Different Water
When a girl becomes a mother there is no fanfare.
No government re-elections, no erupting volcanoes.
The baby mops up the praise. But quietly
there are earthquakes, realigning planets.
When you ask to hold her newborn you are
addressing someone who just became a tiger,
so be careful. When she soothes the child that has
shrieked for three hours she is the Matador,
sunlit with relief. Sometimes, at around 2 am,
she is the only woman ever to have given birth.
At the supermarket she is a calm strong oak
dragging a thrashing child past the strawberries.
At the school gates she’s autumn weeping leaves
of every hue for the loss of summer. Often
she spies the girl she once was and thinks, wimp.
Like grass trees after fire, like crops in new weather,
like a river clasping different water, there is
no fanfare when a girl becomes a mother.
Each Thing Observed Closer
Now I weigh everything
on unseen scales of a kindness hewn
from new stone – my impulse to trap
spiders in a glass has flown,
it is as though the world has become a hall
of mirrors, throwing me endless faces
of my children. And so the slugs
in my kitchen are gentle, spared the salt.
So the spiders that echo my son’s curiosity
are carried on envelopes, placed reverently
on the porch. Even weeds are torn
with respect. I think of tribesmen who kill,
then pray, thanking the still-fresh beast
as they eat. Each day the pieces lace
more cleanly together,
the edges of my life-
questions curved, all life re-quickened
by maternal meekness.
A dandelion clock wheeling its silver tufts.
Three blue bobbing V’s in the brown
cup of a nest
high in the roof.
Two white boats in the bay – hands
asking and asking of the horizon.
Nights!
Such tame dawdling hedgehogs
before my children came, I had
twenty-eight years of domestic, nurse-ish nights,
harmless as cheddar
or new balls of wool.
Warm-apple-pie nights.
Such regularity! Night factories,
clock in, clock out,
eights hours’ unbroken sleep
(ten at weekends), nights that were reliable
as gravity, waiting teacherly at the end of each day,
no glitz or zing to them,
they were the Hush Puppies of earth’s orbit,
sensible as knee support.
My nights were made of Egyptian cotton,
now they are rabid marsupials,
lemur-eyed, full of jangle.
These nights since my children came –
gallery of genres,
occasionally Picasso,
occasionally Pollock.
Nights of small elbows
in the face, nights upside down, nights
assailed by colic and cold.
Tchaikovsky nights! Percussion of
waterproof sheets, nursery rhymes on repeat,
howling, howling.
Nights of find-the-dummy
and change-the-nappy, nights
I have to climb out of,
the moon a gaoler.
My nights are the novels Coehlo dreams about,
flamboyant as peacocks,
nights that are gardens
of fantastic ideas, forgotten
at dawn. Pregnant at midnight,
mothered by morning –
nights that are, frankly,
bananas,
nights at A&E,
nights that make me grateful
for day (O carpe diem!)
Sometimes they are blessed,
saintly relics, uneventful as porridge,
filling sleep’s beggar-cup.
Each morning a different woman
in the mirror, reshaped
in all the ways
only night knows.
The Second Way to Skin a Cat
The forgetfulness began like any avalanche.
That first thick crack, whip-sound of riddance –
appointments I was glad to shed, memos
I’d been reluctant to fulfill. It was only when
my loves became cumbersome to summon
that the cold drip of time
seemed something more. Like my name.
I had to make it up. Hobbies. The order
of each day. What sauce went with lamb,
what a bus was for. The space between one
moment to the next yawned and filled
with floodwater of arguing genes.
I floundered, hooking at whatever floated.
Dredged up some phrases
that sat neatly in my mouth. Dead as a
doornail. More than one way to skin...
what was it?
Memory, denuded. The old personality
dropped like a white skirt of snow
from the mountain’s hips. Sarcophagus
weaved from the thinning dew.
