Her Jeans

Her jeans,

stiff on the boiler, drying too fast,

tug me like a lodestone.

I stop and pick them up, automatically

fold the hard crotch over

to a shape fit for a drawer.

Have her legs really grown that long,

her tiny greenstick pelvis hardened to a cage?

(My own shape now too slack and sloppy for the zip`s squeeze sticks to Lycra.)

The door clicks - its nine o`clock in the morning.

She`s just come home. 

Asynchronicity

A symmetry of sisters,

in old photos we stand

one each side of Pa

(who liked to be snapped,

saw himself still in Oxford bags,

thought fags showed style).

Divisions begin with the body.

`She got the beauty, you got the brains.`

Our mother, old past rebuking

content with a dichotomy of gifts.

Radical and slight,

I ran ragged to dim halls,

fought behemoths with words,

joined a dungaree army.

You moved north to the country,

grew curly kale and beet,

read stories to your kids

wore gloves indoors against the cold,

rubbed chapped and frozen feet.

When I put on flesh,

settled to late motherhood,

you grew thin and restless,

played guitar in the night,

marched and fasted for peace.

You abhor meat, embryos of birds, all fishy things.

I like the taste of omelettes, bacon, shrimp.

Yet once your fretful child sucked on my breast

while her plump cousin slept.

Memory

Hair-washing – my mother singing,

to calm the pain of eyes stinging.

Two sisters kneel in turn on a hard chair,

bend damply over a cold sink,

beg, beg to hear, through soapy ears,

 song from her childhood.

That medieval time when French nuns, plump as cats,

set her rocking on their starched and pleated laps –

a tiny girl from a far-off place.

`Au clair de la lune,

mon ami Pierrot,`

she croons for comfort –

but spins a spell as cold as fear:

that sinister light on the prancing harlequin,

his white ruff silvered to gray with moonshine,

his face neatly masked with a slit crescent;

black, white and red his racing silks –

sadness and anger mixed.

The strange urgent note he must write

to Columbine star-struck by love;

that entreaty – calling on God in the night -

`Pour l`amour de Dieu…..`

My memories touch hers –

two bubbles drift lightly together,

cling in an airy skein

then gently fizz and scatter.

Risk

Untested by the tides of luck

my womb waits - a hanging pear - for the plucking.

Flotillas of striped sails, each plumped with a soft child,

pass my field of vision like tiny deckchairs.

Desire dilates my eyes - babies grow and multiply.

Soon they dwarf buses.

High time to choose a wild name,

throw a pinch of white salt over a clenched shoulder.

I spill my first fruit -

tomato-coloured from the bloom of birth,

but smelling like a peach.

Sunday Morning

At Nanny`s house my mother suffered

tea stewed strong,  brown British sherry from a dark cupboard.

I felt my parents` hand subverted -

time to slip behind the shiny sofa to look at cowrie shells,

old books of Punch,

photos of soldiers, brides, and babies.

To spy the cheap notepad on the gate-legged table -

`Dear Alf` - the errant grandfather not spoken of.

Too stiff to tend her long tall garden rows -

chrysanthemums, (a funeral flower my mother thought)

dahlias, gladioli - beans would be set to sprout in pots.

All this - the prickly brooches, cheap tin whistling kettle,

dusty green tea cups and soft yellow cakes -

flaunt age`s singularity

before the sticky comforts of young motherhood.

Translation

‘Noir’ – stretched to a panther’s velvet breath –

‘is black.’

‘Listen to it – it sounds dark.’

A Breton night

pricked out with stars so white

I stumble dazzled from my tent.

‘Bleu means blue – just turn the letters round.’

Bleu blows through my lips. A sigh -

The sacred blue of the Provencal sky.

‘Jaune is difficult to learn -

sounds nothing like our own mediaeval ‘yellow’.

A monk picks saffron in a wet beech hedge.

In Ciotat

Matisse’s curtains fill and take the breeze.

‘Blanc is white – think of a plain blank sheet.’

Or of vin blanc: two syllables that call

A small stemmed glass to slap upon the zinc.

Yet Muscadet’s a golden globe of light squeezed on the palate.

Scallops at La Coupole,

Moustachioed viragos on the till.

‘Gris’ is the grey of feral cats at night

hunting for lizards on hot villa walls.

Juan Gris from Spain

splashed away the boredom of his name.

‘Marron’ the French prefer to simple ‘brun.’

It means sweet chestnut, burnishes to fox

The hair we Plain Janes still call mouse.

‘Rouge’ stands for red – the English word will help.

(My grandmother, a London midinette,

buffed silver in a high-class jeweller’s shop.

At six she stole a dab for each pale cheek,

Daring the glitter of the locked arcade.)

Mes enfants, these are colours – ‘les couleurs.’

They cross the sleeve of water to Languedeuil,

But further south, in fierce Languedoc

Where slate gives way to roofs of baking earth

They burn,

And you must travel there to learn

How different yellow is from ‘jaune’

And how cold northern blue can blaze with fire.