Canapes
Snow
The tinkle-chatter twinkling through the room
Reminded me of 'The Dead'
I'd said it in a way like you'd know what I meant
Quick-puzzled you asked me to illuminate the dark I'd made
As I started to describe the off-coat-cold into body-thickened-room,
The maid-bustle, float-a-gossip and mingle-knobbing
Your eyes grew wide
Then I told you about how the snow fell all over Ireland
How those tiny specks - each history-filled with every one of our stories-
Blanketed the living and the dead
I felt the click of something familiar
Knew you felt what I felt
And I was filled with the magic of possibility
And for a moment we became all of those breathless snowflakes
Covering prehistory and all that came after
I became very still inside
I was the stillness before an explosion
Because we had so much to say
Bread
Hunger
It'd been months since I'd heard from you
And I felt leavened and holey and crusted
I'd become something crusted and full of holes
And I left home and bought a loaf and returned home
And left it on the bedside table before bathing
In the duvet's tundra, I steamed like a fawn birthed in freak snow
Roused by street noises, I did my hair in the mirror
It looked rustic and ornate and shining –
An otherworldly weaver's basket
My shoulders drew back tight like a bow
Then I got into bed with the towel around me, curled and cried.
Waking, later, beyond street sounds and dreams
The bag of bread sang
The brown paper gave its static rustle
As the room filled with bread-scent
I ate with the hunger of an animal
emerging from a hundred years of hibernation
Liver
Heart
Like that time in the boozer next to the old butcher's shop
You told me you thought your heart was a strange shape
Not anatomically, but in the ways that you loved and loved and thought sometimes it might pop
And you tinkled salt from the shaker onto the liver-coloured wood
Drew the shape of this heart of yours
Dab-licked like you were testing a bag
And said, "There!"
It's never left me - your strange heart shape
Shines in my mind like the wet cobbles below the butchers -
Shines like rain-lit bones
You felt like a spring Sunday
Like the feathers of a rustling book
In a Scandinavian chair
Kyiv
Chicken
"Lush", you'd called the jungle
"and so close to the water! Like a greenhouse!"
It didn't make sense, but I knew what you meant
Which mattered more to me than sense anyway
We'd talked about the stray cats
Having sons and daughters...
Heat rose from the sands like esters
Golden buttery rays that looked like they'd calcify an egg
Earlier that day you'd asked me to baste your back with Piz-Buin
And in the heat you were a succulent bird in the oven
Mai Tai-stupored, I lay there salivating, a scrap-hungry pup
Then, with the fizz of butter hitting the pan
The monsoon whooshed in
We plop-waded into the sea to keep warm
And off the sandy lips of the island ran the wild scent of jungle
Pork Chop
Mustard
And the dark had slickened in and caught us out
Spilling into the valley basins like glacial runoff –
Cold bit our bones like a furred trap
Leaving us mute and fever-chattering
I wasn't a person I wanted to be then
But we'd taken out into the uncaring cold
And the mountain had given us something
Something was given in that pine-needle dark
Hoof-paggard, we emerged into mustard light
Pine-resin greeted our noses
As the fire roared and my toes warm-prickled
I felt an inner fattiness beginning to drip
The first drops of an after-winter thaw
Treacle Tart
Treacle
And we'd said our goodbyes lifetimes ago
But met again and you called me treacle
And I called you my little tart
And the world scowled at us
And the voices in our heads were like the mad clowns
In that picture in the gallery that we always visited
Laughing at us
And we loved in spite of the clowns and the policemen
We loved in spite of the evidence mounted against us
Millennia of evidence
Singing our song again like we'd never heard of heartbreak
Like we believed in everything
Didn’t we treacle?