Issue 10: June 2005

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

JEAN SPRACKLAND

Physics

By every rule in the book
I should be dead. Instead
I'm frozen in this hall of blue light,
wavy lines, blunt silence.
My limbs are bleached bones
stuck in a kung-fu pose.
I watch my fingernails, but they don't grow.

Somewhere inside me,
a baffled clock ticks on. Where's the boy
who played sleeping with the fishes?
He shinned down the swimming-pool wall, blowing
slow bubbles, lay on the bottom
counting eight nine ten . . . he loved
to be bearing the weight of all that water.
Say I'd once had a wife, would she still think of me?
What news of the child we might have expected?

I heard that before the Big Bang
there was no such thing as time.
I didn't believe it then.
I'm unfastened in the amnesiac cold
and the one clear thing I know I had and lost
is the flex of the diving-board under my feet,
the lovely air
curving and following through.

Spilt

You took handfuls of sea
to fill the moat of your brother's castle.
First you ran, then went low and steady,
but still it spilt. And you
didn't see this as the fault of the water,
its special talent for escape. To you
this was one more failure
to be shaken off with the weight of childhood.
You shaped the bowl of your hands,
pressed your fingers together,
held it against the sun to check the seal,
crouched in the shallows,
scooped again, again.

And here you are, going low and steady
between your two lives, walking
the impossible street that connects them.
It's dusk. A neighbour
setting bottles on her doorstep
throws you a foreign glance.
And still you arrive
with nothing to offer the people you love
but damp fingers, the evidence.

Mattresses

Tipped down the embankment, they
sprawl like smashed suburban wives,

buckled and split, slashed by rain,
moulded by bodies dead or disappeared
and reeking with secrets.

A lineside museum of sleep and sex,
an archive of thrills and emissions,
the histories of half-lives
spent hiding in the dark.

Arthritic iron frames might still be worth a bit,
but never that pink quilted headboard,
naked among thistles, relic
of some reckless beginning, testament

to the usual miracle: the need to be close,
however it stains and bruises.

Available from Amazon.co.uk: Hard Water (Cape, 2003)