She wouldn’t relax,
and her voice was full of foreboding:
I must change the pillowcases,
she said, fretful with suspicion
-as if, resting your head where others had laid theirs,
you could inadvertently catch their dreams,
and then where would you be?
and where would they take you,
unknown roads to landscapes unknown…

It’s bad enough to have your own customary hauntings
like fat fledglings nesting in your brain,
feeding off it with regular hunger,
your loss, their gain.

If people had told you, long ago:
“It will pass, it’s only childhood”,
you might have been more forbearing,
more hopeful too, but the truth
is that it doesn’t pass: it lingers
like a bad smell on a hot afternoon
when some anxiety, a warning
of dangers possible, brings back the old ghouls.

So the pillowcases are changed,
and so a little protection
has been afforded, a symbolic gesture
to the Gods of the house, who would lure
innocent guests on improper journeys.
And so one can lie down, now, but
-keep your fingers crossed, think nice thoughts,
say your prayers, the shadows might clear…

A grey-green wallpaper –no: flowered,
old roses, small pattern, faded,
yes- wraps you up at night
in the blank silence of a villa
smelling of piety without grace.

You take in the silence
though you were permitted to shout
-you are on holiday-
even when you played close to the road.
Sad hard silent Romany girls
take little children on donkey rides.
You remember feeling for the donkey
with the eyes of a resigned bride.

Upstairs at night, in bed,
contact is made, a questioning
at the silent gaze of the Virgin Mary
surrounded by many cherubs’ heads
-chubby, almost pretty, and silent too-
on a background of ancient gold.
When the silence end…
The beginnings of a voice
are stirring in your head.

One day, sad cells multiplied
in my mother’s womb
-without her full permission, I think-
and grew slowly to fruition.
When hell unleashed itself,
steel forceps did the job
she was afraid to do,
every one of my screams
threatening her existence
-shaping mine.

I was born much later,
with apprehension,
cautiously monitoring my strength,
my will, my commitment,
doubting all three.
But there is, isn’t there, a stubbornness
of life wanting to live itself:
here I am now, turning
to the demanding light of hope,
seemingly the picture of conquest
but fighting familiar windmills.

Sad cells, not dead, are still
making their presence felt,
in turn gossamer
and barbed wire.

She was good at stifling cries.
Hers I heard, though, always,
in a passing glance, a clasping
of the hand, a choking of the throat,
a restrained sigh:
they were all mine.

But when it came to me,
when my tears from my grief
burst uncalled for on her life,
the threat was too much to take
-another life when only hers mattered
and should fill mine-
“Stop playing martyrs”, she would say.
There would be less of me
that day.

Life was subdued, as if sounds forbidden.
(you watched your heartbeats for reassurance,
relieved they were quiet, and yours.)

Her breath filled the room.
Her voice, her thoughts, were yours, too,
to breathe, to own and to follow,
guiding your steps -a prescription
reverence gave no other choice
but to obey blindly- your conscience
in her hands, and your will
a mere convulsion of your heart,
a penultimate gasp.

The future is a mist, improbable
for she doesn’t envisage hope
or lack of fear.
She deals you these cards, too,
the only ones she knows,
places them in your hands
watching you go to sea
without a buoy, a sail,
since you must drown too,
or life would be too unfair.

It sizzled in the pan, the minute
it met the oil, the heat,
and spread to a dark full moon
with small volcanoes made by bubbles.

A trembling in her hand, mother
pricks it with a fork, a little harshly,
irritated as I stand watching,
my head at her elbow, asking :
“Who is it for? What is it?”

“A blood pancake”, she says, and shakes it
a little too strongly, it nearly spills.
“Your father likes it”, she adds,
an eyebrow up, tight-lipped,
then complains: “To make him strong.”
And I can hear her silent prayer:
“Let it not work, please God,
let it not work.”

Later, she said it was for the country air:
I had been sick and needed it to recover.
I remember vaguely a landscape defined by a mass of green, rough grey stones in the green,
a blanket of blue sky. The silence.
I remember better the deepest bed ever,
made of feathers and every morning the strangeness of large bowls and coarse bread.

