You | This is Lust to Say | Bun-Shop Lessons | Miss Patience Muffet | Flame Juggler Airfix | Late September | Whispers If You Were to Come Back
YOU
With you here, I had
a zoological time.
At the sink I slobbered your nape
with bloodhound
kisses, paw on each shoulder.
Was all meerkat for your key in the door.
In the shower I'd be
robin, cheeping
my heart out from a steam-basted chest.
Under dawn duvets I
was squirrel-whiskered –
fossicked and dug you, all scratchy-toed.
Cold evenings,
iguana, I'd slow-lick
lips, all-foured around your trunk.
And when you said I
was your man
I brayed so they heard it in Bosotoland.
Now you're gone, they
cower under lock and key.
Come back. Bring out the animals in me.
THIS IS LUST TO SAY
(A Spellcheck
Poem)
I have eaten
the plumes
hats were on
the vice box
and which
you de reprobate
waving
for breast fast
Cor give me
Hey we’re delicious
so old
and so sweaty
BUN-SHOP
Startle-eyed, me and
she, in the bun-shop
where fourth-formers tried on cool
like over-sized
blazers, lipsticked
with doughnut sugar and jam, and girls
gave little swivels
in checked skirts,
dipping liquorice in lemon sherbet.
I peered into the
deep-pile of her mop,
saw white crumbs of scalp. Smelt sulphur.
First detention ever,
for using perchlorate
to singe her initials in benchwood.
Mr Grant: pissy
lab-coat, jaundiced
coot, grimace in a dough of face, thread
of custard forever
stranded between
dummy lips – Use your loaf boy.
Too late. Hovering
behind the homework
each night: her marooned complexion, those
small white teeth.
That sulphurous perfume.
End of term. Her hand in my pocket
my éclair in the
other, I blew it.
Three stupid words. I'm a Catholic.
The shop – a
delicatessen now. The school
long since converted. Yet, hanging round
the drains, something
still of Mr Grant
and her – that whiff of coconut mat
in her blouse, his
nicotined lard of finger
and thumb, the spatula pinched between
dipped in the tart
yellow of that test-tube:
Make a note boys. Sulphur. Flowers of.
LESSONS
Easy for me, your
son,
youthful lungs trawling in one sweep –
cigar smoke,
omelette,
the girl next door.
One day I told you
how in physics we'd calculated a cough holds
billions of atoms
Galileo
inhaled. It took a full
week for your retort
–
as always, off the nail. Must be I've used it
all then. From
Siberia
to Antarctica – from slack-
pit to spire.
That's
why each draw's so, so bloody hard.
Your drenched face
was me,
silenced. Had to catch you
last thing, at the
foot
of your Jacob's Ladder, ascending to the one
bulb of the landing
toilet, to tell you
I'd checked with sir.
You can't use it all, I piped, not in a hundred
million years.
You'll get
better. Just wait and see.
Mouth bluish, a slur
suspended over your chest. Fist white
on the rail. You said
–
Don't hold your breath.
MISS PATIENCE MUFFET
Afternoons in his
study I squat
at the mahogany cabinet, fix eyes
on its rows of plump
bodies – one
like a bruised grape, another
a spotted sultana
engorged in brandy
– or those that are a meeting of legs
and little else.
Bristled tarantulas
light as bird-bone, diamond-backs,
the Widow's orange
hourglass.
Once, I caught him. Late with a woman –
eight limbs akimbo.
Two upturned faces.
Otherwise days just spiral out
from each morning's
brown-paper packets:
India, Indonesia, Australia, Tasmania.
I run scissors round
their edges,
plop the drowsy knots into glass.
Then the muff of
asphyxiant.
Chloroform. Formaldehyde. Sulfide
of hydrogen. The
choice is vital –
how he winces if the legs claw, snap.
He can't bear to
touch. Gawped
ashen-faced when one slipped up my skirt
bit a leech of milk
into his lips
at my giggle. I kept it alive a week.
But he's going. Only
takes liquids,
semi-solids – like those sots of hair
that toboggan the
bathtub yet tickle
for air between my palms.
Each day his lips are
laid
with more purple eggs. Bloat fat.
Tonight his jaws
dribble
and botch at what I bring him. Whey,
soft balls of curd.
But he can't
eat – says the pain, the pain
is sucking him out. I
put the glass
to his lips. Patience, he whispers.
It is time. I take
the largest
wad of cotton, step up
to the bottle. Twist
the stopper
from its slender brown neck.
