The Guardians

I could not bear the empyrean capped,

not after living so long under the ground.

You were away

when I found the lump.

You came back with a wooden duck

and a black toy dog.

In the thick of it

the duck would come to live

with the small plastic shepherd

and the stone our daughter found out in the river –

its shape sat safe in my hands.

The piggy bank was another gift.

My friend said put a coin in it a day

and smash it when you need to buy the dress

for your daughter’s wedding.

But the dog – the dog was quite something.

Being stuffed, it said nothing.

In a dream it sat quietly by our own living dog

and she looked at me straight out of her old eyes and said

Go on – it’s OK to pick it up.

The Ties My Sister Makes

For Elena

The silk ties my sister makes

lie sheathed in plastic sheets

in their pigeonholes

in the factory

beneath the volcano.

They hold all the colours of the sea

and are scaled like fishes too

so that when I first see them

laid out in their obedient ranks

I want to exclaim like Willmouse

at the Roman fish market

Che belle cose.

My sister’s ties

will be dispatched about the world,

their underwater silvers and greens

flashing in the dark aquariums of shop windows.

I think of all the necks they will encircle,

the men who will make their deft adjustments

and the women who will stroke them and roll them away

with socks or hang them inside wardrobe doors,

unaware of my sister’s clever hands

and of her name

inside the label

beating out its syllables

silently next to their husband’s hearts.

The Forge

The women in these suburbs

flirt with the man who cuts keys, fixes heels.

They can’t help being won over

by the light that glowers at his shop-front.

Too sure of himself by half

my mother would say.

He dyes his hair unflatteringly dark.

Once I took him shoes,

a second-hand pair.

God, love, he asked,

what have you been doing in these?

I laugh at the histories I could invent

for these strangers – sleep-walking, bacchic dance.

I laugh and say nothing

as he hands me the little green slip.

But I don’t go back for a long, long time

(life more ruptured than the wreck

of shoes I handed him, impossible to unlock).

Where you been darl?

(if I could click my heels).

It’s a story I cannot tell –

what kept me from redeeming

something fixed.

At night the women in these suburbs

unlock their doors

with keys fashioned

by the man at the kiosk.

They kick off their shoes

shiny and re-heeled.

They smile without quite knowing

how the man with the dark, dark hair

has eased his way into their smallest secret places,

snug in the palm, firm at the ankle.

And I chide myself gently

for not telling him the story of the book

I swapped for shoes

or why I had been away for so long.