For a long time I thought
I had been there on my own -the old feeling-
but she assures me she was there too,
and my sister.
I realise it must be true
when I see myself running to her after watching the farmer
beat his screaming cat to death in the yard.
The animal was sick, they said.
It took a long time to die.
She said they do these things in the countryside.
Mostly I remember
her silence, echoed by mine.
I would try to play, except
that I never knew how to play.
Did we make daisy-chains? find crickets?
I see nothing, feel nothing.

Later, the name of the hamlet was never mentioned.
I know it was a funny name:
Couledoux: “Liveasy”; as if we could ever.
And since I know that she hated the countryside,
why would we go to the countryside
since we already lived in the bloody countryside?
After, my father would look at her slyly.
She would return his gaze, resigned.
I feel I knew that
we had been running away.

Fall, falling, fallen,
down the well,
to the bottom of the sea
-caught in the net curtain I wrap myself in-
dizzy heights, peaks frozen,
a light bulb swings madly overhead.

That and, hauntingly,
the swallows dizzily racing round the square
screaming shrill dizzy screams,
setting an incomprehensible standard for joy
unmatched by dreams.

Winter, a safer season, would come,
freezing desires as surely as ponds,
keeping life still.
Look at that water,
plumb the depth:
fall, falling, fallen.

We rubbed presences daily
and hid behind safe words,
-underneath, salt in wounds-
passed each other in the hallway
where he would shout:
“Turn off those lights! I pay
for those lights!”
We didn’t see each other
with or without lights.

Looking back, I can hardly believe
that he could not see me:
was I too close for his long sight?
Was he defeated already,
pushed aside, elbowed off
the chess board where
alone my mother played,
claiming all the games?

“Scorpios are passionate people”,
says Martha.
“Really? I do not see my father
like that”, I say,
“He was weak, unfinished almost,
as if never born properly.”
“Got waterlogged in the womb,
probably”, says Val gaily.
I laugh, and I cry.

Looking back, he fathered in me
a kind of passionlessness,
a flimsy existence, an absence
from the world for too long a time.
A passionate person without passions
myself, I floated in his silence.
All dressed up with nowhere to go
because nowhere was all I saw,
I could only be the ghost
of the daughter he would have had.

Because they found me hungry for things I did not know
and understood little
making their way to my door because
they were hungry for things they might have known
but did not give away, or little,
we danced a while, then slept.
Waking up was the hardest part.
Apart, reality was split, shattered,
a broken egg that no army would mend,
but desires remained, transmuted
by some longings appeased, and others awakened:
transience was begging for eternity,
a risible calling for who knows the demands
of the soul, and the clumsy talents
of our flesh and our hearts.
The Gods might weep, or laugh.
It is of no concern to me unless
a particular light, a speaking in some code
sheds clarity, gives the key to the conundrum.

High summer. High notes.
An infinite landscape unrolls colours
like feelings: the mountains, hills, gentle vineyards,
the scented smoke of burnt lavender,
all speak of an old debt
it owes me, I owe it,
a marriage long-postponed
-I was the bride waiting for years outside the church,
both my heart and my veil frozen-

until this day
when waiting stops at last
and wanting is appeased with gifts of gold.
Heralding it all,
the crown in the evening sky of an eagle,
golden, and the slow, slow, spring of its flight
gives my heart a stretch,
my soul a pulse louder
in my head than all my thoughts.
The landscape opens, defined:
such grace over my land,
my trees,
its wings underlining the sky,
parallel to the hills then
disappearing in their purple shadow.
Some of me goes with it,
accompanies the loss, then glows in its reappearance in light
as it unveils the repaid landscapes of the past.

Effervescent with love, I
claim it all: mine
-and I am yours, too; this journey is over.

It rains now and
I stand protected, nose
to the glass -eyes wide:
the trees show black against
an evening of celadon sky.
Half past five in early March,
the birds have started their chorus
not quite hidden in so many greens.
The garden is mine and glows
– did I make this?

