Goya's dog

The singer’s blind

mouth sends blood

to the painter’s hands –

Tio Paquete hears

the snapping

of the aortic valve,

counts the heartbeats,

feels the filling

of slack veins,

salivates

at the straining

jaw sinews, senses

dark paint, in a bar

in the Malasaña,

as the slow sun creeps

across the brush strokes

and a dog-whistle

calls attention to

the ochre wall.

(Published in Brittle Star magazine)

 

Geography

When children in woolly hats came out of school

crows rearranged their feathers and perched

high on the traffic lights. Hot sugar smells

oozed from kiosks between the blocks of flats.

Across the river, café staff cleared tables, flushed

out the coffee machine. The river linked places

that had trams and galleries, places where

musical scales were practised and fashionable

shoes scraped against heavy cobbles. Ministries

were alive with digital paperwork and video calls.

 

Now the ministries’ flags hang limp in the vacuum,

their stones weighing heavy on the bedrock

during the inertia of winter. In a square,

one of the children almost looks. She once

had sparkly pink varnish on her tiny nails.

She and her mother must have smiled

while they waited for it to dry. The crows

seem unsettled these days, blinking white lids

across their black eyes. They fly over frozen fields

to gather at the edge of the city.

(Published in Wildfire Words)

Wooden house

You remember the arc of the road,

the half-shut gate, the wobbly slabs,

the key that sticks in the lock.

You remember the squeak

of handles, the creak of hinges,

feet on the dark waxed floor,

 

the other rooms, without murmurs

and coddled babies, the soft rind

of nursing; spaces for dust motes

where the aching house groans.

 

Drawers wedged through disuse

are too intimate now. Browning 

receipts and forgotten letters are fossils

on the desk. The blackened arms

of a favourite chair feel cold.

 

Sweetness clings in a memory

of warm neck folds, curdled and lost. 

 

(Featured in Kirsten Adkins' film Singing the Wooden House)

Ordnance Survey

Against reason, I once believed

dippers could walk under water –

under the pale blue lines

flowing across the map’s tight confines.

 

I've seen them dunking their white bibs,

acknowledging the cartographers'

fine borders – as if rivers never lose control –

and hurling themselves against the flow.

                       

The map's conventions ignore

the broken banks, the widening shallows,     

the scattered rocks, the places where

fat birds flutter into the stream. I stared

         

for an hour, hoping for resolution,

ignoring packed contours, crags,

vascular signs of vague paths.     

          

I wanted proof – I'm a follower of distinct dots,

dashes, rights to roam along precise

tracks confirmed by lichen stiles,

 

routes that cross green A-roads,

pale lemon lanes, villages laid out in grey.

The dark river refused to let me see.