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Jen Crawford
The longboats
‘If I can think of it, it isn’t what I
want.’
‘A Sick
Child’, Randall Jarrell
-
- 1.
-
- When a cat has sustained the injection
- of another cat’s teeth, and the wound (as it heals) infects,
- and erupts at the frotting, cools, scabs over, and erupts again
- and again, we marvel at the purchase of the lesion
- but nothing lies deep or simple as the cell-prints of
- oh, passion, undisturbed like the borders of our dreams only
- while real-life pushes the line - the urgent, furtive thumb
- scuffing charcoal into white (that is, her paper skin,
- the confession of her ribs).
-
- Men I know hold the heads of women gripped by nausea
- and feel the promise of reform soaking deeper, please,
- deeper towards their parching hearts. Clinicians
- excuse themselves from recognition of the deadly boring
- and the condom is still in the drawer, waiting
- like a milky film for an eye: we are afraid
- (surviving genes and injury)
- age will have us capitulate.
-
-
- 2.
-
- Her stomach’s been rag-tied, wrung and released,
- dropped with no drop left but this
- rolling sour under her tongue. She spits.
- What does he see of himself
- in that clear bead, now globing and foetal
- in the bowl? No matter. He flushes
- and she’s still pale as damp string
- hung over his hand. His warmth passes
- like a shiver or cramp through
- layers where she is concealed, ornate,
- pressed together in tender parody
- of emptiness, as if there were room between them
- for what they could not conceive.
-
-
- 3.
-
- ‘Nightly we drift to war, and let each morning bring
- our glistening, whole return -’
- but she speaks like a child grown around sickness:
- I thought of it, and it will have to do.
- Waking after days of driving she finds
- the escarpment buckled under flame,
- smoke spilling towards their road
- and childish old men in flapping hospital frocks
- chasing themselves towards death;
- or, his body, spread
- like a worn sheet across the earth
- and nothing will burn. He’s singing:
- ‘and come a stranger current
- to urge the longboats out,
- and fray the likening thread that holds them near -’
- then feels her fingers working hot
- where he is soft and thin, and soon
- the shock of air.
-
-
- 4.
-
- It’s not easy
- to sex a skeleton in a desert at fifty paces;
- but approaches must be made. In corneal ruin
- (years picking patterns out of gleaming fields of sand)
- you may never know
- but come very close instead, lie down perhaps
- or disarrange with your hands now feeling only
- for coolness trapped beneath or within
- the pelvis and the skull.
- A memory waits: aisles of bright-skinned goods,
- rows of labels as smooth as bone
- and other women’s velvet children reaching out to touch -
- as if sterility had been the lover you longed for,
- and that gentle fluorescence could have burnt from you
- the bitterness of choice, the infection
- of the making eye, discharging
- as it sees. And now so little between
- the paper and the bones, yet it seems the bones will yield:
- how good, then, to find an unknown dark
- where nothing red will bloom.
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