Motherhood Diptych
Like a blade pressed to the artery
before exams are sat, reversed
rainfall of mortar boards, before
that first witness of a replica corpse
with convincing pews of veins,
before the reverencing encounter
with the real thing, an actual cadaver,
before the tutor blithely cut a giant horseshoe
into the sternum without a shock of blood,
peeled it back like a sticky carpet
revealing the organs in neat arrangement –
the blue canoes where once he breathed,
this man, the unheartlike heart, still purple,
its pale pipework flushed of every wish,
then the odd aubergine liver, failed,
the gut’s many long roads –
like a surgeon required to heal the ruptured
but still beating and quite naked heart
without anything before, not exams, calm
tutor uncurtaining the chest,
before the triumphant rainfall –
think of her forehead strung with clear pearls
under five theatre suns,
white moon of clock dragging doubt,
lonely chirrup of the ECG,
yet another blind cut she is forced to make –
here? how deep? scalpel or saw?
so too this daily shaping and saving four lives
with just my own
and a hundred wilted plants
to draw upon
Symphysis Pubis Dysfunction
I explain it to the doctor, regurgitating Google:
one in 5 pregnant women affected; debilitating; caused
by hormones and hypermobility. She’s never heard of it,
asks how it feels, what it prevents
me from doing. I go back to a moment branded in memory –
first pregnancy,
17 weeks, the sensation of a hot poker
laid horizontal against my bikini line. I had stopped
and yanked my waistband forward to check for the sure strip
of burning flesh. Nothing, but by
28 weeks
I had to shuffle, subservient to the clamp
around my groin, my legs rusted scissors,
each morning a caesura in the doorframe,
impossibility of stairs.
At 35 weeks each breath chained
to the pelvis, anchor
of spine and thought, black canal
between the white rocks of my pubic bones
flooded with flame
when I turned over, stood up, sat down, sneezed –
now, 15 months after giving birth
there’s a broken basket at the top of my legs,
or rather this white-winged nest, stem of sacrum,
root of coccyx and ischial tusks, the iliac
crest fluted beautifully like the petal of some rare lily –
just without the requisite cartilage
fusing the two halves of me together.
The Only Dad at Playgroup
Actually, I’m at an eighteenth-century fair
amongst the bearded ladies
and conjoined twins, regarding this mild-
mannered man refraining from
removing his blue anorak, accepting
tea politely and not hesitating
to whisk up his son to sniff
his bum, visibly doing his best
to ignore the sideward glances
and smoke of curiosity that has filled the room.
I see the man and his boy behind bars,
met with the stares of frocked gentry
and prodded a bit to see if he’ll
reveal the reason why on earth he’s here,
and if, like a medium, he might spill
some existential truths about modern parenting.
Eventually, he cracks – I’m a house husband –
and is instantly wrapped in cloud,
ascended into heaven, and crowned
with stars. Later, a male friend
scoffs and yanks the man down,
casts him back into his cage, reveals
him to an astonished and knowing crowd
as a wife-battered unemployable eunuch.
Only in the twenty-first century
could he possibly be both. Ladies and gentlemen,
it’s The Incredible Only Dad at Playgroup!
Working Mother
Sometimes I’d hold her long after
she’d fallen back to sleep, until her soft
blonde head had imprinted my arm,
harvest moon on my chest from her cheek.
Some days I’d cry all the way to work
and all the way home, I was not ready
to leave the softness of her. My life before
peeled keenly from me, old weather.
I had emails in my head, shopping lists
on my hands, a corset of memos.
Justified myself to strangers.
Argued over Child Tax Credit
and nursery policies and childcare hours,
whether daycare created criminals
and divorce. Comfort ate. Sometimes I see
them, those women still on the rack.
I see the space they feel between them
and their child, the one that feels too young,
too helpless to be left, too soon.
I imagine them sitting in that chair at some
dark hour, wondering if a part of their love
can glove their son or daughter like armour.
If their love will stay when they cannot.
Poem Made From Bits of Newspaper Headlines
after Cornelia Parker
Childhood obesity to blame on working mothers.
Working mothers link to school failure. Welfare
reforms could force stay-at-home mothers to work.
Working mothers’ children unfit.Working mothers
may cause breakups. Kids of working moms are more
likely to get hurt. Working mothers ‘less likely to cook
healthy family recipes.’ Companies ‘not planning to hire
working mums.’ Kids pay when mother’s away.
Who’d be a working mum in the UK?
Silence for Schumann
Clara Schumann, wife of the composer Robert,
gave up her successful and thriving career as a concert
pianist to support her husband and their children.
My husband’s notes
hang like wet socks
on the line and shall not
dry in any other wind
but quiet,
thus my own hands
will tangle only
in the raw minors
of child’s play,
clang the silver’s
discordances
and the sweet shy chimes
of china bowls at supper.