In the water of his
eyes my hair
is a clot of spiders.
FLAME JUGGLER
(Leicester Square,
London)
All afternoon that
methylated blue
pulled into tight loops about her –
a trenchcoat of
effort she sweats in.
Each gasoline skittle is a rotor
constrained by her
law: there
in her mouth, under each pit, between
the legs, the slap
slop of metal
against palm, wrists peppered with soot, eyes
returning the flicker
like tossed coins:
those pewter and copper moons drawn
to her sun – that hat
on the ground,
its crushed rim stinking of gas.
A life of parabolas
where nothing
must collide, countless childhoods lost
in the spin of a
baton. She drops
only once, trying the impossible –
all four abandoned to
the air, hands poised
in utter trust of trajectories.
I wish she'd come
home. I'd bathe off
the stink, watch her slick spread into suds,
froth annihilated to
deep dark water.
I'd ointment her wrists, forearms, those
liquid hands – but
she's still
on a roll. And all at one with herself.
AIRFIX
I razored the tip off
the tube of glue
like a zit, that first spurt of goo
whitening in air across my fingers.
Those millimetre men
came in boxes,
sprouted in rows from plastic stems.
Had to be twisted off at the heel,
attached to their
bases using pegs.
Horses at full stretch – stuck down
by one thermoplastic hoof, their riders
anally inserted by a
stud at the saddle.
Thought nothing of it, the heavy-sweet
perfume of glue galloping through my brain.
Looking at my men I
knew something wasn't
right, but couldn't make anything stick
for good, except the cap to its tube
though I rewrote
history each morning –
Cherokee scalping the 1st Panzer Division,
cowpokes stampeding Boer English. Once
I repelled a Roman
Empire from the shores
of our pond, with a single Spitfire.
I left snipers overnight in the throats
of nasturtiums,
secreted grenade-throwers
in petalled explosions of zinnia
just to keep the garden on edge.
It took ages to array
them, seconds to
annihilate. But glue was all I needed then
after a double-handed mine, and broken men
were dabbed together,
stood between
two books by the fire until morning
returned them, upright and true.
LATE SEPTEMBER
(after Bertolt Brecht,
‘Spring 1938’)
There’d been dew.
Maybe light rain.
And a blot drew my eye to that plot of light
through my kitchen window. Closer. I saw
pincer legs measure
out each wire. That
pause of the abdomen before it dipped
to spot-weld each link. I took a chair outside
to stand on. Craned.
I wanted to live.
It let me brush a fingertip across the velvet
brown of its back, against the nap, and again
till it froze
mid-air, eight legs outstretched,
still as a child roused from a trance of play.
There – the same creature I’d raise my slipper to,
hunt across carpet to
end in a smudge.
I wouldn’t have it in my hand. In my hair.
Yet it – she – went to all that length to snare
mosquito and
bluebottle, those who’d ruin
a soup, or blood. Hours. For once I took
the time. Saw the target complete, her radii
strung high between
window and washing line.
I thought of the twist of cells that can work
such wonder. I thought of poets whose words
don’t reach. Spider
just does. Reads angles –
but not this freak thunder, its blown-up tongues
of birds. Everywhere. Birds swooping for spiders.
I feared something
might skim, unknowing,
through that hard-earned web. A swift perhaps,
impossibly late. I saw spider prey. Hung there
in her patch of
unsafe sky.
WHISPERS
There was that time,
two women were in a field.
One was taken, the other left.
That moment in midday
heat, when your hoe hooked
a grenade, froze a clan of faces mid-air.
In the woods, the
white soap-bars you skirted:
the trip-wire beneath them, fine as your eye.
The bayonet through
the haystack, that threaded
your mother's earring, clipped your ear;
the copper saucepan
punctured, head-height;
your aunt's leg clean off as you sat together –
the brass shells
stowed in the ditch you ducked
into as the earth erupted all around.
Forty years on, as he
whispered you away
from your station by father's bed,
it was the young
doctor finally ran you through
when he would not meet your eyes.
IF YOU WERE TO COME BACK
I'd stand at the door
like one bereaved:
Aghast and breathless,
With silence stretched between us
For a second
Before it snapped -
And my heart burst its banks
In belief.
Then I'd draw you in
by both hands
I'd kiss you on the mouth, on the face
Wear out your name
with soft saying
I'd kiss you more than you would want
Until you'd have to draw back, breathless
As one wounded
To try to speak, to tell me
Why it was you came.
(© Mario Petrucci)
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