The numbers

Every morning I check the numbers:

Covid cases and hours of sleep.

Try to focus on the rolling average forest

not the trees, though they blossom and bud.

It’s been a year of seasons.

I mean, of course it has, but so much so this time.

We spent money on woollen things to wrap around us

and from this end of it all I’m glad

to have hunkered down through the worst of it.

Hair growing unruly and the same two outfits.

I buy sparkly skirts in preparation

for whatever good things are surely about to happen

and on the morning after Lotus first sleeps

straight through twelve of the night’s twelve hours

I walk to the corner store for bread and eggs

feeling extraordinarily ordinary

back to some baseline normality

and the forest is not fogged,

but a dappling canopied, mossy floored space

letting wind and light breathe through.

Expectant / Morphology

Expectations and Reality

Here is a poem published ten years ago in my first collection, Wit of the Staircase. It is inspired by the form of Surrealist poet, André Breton’s ‘L’union libre’.

I wrote this poem from my imagination, looking up images and descriptions of what it might feel like to have a life growing inside me.

Expectant

after André Breton

Girl with the eyes of blown glass
With the limbs of a curled tadpole
With the thoughts of a startling gesture
With the breathing of a baroque organ.

Girl with the fingerprints of tiny forecasts
With teeth of tight buds and a harvest of rice
With the quickening of fists
With the heart of a fusible link
With the heart of a bicycle pump.

Maybe-boy with the eyelashes of ellipses
With the ears of fine bone drums
With the eyelids of swift translucent fish
With the fingers of quotation marks.

With the hair of hiccupping
And the ends of guitar strings
And of a shelter of bracken
With the bones of clay
With the weight of the world.

From Wit of the Staircase, 2009

There are images here which I love – the “eyelashes of ellipses” and “eyelids of swift translucent fish”, for example. But the last two lines feel awful to me and I wonder what feelings I had back then about having children. “Bones of clay” is vulnerable and soft in a terrifying way and “the weight of the world” feels devastatingly unfair.

Here’s a recent poem, this time based entirely on experience. She is a marvel and she is strong – I’ve seen and heard the four chambers of her heart beating and feel her movements deliberate and determined.

Morphology

We saw you on the fourth day of spring.
Still part of me and in ghostly black and white
but there you were, like a photo of the moon.

The sonographer chatted the whole way through
recommending nappy brands and hypnobirthing.
We could see your bones, your organs and eyeballs.

You are beautiful and perfect and even if you weren’t
you still would be. When we stepped outside
jasmine was everywhere, new blossom

on the otherwise bare twigs of winter. The next time we see you
you’ll be entering the world, exiting the world you’ve made inside me
and joining this marvellous place of birdsong and magnolia.

Each day the temperature rises gently, our body swells
ripples of your quickening strengthen your underwater dance
beating heart, undeniable presence of being.

September, 2019

I still call writing days writing days

but really they’ve become

sleeping late under a pile of cats days

letting my washed hair dry in the sun days

lunchtime yoga class followed by lunch days

reading poetry in a café, scribbling notes in my journal days

slow stride along the bike path back to the space

where maidenhair ferns its way down one wall

devil’s ivy curls its lips like leaves to the light

thick arms of monstera press against the corner window

obscuring a laundry line of last week’s life

the heartbeat rhythm of solitude, solace, self-solicitude days.