Sometimes I finger the kitchen top,
arpeggio linen pleats
for a piano.
What clamorous lusts sforzando
the silence.
Staying at Home
Do not imagine us three curled up in tame domesticities
of picture books and occasional playgroups,
neither believe in painting-time
and story-time as ways of killing the hours.
Motherhood involves the vagaries of industry.
Imagine the home as a realm of immaterial business,
commerce of nurture. Fathom the architecture of confidence
and patience. Here is the laundry, the stained and pocked.
Here are the hills of plastic cups, horizon of battered toys.
Watch. Soon armies will come and all the palaces
we built in the minds of our children
will shine their bright and fervent lights.
Hare
I kept you in bed with me so many nights,
certain I could hold the life into you,
certain that the life in you wanted to leap out, hare-like,
go bobbing off into some night-field.
For want of more eyes, more arms
I strapped you to me while I did the dishes, cooked, typed,
your little legs frogging
Nested you in a car seat while I showered, dressed,
and when you breastfed for hours and hours
I learned how to manoeuvre the cup and book around you.
Time and friends and attitudes, too.
We moved breakables a height, no glass tables.
Fitted locks to the kitchen cupboards, door jammers,
argued about screws and pills someone left within reach.
I’ll not tell you how my breath left me, how my heart stopped
at your stillness in the cot, and who I became
when at last you moved. There is no telling
what skins of me have dropped and shed in the fears
I’ve entered. The day beyond
these blankets, beyond our door
is known to me now, fragile as moth-scurf,
its long ears twitching, alert,
white tail winking across the night-field.
Thetis
Not a rite-of-passage rash-and-fever, not a week eating ice cream
on the sofa,
this was not chickenpox but a biblical plague
the month before he turned two, his skinny frame covered entire
with penny-sized bulbs sagging, fat with neon green pus,
as though he had been mummified in bubble wrap, victim
of the world’s bees,
skin around the pustules souffléd with red welts, coat of
monstrous nipples.
I was furious, convinced the pox was an intelligence,
as if it had divined by vengeful will
not only to smother his skin in sores but the insides, too –
I could not bear to hear him scream
each time he passed the drops of water we managed to smuggle by
the flames in his throat.
In the hospital I cradled him
to my eight-month-ripened body, the night and his fever terrifying,
a stand-off with wolves on a treeless plain.
I had believed his birth had finally split the
world wide open
to show me the precis
e flesh and wit of horror, formed a shell
around me that makes child’s play of pain –
but I had forgotten
that a species of pain rises up in giving birth that is lord above
all others,
persuades dominion of my heart, rules penitence, makes me kneel.
Lord of inflicting my son, lord of hurting him
even in his tender places, lord of stealing his breath,
I who thought I had conquered all by giving life
submit
submit
submit
Speech Therapy Candidate
Bring me your coastlines of sound,
the ancient coves wherein song
becomes word. Son, I read you like a text
written on my skin
and yet your silence insinuates
where for you the tide charges like white horses
where the small conch snail is a glyph of delight
Bring me perforating symphonies, sinewed
with your truths
bring me your hooked consonants, an apostasy
of vowels
bring me numbers echoed out of order
bring me babble like a bag of spare parts
we will assemble the engine of speech
Let the whole foal-voice come stumbling up
the paddock knock-kneed in the shushed
psalm of starlight
Daughtering
I should not fault you for adorning
my paperwork –
scene of daisies, fairies and a moon with eyes
brightening a contract,
edits to a novel palimpsested by purple hearts,
phonetic verses about your friends, a six-year-old codex
of the world as you see it –
nor should I correct you when you scold
your younger siblings in my telling-off voice,
when you pinch my clothes and shoes, echo my laugh,
walk with my sway –
my first-born child, as I write
the contours of motherhood on the pages of your days
so you print upon the world with borrowed ink.
How deftly you tell my many weathers, human barometer.
How my mother’s words fall out of my mouth
and then from yours, the females of our lineage
matroyshka bells, love’s echo chamber.
Melody, this one life sways on the stem
of your glitter pen. Each of my words, each act
a signature of so many ripples.
The Possessed
When I was eight I saw the ghost of my mother.
She was alive, but she was a ghost