ISABEL GALLEYMORE
Significant Other
For my parents
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Ocean
The Starfish
Once
By Ourselves
Robin
Choosing
Slipper Limpet
The Ash
A Stranger
Into the Woods
Kind
Goose Barnacle
Say Heart
True Animal
Seahorse
Together
Day
At First
No Inclination
Limpet & Drill-Tongued Whelk
Difficult Cup
Spirit Human
The Scrotum Frog
I Keep You
Nectaries
Eye & Sight
Spiny Cockle
The Wingless Wasp
Worm
The New World
Rainforest Spelled Backwards is Lustful
Harvest
Tended
Nuptials
Crickets
Strawberry & Ship-of-War
Barnacles
False Limpet
Shadow Tale
I’m Doing You an Injustice
Succession
Luminescent
Crab
Significant Other
Examples Include Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’
Are We There Yet?
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other; in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love.
— Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto
Significant Other
Ocean
Wasn’t walking beside her
walking with the ocean below
when you didn’t know her and wanted to?
In that heat, along that path
you hesitated
at a slug, beached
like a tiny grey whale –
thirty tonnes and seventy years
of navigating the continental shelf
assumed by this soil-scuffing inch
and what would she make of you?
The ocean blinked.
Say you took that step, or say you fell,
wouldn’t she move you miles in herself?
The Starfish
creeps like expired meat –
fizzy-skinned, pentamerously-legged,
her underfur of sucking feet
shivers upon an immobile mussel
whose navy mackintosh is zipped
against the anchor of this fat paw,
this seemingly soft nutcracker who exerts
such pressure until the mussel’s jaw
drops a single millimetre. Into this cleft
she’ll press the shopping bag of her stomach
and turn the mollusc into broth,
haul in the goods and stumble off,
leaving a vacant cubicle,
a prayer come apart.
Once
there was a question of how close
to come to nature without being eaten,
but as the town fussed to build a fence
someone likened their hands to crows,
their stuttering heart to a common toad:
to be at one suddened the air. Rain fell
on their faces and with it they were one,
one, they said, with the rivers and stones,
one with the riverbank’s wig shops of moss,
with the prickliest gorse and its bees – bright
as liquorice allsorts: at one and lost
as the woman wrapped in her lover’s arms
who accidentally kisses herself.
By Ourselves
The too-hot winter sun. No cloud.
I glanced up to find
we were finally by ourselves
and had been for a while. Hadn’t we
desired to be alone those times we flirted
with seeing human forms in trees?
Some evenings we gave over entirely
to making the moon one of us.
Still, it felt too fast, this intimacy:
the overhasty buds, the last few bees
finishing our sentences,
their bright cheeks turning pale.
Robin
A road sign
with a fire warning
in its breast,
a house built
for coming weather
on stilts
and taking off,
smoke,
the landing
gear pressed under.
Choosing
from eight million differently constructed hearts –
I couldn’t – I chose to love them all –
the squid’s triptych of pumps,
the snake’s cardial sac, expanding as it eats.
To say nothing will come between us,
to stay benignly intimate was –
sometimes not calling was easier –
sometimes I’d forget to touch you
and you, and you – a natural phenomenon
dwindling – one of a dozen breakups
from the world each day –
like the others it seemed you’d just popped out
for a pint of milk and now
nothing’s conjured hearing your name.
Slipper Limpet
In the double-dark of the sea at night,
a shoe of shell bears a belly-foot
that bears an appetite and so invites
a dozen to generate a vertical queue,
a carefully organised high-rise orgy
with her, its founding member,
its queen sticking to the ocean bedrock,
as smaller, younger males shuffle on top
and when she’s tired of the day in day out
rut, when her gills have breathed their last,
her nearest male inherits her sex –
two moons and he’s bequeathed
her duct – and yet he’ll remain stuck on her
empty bone slipper, departed Cinderella.
The Ash
Like a single branch of ash
honed to the handle of an axe
and made to take the hand
of a woodsman as he throws
his body weight to fell
all the ash has sown,
I turn your words although
the line you spoke was simple
A Stranger
In one unfamiliar town
I ask a stranger where
the small red bus departs
and, told you’re almost there
it leaves from where the elms
once stood before the road was paved,
I end up searching
for some past felling,
an old yawn in the earth –
although I’m told the only chance
of love is via falling.
