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Barometer
The hollowing of the empty place
On having enough messages from the dead
About the author and this book
I breathe into the lonely snow-lines on the scan,
tell you how to grow safely, how to throw
and catch a ball, how later, stronger, fleshed out,
you’ll thrust up a hand in class before the question’s asked,
then hush, hush yourself before bed.
I tell you about a lot of things: Clarice Cliff teapots,
Georgia O’Keefe, tiny relief etchings we’re making,
you circled in me and I’m blistering in midday sun.
I tell you about kissing at swimming pools,
little black dresses, apologies and apologies.
I say, Be stronger than me and mean every word
and plait your long blonde hair in innocence,
which I regret. I say, Feel safe with lullabies,
don’t be scared of fairy tales, but know you should be.
I say, Opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck,
as are new shoes on tables, walking under ladders, black cats.
I fail to tell you we all fall out of luck with luck.
When you fall out of it there will be a train whispering
a promise, a half-stepped-on pavement, a book’s page
slicing your small forefinger as it turns the page
of the epic novel you’ll never finish.
I tell you about cutting your hair short and suffering
the consequences, and about huge paintings by women
who’ve disappeared; I will speak of my perimeters,
the way I brush my hair, cathedral ceilings
and how they are painted. I tell you, when you exist,
you will be all of these things and so much more:
we’ll write your spine in charcoal, your heart in ink.
Not until after the front door slams shut
and absence sucks air from its cheeks
do the words in her head, packed tight
as if on postcards, unhook their ink.
She knows their sloping script by rote,
has read each one to the echo of her womb,
laid her palm on her belly as she read them
aloud. She said, Cessation, cessation,
second trimester, over like a chant as if
wood fairies found a loophole in time,
wound arms and legs from blades of grass,
tugged saplings for spines, wove slews
of apple blossom into hair. And for the heart ‒
she can barely breathe now ‒ the heart comes
from the stunned corpse of a doe, bulged
like late-summer fruit. She heaves herself
across fields, rubs rain-creased dock leaves
on her left thigh, shuffles past cows
flogging milk into machines, breathing
slow-flung air in sharp plumes. For one
unbridled moment she thinks she can run
through buckled nettles, the barbed thickets
of brambles, straggle shoulder-high thistles
all the way down the lane and never
come back to her silent grey world. But she
remembers the locksmith, his dreamt-up
names for keys, how you can half-turn them
in the nuzzle of a lock and nothing will open.
