Issue 10: June 2005

Luke Heeley | Alan Jenkins | Barbara Marsh | Niall O'Sullivan | Eamonn Shanahan | Jean Sprackland | Todd Swift

BARBARA MARSH

Longhand

I hold childhood report cards to my face
as if I could breathe her in with her signature.
The tiny notebooks full of jazz lyrics,
the birthday cards, those loops and lines I memorised —
I hoard anything in her hand.

She scribbled in the margins of her old cookbook,
stuffed handwritten recipes between its pages,
one (for cornbread) in my own eleven-year-old script.
On the inside cover is her recipe for perfect piecrust
which I have never tried to re-create.

I was married at her bedside: her yellowed eyes
moving in and out of focus, my fingers worrying the lace
on my palms, wedding vows in counterpoint
with hospital intercoms. She witnessed
the marriage, her final signature unreadable.

Daffodils

I have seen them sway, their skin so
transparent, wondered why they don't drown
in rainstorms.

I have seen them in vases, holding their breaths.

I have seen them withered, a pale watercolour,
ready to crack and flake at the first touch.

I have seen them in bunches, cautious
of every cat-step, under the bench,
in the window-box, at the railway florist stand,
waiting.

Murder

You get smaller and smaller
until you are nothing but a drop
of blood.

Across from the station is an element,
a series of numbers waiting for a name
before it fits on the chart.

It is anxious.

The circus next door has opened
its big top and the ringmaster's whip
is nowhere to be found.

There's a sardine looking
at the dust and a silver horse
without a saddle.

Hell is downstairs, door number 16.

It's only open during particular hours.
There are no appointments. You have
to show up and get lucky. It helps

if you can swim. Remember: you can't
get there from this spot. It's a surprise
where you end up. Sixty years on

you'll be singing in B-flat,
hitting the low notes you couldn't reach
when you were young.

It's easier than you think,
but you have to go gradually.