Animal Sanctuary

This pygmy goat, white beside a white wall
and still as a retired nursery chair, stares
un-blinking – tolerating my palm on her forehead
as votive blessing, visor or stay- her valiant
yellow eyes blank and fixed on something real
yet indeterminate before her lids drop home.

*

This speckled Welsh grey was skin and bone
when salvaged and her steaming foal heart-stopped.
Today, filled-out, over stable door, she ushers me
close but at my touch shakes her head, ears aslant:
perhaps at the reminder I embody: collateral loss
in my skin, the mother, defunct, and un-broken in

Stand In

Goodbye to the surreptitious bait box
stored in my freezer compartment
sundry tackle and two mended rods
and the tears spent over them.

Goodbye to your help in learning
the lyrics of ‘Owl City’; my aged cat
blithely countering raised decibels,
mock-operatics, mouth popping.

Goodbye to holding the cayenne
and anything of goat in the kitchen
to doing a taster with spork first
and mixing Vimto at forty per cent.

Goodbye to earnest opinions on snippets
I read you from the Guardian, or which
you cherry pick from the Angling Times.
Naive but which always delight.

Goodbye to toe-curling embarrassment
at clothes-shedding scenes in DVDs,
my terror (that like stress, lingers)
at enacting any kind of primal scene.

Goodbye to having to cajole
and tell horror stories (usually mine)
to get teeth brushed and gently correcting
any hint of a same size forever notion.

Goodbye to being a stand-in mum
the only week in my adult life so far
the child-shaped space next to me
has been fully occupied.

The Meringue and Red-Brick Bordered House

Where the lavender bushes served bees out front,
and an ancient holly tree slain in July ’73,
where white gloss banisters gave agency to four girls,
where a lady sunned herself chestnut with Ambre Solaire
and a golden retriever barked herself hoarse,
where on the centrepiece parquet floor
a woman and girl fox-trotted to the Glenn Miller Band,
where a deep square ceramic sink held an offal bloodbath
and the business as usual hum of the deep freeze,
and the toiling thrashing of a washing machine, held sway.

Where upstairs in a small room Deep Purple, Pink Floyd
and Led Zeppelin played for a boy and his sister,
where at the back a woman howled and a man's fist glowered,
where meaning for two girls was found in Abba and Queen
and one lost herself in fiction on the window seat
to the witness of the windows of the big house opposite,
where there was inexplicable blood loss in the toilet,
where a man's bowels evacuated volubly,
where a teenage girl collapsed, amidst pills like confetti,
where my inner map was sketched, and my unravelling began.

Talking Heads and Me at Twenty Three

Pig tailed, she climbs Gypsy Hill in clownish spots,
stripes, pink DM’s and jeans as cut-off as she is.
Murder could happen across the street and she’d
not notice. All she lets in is the copied cassette
playing through her Walkman. Even the sun jars.

‘Stop Making Sense’ is her soundtrack, her mantra,
the only music she can tolerate that gives reprieve to
the hold grief has about her throat, broken otherwise
only by hysterical laughter or unstaunchable tears.
Especially dear is track two: ‘Heaven’: the place

where nothing ever happens: its meaning unfixed,
ricocheting between a retrospective paint job
and the reality that something did happen: her house
of cards collapsing over and over. She accompanies
David Byrne through a party that everyone arrives

at and leaves simultaneously, blind to the fact that
someone is out of step: Mummy Jo - has left the party
and the stranger at the bar who she brushes by
every week on the hill- Love, will not be met
‘til she’s twice her age, and given up on Heaven.

Hard-Wired

Because of your
milky sugarloaf scent
that I want to breathe
two hundred times a day,
because of your weight and mass
as appealing to carry as a you-shaped
new-baked fruit cake,
because of your
rose petal skin
as alive as proving dough,
because of the ten wax opals
at your diminutive finger ends,
because of your arabesque form
and your rosy parabolic perfection,
because little tadpole I waited so long
that your first smile nearly broke me
because to massage your soft roll limbs
and watch you drop off like a cat akimbo,
because to hold you my fledgling, so perfectly close
so soft and inseparable in our monkey love,
because my little bundle of derring-do
my sweetpea, my bunnynose
my chickadee, my gosling
my yearling, my piglet
my owlet, my cheeper
my eaglet

nothing else
can hold a candle.

Some of my Favourite Things

An apparently small and perfect
red patent clutch bag from the 60s
jam-packed with silky pockets and
3D glasses never looked through.

