Press this shell to your ear

 

I met him on a northern winter shore, my silkie boy,

his slippery kiss, it blanched my swollen lips

with brine. By early spring, my skin was cracked

and wafer flakes broke off as he stroked

the blisters on my upturned face.

Such brittle clumps dropped each time

he ran his fingers through my once fine hair,

that even he could see that I was sick

with missing salt-free streams and meadow dew.

So he and I drove south through hedgerows,

green with fresh growth, flushed with budding.

 

All the way he kept up such a sea pup keening,

I had to toss a mermaid’s purse for him to chew,

clamp a cowrie to his ear to make him sleep.

I dug a pond deep in my orchard where each pink dawn

he stripped down to his oily grey hide,

lay mournful in his landlocked pit of mud.

We nailed a tidal clock to the ceiling above our bed

to mark the highs and lows, until the day

I woke up in a sweet dry bed and found the cowrie

on his pillow, so that now and then, on a stormy night,

or a spring tide, I still can share his distant rushing joy.

 

 

My Limping Goddess

 

The day I had my mother to myself

she took me on a spree,

she bought us both new shoes,

and let me choose our treat,

St Pauls, to round the day off nicely.

The Paternoster pigeons

scattered as she led the way.

 

Inside I focussed on her kitten heels

which sparked the ancient steps.

Where skin met crimson suede

I saw a vivid blister forming.

Yet with a conjuror’s smile she pulled me up

a final flight into the sacred upturned space.

From the far side of the void,

the words she whispered around those walls,

were just for me.

 

 

My Father’s Beard

 

Because today my hand shakes

less than his, I am to shave my father.

So squeezed between bath and basin,

cupping awkward chin I  scrape

at a beard grown wild and strange,

as long as the days since she died.

Just once he flinches and swears.

Now squeezed against a cabinet, jammed

with drugs and sharps still to be got rid of,

I work the other side, recalling how

I would recoil from his embrace and jerk away

a tender cheek, avoid a graze.  I run

a hand against the grain.  “That’s better,”

we both say, as I rinse away the evidence.