Chapter 15

In between Mantel and McIlvanney
I'm trying to write a conversation
using my voice.

On my way to buy a morning paper #52

Click of gate ahead of me. 

Man emerges, three squat, fluffy dogs on Karma Chameleon leads (red, gold and green)

In his other hand, a mug of tea.

Grey beads on brown

Birds like beads on the ends of up-turned braids
scatter in an instant, circle and resettle
at the sound of some invisible alarm.

From my window

The once south-blowing rectangle
of the green binsack in the tree across the road
has, after four days battling with the elements,
become north-bound three-strand, pennant,
fancy-knotted to the top-most branch.

From my window as I drink coffee

Skeins of dirty sheep dag clouds
Dry hawthorn undramatic brown
Through which a serrated glimpse of golf club green
To the soundtrack of BSA A 10.

On my way to buy a morning paper,

Over-optimistic blackbird
singing that it's Spring

Fifteenth of the month

Not a quadruplicate of babies' skulls

November coloured

eyes and mouths rehearsing Christmas carols

e’en as they lay, battered in the gutter

but an egg carton, fog-sodden and forlorn

Loaves not fishes

Late-woken from a dream re-formed

from the dough of Thursday’s memories

to red dot flashing of bread machine

and a butter yellow sky.

Low tricks by the sun

Long slender legs extend my arrival in a kitchen where

crumbs are boulders, windows blind with grime

and I wish, not that I was less a slut at housework

but had been more so, while my legs were still that long.

On my way to buy a morning paper #50

Close to the ground:
not an exotic creamy toffee crunch dessert
but once-white, now-dead hydrangeas.