Poems from Ghost Station

Ghost Station

Rosslyn

Wild garlic and rain in the woods and between invisible tracks
that lead from here to there I sense them glide
through their lost narratives down platforms of damps ferns.

Think of a bent hair-pin lodged for years under a wooden carriage seat
fallen from a stook of auburn hair, a single collar-stud trapped beneath:
the floor that once fastened small intimacies behind a film of beaded glass,

or an old man’s knotted hand, knuckles raw in the niche of his lap
carrying home a gift of speckled eggs. Imagine the pallor of rain
ashen, pewter, stained watery-sheen along a backbone of glinting steel,

and shadows of coal-dust, steam and sparks on iron where green tongues
of larkspur grow. Turn your head and glimpse between verticals of larch
and beech blotched autobiographies like smudged footprints in wet grass.

Listen, where the wind throws back its dialogue of despair behind
the raindrops, acknowledges lives drained away, like a plume
of smoke recalled along invisible tracks by a damp bird’s solitary song.

Blakeney

A single wooden skiff
lies beached among the reeds
out beyond the estuary’s tidal reach,

layer upon weathered layer
of paint, a palimpsest in blue
peeling like eczama’d skin,

its hull a bleached
cage of ribs
rotting in brackish water.

We’ve come East,
to where the horizon’s
a mere line of pencilled light

and brindled skies squat
above the fens to mend
what you refuse to,

cannot name, as if in the
merging of sky, land, reeds,
these beginnings and ends,

something might be permeable
beneath this waning light.
Four in the afternoon

and the November dusk closes
in the long horizons, shadows
the corrugated spit of sunlit sand

as we taste the smoke
of early evening on our lips.
You walk ahead and already

I know you are slipping from me
as this small trapped craft must have
once slipped from a surf-wet quay.

Oh love, what I want say
is look; the tide is turning,
turning and refilling these salt pans

as the chambers of an empty heart
endlessly pour and fill
pour and spill

Nude in Bathtub

After Bonnard

Between the edge of the afternoon
and dusk, between the bath’s white
rim and the band of apricot light,
she bathed, each day, as if dreaming.

From the doorway he noted
her right foot hooked for balance
beneath the enamel lip, body
and water all one in a miasma

of mist, a haze of lavender blue.
Such intimacy. A woman, two walls,
a chequered floor, the small
curled dog basking in a pool

of sun reflected from the tiles
above the bath. Outside
the throbbing heat. So many times
he has drawn her, caught the obsessive

soaping of her small breasts,
compressed the crouched frame into
his picture space, the nervy movements
that hemmed in his life.

The house exudes her still,
breathes her from each sunlit corner,
secretes her lingering smell
from shelves of rosewood armoires,

and the folded silk chemises
he doesn’t have the heart to touch.
And from the landing, his memory tricks,
as through the open door the smudged

floor glistens with silvered tracks,
her watered foot prints to and from
the tub where she floats in almond oil
deep in her sarcophagus of light.

A Necklace of Tongues

All morning she sits
stitching a necklace of tongues
in her high window,
picking each inert slab

from the shallow porcelain dish
holding its brass-cold weight
muted as a muffled bell
heavy in the dip of her open palm.

Last night snow flakes
melted like kisses,
like salt
on their warm skin,

now her silver needle
pushes through the thick-muscled
root trussing each
glossal silence

with meticulous petit point.
If a worm has five hearts,
and an angel none,
how many tongues

does it take to tell lies
about love?
But for now she can only wait,
passing the leaden hours

with herringbone and cross stitch.
Later in front of her mirror of ice
she will lift the cold carrion
like a queen’s fringed torque,

place it in the soft dip
at the base of her throat,
making visible the muted words,
that wounded song of herself.