A commemorative Queen figurine
in a bell-shaped farthingale
with a coin slot pelvis. Hollow
but for what you put in her.

A large orange armadillo
I found behind the rose bushes
who stretches out liquid
as a cat when I stroke him.

A black pelican who sits aside
me on ships’ decks and catches
in his pouched bill anything
of me the waves’ swell dislodges.

The quiet leafy lagoon I swim
with a family of three boys:
the only debris a flat pack
skeleton glowing at the bottom.

Sister Static

When a newly-charged toothbrush
groans like a dying calf in my mouth
and the light of a head-torch
is snuffed in the aura of my hand
and relatives pecks shock me
as does the touch of thigh-rubbing
acrylic wearers, and petting
our sister’s cat on a stone flag delivers
a blue crack to her little wet nose
and a tooth viability test administered
at the School of Dentistry all but shoots
me, Bond-like from the chair

I think of your friend who cannot walk
down town at night without streetlights
dying in a domino cascade
and I know that all my efforts
are not nearly enough
to bring me back
into your favour.

Vacuum Plea

Made by Space Bag 6 Piece Vacuum bag set: easy to use for packing bulky soft items and very effective at squashing them down to minimum cubic area.

Prostrate, face buried
in the puffed-plastic cube,
you lift your head fractionally
on your out-breath; exposing,
from my vantage point, your bald
patch to maximum humility.
I reach for camcorder, unconsciously
honing in on a sequence of latent potency.
Then your son gets down too -
Let me try Dad, and the LCD shows
his unruly blond gosling head
bowed to what, in this passing
moment, has become The Source;
your head beside him,
a larger nutmeg. And your son
reaches up, pressing together his palms
in a simple peak above his head.
And I see the two of you face down
before the Great Mother, sending
numerous, silent petitions
with the same root:
that the same woman
your ex-wife, his mother,
might one day give an inch.

The Matrices of Loss

The barren woman is trying to return, unnoticed to her
mother’s house through the mouth-like hole in the brickwork
stopped up with the fine grey pashmina that used to
mummify her throat.

Her sister is standing on the newly turned over vegetable patch
describing the wonderful christening gift she’s got her.
she holds up a tiny Prussian blue velvet dress
with silver writing on the bodice.

The barren woman moves into a doll’s house, to share with a large
owl. He shadows her menacingly leaving droppings everywhere.
She becomes an apprehensive twenty-four hour chattel.
The dark haired girl returns

She’s brought the Tobiano rocking horse with her. The barren
woman rode it through her childhood across deserted overseas shores.
Its asking price is on a cream trunk tag they use to sell antiques.
The girl’s face shows signs of scalding.

The barren women pulls the Turkish man by the hand to the duck pen
the ducklings are darting around like blobs of soot. She’s wearing a violet
Disney t-shirt with animals on. He gives her a bedroom kiss.
She reconsiders the mumsy look.

Unlocking her bike outside Woolworth’s the barren woman overhears a
woman telling her seven year old girl: ‘You look like you’re already on
IVF.’ They turn it into a song and spout forth like the Von Trapps. Silver
boots lie on the pavement like rats.

Tuckers Grave Inn

Tuckers Grave Inn, Faulkland, Somerset, was named after Edward Tucker who hung himself at nearby Charlton Farm in 1747 and was buried in unconsecrated ground at this remote crossroads as was the custom for suicides.

You’ll find me at a dark crossroad, near Charlton Barn
where they found me, the only sound after your engine
cuts being your feet shuffling blindly over my remains.

You might think me shut, for my shutters betray
no light, but knock upon my short brown door
looking beyond the curious eyes behind my grill.

Advance along my flagstone corridor and a stable door
to the left will bring you into my tap bar where the latest
hand will pour you a tankard of Butt, Bidecombe or

Thatcher’s gold straight from barrel and drop an egg
pickled to a taupe straight into your crisp packet the
opening of which you thought was your prerogative.

Craning you head, take your libations, into the Rose
Room: my snug bar, and find yourself a chair if all settle
benches are taken, as was the pattern of my life.

Allow me to guide your fingers, whilst sitting easy under
stringer beam, the fire aflame, chestnuts roasting,
Labrador dosing, to pick my tale from mantle.

I Edward Tucker, did willfully end my life by rope’s
choke for the corn laws that did rend me beggar, and
for hearing the bans of Mary Barwell already mine.