JULIA COPUS
Cleave
I
It was a cold winter that year, even in heaven.
The night your hearing gave up the ghost,
Lachesis had fallen asleep at her loom,
bruise-blue circles rimming her eyes.
The thread she had just been working
into the woof with chilblained fingers
broke and lay loose in her lap.
And on earth,
from precisely that moment, your blocked-up ear
refused point-blank to swallow any more.
The mice in the attic over our bed
no longer stopped you from sleeping
and my scuffling feet on the flags
were quiet as dolls' by morning.
Within hours, your deafness had opened a gap
that stretched between us the length of the globe
till the soles of my feet, the soles of yours,
were planted in opposite quarters, cleaved
by 8,000 miles of rocks and seas
and we were north and south, antipodes.
II
Or maybe that's not how it happened.
Let's say he settled his head on my lap
while I tilted a coffee-spoon of oil
warmed in a pan to the heat
of his skin and checked with a knuckle —
gingerly, gingerly — into the cave of his ear;
that on weighing the odds and taking stock
I was happy to stay for as long as it took —
so long, as things turned out, that my foot
became famed for the small patch of carpet, cleaved
to its sole, and the river we'd dreamed of living by
swam into view, and glittered through gaps
in the hawthorn tree. And spring began.
And as for the pool of oil
that had settled in his auricle
it must have been a libation,
for the gods in time returned to him
first the sensation of traffic —
buses that chanced it up Limbrick
making the living-room windows shudder;
a little while later, the tick of my watch;
my stockings shifting under my skirt;
and finally, far off, a goddess waking
next to her loom, the crack
of her fingers taking up the slack.
Hymn to All the Men I'll Never Love
My heart, sing praises to the men
I'll never love; from whom a night
away's just that — a night — and not
a lifetime in the desert without food
and water. It's because of them
that breakfasts can be eaten, Lord, appointments
kept, and letters left to lie
where they have fallen; men with whom
a perfect evening may be nothing more
than beer and cards outside beneath the lean-to
where straight-talk and easy gestures leave
dark nests of sparrows and the scent
of bonfires in their wake; the sort of men
whose smiles I can endure without
surrendering my all to them;
in whose unswerving disregard,
let heaven rejoice, let the earth be glad.
A Short History of Desire
On a day like today, I think I can almost
begin to make sense of those chivalrous knights
who, on the whim of some titian-haired damsel,
would set off on horseback, although they were barely
out of their teens, in pursuit of some noble
improbable task, while a sun much like this one
strobed through the trees and the left-behind girl
perfected the art of the meaningful wait —
the curve of her breasts and her full lips so pleasingly
matching the line of the coiled anaconda
thickly entwined like a creeper about
her chiffon-swathed hips, the nub of its head
reclining over her naked shoulder.
As naked, that is, as the thigh of the fabled
Victorian gent (beneath the folds
of his peg-top pants) who, perched on a horsehair
chair in the parlour, would catch a glimpse
of his lady-love's finely-turned ankle and feel
the strain of his flesh at the seam of his button-up
fly; was suddenly, keenly, aware
of the fervour of light, how it filled up a room
on a day like today, how it tugged at his blood,
and glanced off the edge of her silver-plate buckle
the way in the Fifties it glanced off the fenders
of a thousand parked-up Morris Minors
under the moon when the sweetest of girls
might take off her clothes on a day like today
to the radio's chanting — alop-bam-boom —
and lie back like a leaf-bud splitting
open across someone's trembling lap as if
just then a knife had been touched to her skin.
However deep asleep you think you are,
there always will be days like this —
a light, hair-tousling breeze and a sun that streams
into the dusty parlour of your heart.
Pray when it does that your heart, out cold
for the winter, stirs in its stockpile of leaves.
Or else, that you're caught off guard by the quickening
thump of your hoof-beat heart returning
from very far off: pray then for the stoutness of heart
to ride with it headlong into a poem like this one
where some part of everything never stops moving
under the light of that big old heart, the moon;
where even the moon up there in its ocean
of sky is afloat, and trembles with longing.
From In Defence of Adultery (Bloodaxe, 2002)
Also available from Amazon.co.uk:
The Shuttered Eye (Bloodaxe, 1995)
Julia Copus won first prize in the National Poetry Competition 2002.