Jericho, Oxford
Come, said the boy, I want you to meet
my friends in Jericho,
two philosopher kings in threadbare socks
and their lovelorn lady artist,
making magnificent meanings together.
I grabbed at hope, like I’d just walked off dark moorland
only to discover a yellow wedge of light
thrown from the open door of a pub
and the day-glo fag-ends of hustlers in the car-park
doing their handshake deals.
Seventeen, and shelter at last.
It was hardly Biblical, a huddled neighbourhood
even today when cottages sell for a million,
the walls so thin and the sills stained
with the blood of geraniums.
The woman who opened the door
was serene as glass, dark hair falling
the length of her back, skirt to her ankles.
She asked to draw me, and so we stayed in.
Lying in the bath was a good place to start
but we settled in the end for the pure girl face
that I turned to consider the street
down which the boy and the men had gone
in search of bookshops and better drugs.
How does a woman live with two men?
How does she love them both?
I wanted to ask so many questions that afternoon.
It must have been summer, slip-leash weather,
and I knew it already as her charcoal whispered my hair:
men don’t stay behind walls like that,
he was leaving me there for good.
If it weren’t for that weekend I might still believe
that stripping and spreading’s what passes for love,
might never have felt the small seed of failure
stuck into my tenderest flank, sharp as a needle
whenever I move. It’s the painter I long for now.
I can’t snatch back one letter of her name,
and what are the chances that she remembers
the girl who had nothing to cry for so did not cry,
the one who waited in ridiculous heels and a childish hat,
but I see her again and again. Only yesterday
a woman alone in a coffee shop, bags resting at her feet,
phone idled to a sticky sheen, caught my eye.
It can feel like a song thrown clear to the shore.
Pick it up and it hums in a pitch so plaintive
it penetrates walls. She said, you’re beautiful, you know.
* * * * *
Ektopia
Each time your father and I made love
was a rough draft stitched from skin and tongue,
specks of grit scattered like commas in my flank.
You the pearl, doubling each day in a queasy berth,
a tiny masterpiece that stole me cell by cell
and wouldn’t brook confinement.
You chose a flight to Massachusetts for your detonation,
ruined my jeans and soaked the fabric of 42B
with a sac-burst pulse that wouldn’t stop.
I had to ask a stranger for shelter for a night.
I managed the cleaning and arrangements
that follow even the smallest death,
endured the needles that probe the ridge-scars,
collecting evidence. Two years later
a doctor bent above me, a white carnation
in a vial of water clipped into his pocket.
He said only older women distorted by ambition
could suffer as I did, and I was young and
not ambitious, blood’s only blood.
I managed him too. It’s entirely dark
inside the body and I was sure of nothing.
This was a time when people said
what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
and I believed it. Who knew then –
not your father, jail-break child, nor I –
what I’d bear in years to come, what drafts
tear from my secret tapestry of stars,
flung into the wilderness of space
for the ever expanding best?