Some time along that long lonesomeness
I must have wished myself well
must have said no
to the shattered child:
there would be light,
a fountain, birds, a place
of rest…

I shall not want now since
the days come open-handed.
I shall give thanks
for my friends the foxgloves,
clematis, roses and akebias.
I shall be quiet, wise,
feed on light.
If the garden keeps its promises
there will be, in the summer breeze
the glow and the sing-song swing
of a robinia.

The sky is full of comforting noises.

Her face wears the clear light of trust
which follows me, however dark
the room.
One day, like a hermit crab,
her little hand outgrew mine
just as her feet could recite the way to school.
“It took me a year to wean you out of it!”
she says now, squealing with laughter.

Winter is closing in today,
my own hand has work
to do:
writing, and always the garden
where the trees stand their ground this year,
hang onto leaves,
the solanum blooms on regardless and
it is still too early to prune.
This is respite before the uncharted.
I finger a late yellow rose,
unsure,

and it comes to me like a scent that sometimes
after crossing a street and
before letting go,
her thumb would caress my thumb a while.

Look how they stun:
the first days they stand stilted in their uniforms,
disciplined like new soldiers
waiting for parade
-their perfect sheen speaking
of creatures in their teens temperate
with their sentiments

They came into your house innocent
of their yellows that daze or reds
that burn
-no scent, the soul hidden
in the darkened depth, tongue
stretched in thirst and search,
animal.

In their later days they dance mad
flamenco, flaunt their billowing
skirts, swell, swivel,
arch their stems, libertine,
become all mouth
– cajoling the dangerous light.

Today they have
lived long and loved late,
are done in, sapless.
Thin-lipped, pale, papery,
they take a bow
-the dance, they say, was heady.

What do I know of your dream
and you of mine?
-its aim, its strength, its arrogance,
its immoderate hunger, its gentle modesty…
Molly had patiently grown old with hers.
Her freckled and blue-veined hand
stroked it quietly through her cardigan
as if holding it into place
-still there, a measure of her existence.
You don’t talk of these things too much,
people would laugh: an old lady lusting
for the sound and swell of the sea,
that immense breathing, that giant pulse…

The haunting stretched back to childhood
when her own grandfather had told her
of the nature of the sea he knew,
smooth, rough, wild and cunning,
its unsafe and eloquent calling
a mirror of earthly passions.
As a timid dreamer, Molly had claimed little,
and now a wheelchair and old age
kept the dream shackled to a daily routine
of timed meals, cool gardens and Ovaltine.

“I want to see the sea”, Molly said.
Ninety-five, they thought. They listened.
Well-meaning and happy to please,
they wheeled her onto Southend beach,
-and there she looked, thinking she was elsewhere
as she saw nothing but water, her dream sinking
in the muddy sands:
“Is that all it does?” she said.

The left one is long-fingered, smooth, has some grace
-is keen to show it-
It doesn’t mind posing, is fond
of holding my chin, lying on my heart.
It doesn’t feel guilty while it rests.
A sensitive messenger between will and initiative,
it holds, calms, pacifies,
loses nothing since it claims so little.
It is the lady-in-waiting, the vestal
of unseen temples, and it wears a ring
to show that love once lived in the house.

The right one shows no hesitation:
strong, square, lined, it has scratches
and burns all earned in action.
A warrior with a clear head, it plays
cards on the table, hides no game
-it is so sure of itself it confounds me –
At times foolhardy, it is often brave,
ready for work, competent.
It doesn’t mind showing its age,
claiming its prize, saying “I want”.

Apart, they would feel maimed, sisterless.
Together, they would say a prayer
and if heard, live in harmony.

My old bed was ridiculously large
for my life-style,
for my night styleso had to go. It went
to a couple who wanted more distance
between their dreams.
I bought instead
a mid-sized wooden bed
with a carved head of golden harmonies
that would welcome opportunity
in style,
but the mattress forbade joy,
or peace, except eternal:
it had to go.
Reality stepped in
when my tiny new house
gave storage a priority:
my new bed can now hold
in its base my old wedding trousseau:
cotton sheets and fine lace,
table cloths, soft blankets.
It stands like a monument in my little room,
makes too many demands on the eye
and the heart: so it will have to go,
be replaced by a bed of sensible size
for the sensible dreams
of a sensible life

-and if I strike lucky
we can always go to his house.