How easy it is to walk past.
Into the Woods
For those who want to invest in disasters,
the INCH pack includes a sling-shot,
fishing rod and tarp. It stands for
I’m Never Coming Home.
Walk into the woods and don’t look back.
I learn this from my neighbour’s watching
of Doomsday Preppers at full volume –
her
octogenarian ears believe
everyone is mumbling. On the street
she leans in uncomfortably close. They say
such impairments come by degrees.
We’ll be right back with Brian’s missile silo.
I give up on my book, fill the kettle.
Sunlight floods the living room;
the birds and branches of the papered walls
fade at a rate not considered change.
Kind
Being steeped
in his keeper’s routine,
the owl anthropomorphises
himself upon the plinth –
if we put a female in with him
he’d still make love with the hats on our heads –
he’s been here twice as long as I’ve been
captivated by you,
like him I don’t think of myself
as possessed
until one night, loosed to the world,
I find myself expecting
everyone to be your kind
of kindness.
Goose Barnacle
An enamelled flower bud, a locket
made of shell, a lacquered fingernail
treehoused upon a wormy stalk
that wags as though to say
not quite or not exactly so
and this is only one of what’s a fishy copse
undulating back and forth as in a gale
and asked what land they grow upon
they’d likely say no land, and asked
whose hand they reach like fingers from
they’d likely say the hand of some stray branch
that, dipping in and out of water,
persuades their beaks to open,
their feeding limbs to royally wave.
Say Heart
They say it’s because I’m afraid to be alone.
What good is saying heart,
when you can say heart like a little wine barrel,
or heart like a red squirrel.
I am most like myself when likened.
He, for example, has made me realise
I can climb, jump between trees.
True Animal
On a dozy summer’s day, a donkey magpied a lion’s skin that the hunters had left to dry in the sun. What else had the donkey to do, but chameleon himself inside it? As he swanned across the paddock in his new ferocious fur, the horse began to mouse, the hare grew chicken-hearted, and the chicken hared away. How good it felt to shark among the shrimp, he thought, and let out a proud hee-haw… The daisies widened their eyes. Mid-run, the chicken stopped. The hare, and then the mouse, dared themselves to look. Finding not claws but hooves, each turned upon him and, as any true animal would, parroted a short teaching on natures true and fox.
Seahorse
Isn’t it shocking how he speaks for her?
His thin voice wavering across the restaurant –
she’ll have the cod artichoke bake.
A giggle of bubbles comes from behind them:
a fish tank curtained with seagrass
where a seahorse is tying itself
to one of these slim, tweedy forms
like a hand shaping itself inside another’s
the way my hand tucks into his
like a difference pretending it’s not.
Together
the heart aflame no longer
shines any light on love
because they are always together –
because they are always together
it’s hard to see them apart
like the blade in the blade of grass –
two lovers grew so close they became
too fluently familiar
having lost what makes fire fire.
Day
Having lived this long with one another,
we know day’s ‘face’, day’s ‘hands’ so very well;
the way it touches and likes to be touched;
can, in the most part, read its ‘mind’,
so when we hear that day is only playing along
that day has a plan to abandon us
we brush it off as gossip. After all,
the orange juice carton pours out orange,
birds gently carry on birdsplaining themselves,
under the trees of our tree-lined streets
a few of us gather without exception,
our talk of the weather still small.
At First
The seasons grew untidy;
the months filled up with rain.
At first it came soft as a sheep.
Inside the sheep a wolf, of course
inside the wolf a man intent
on acting out his tale.
No Inclination
It came to light that mountains were some
of the least despondent land formations,
didn’t know what it was to howl.
The woebegone voice of the willow
confirmed it had no reason to weep.
Accordingly, schoolchildren were instructed
to rip up their books, releasing
alligators from their anger,
bees from their busyness,
cats from their curiosity…
while one neighbourhood didn’t see any harm
pulling the sun closer to inspect.
It couldn’t be denied: that fiery mass
possessed no inclination to smile.
Household after household poured
whiskey-cokes to toast the news,
the ice melting fast in their drinks.
Limpet & Drill-Tongued Whelk
Across the rockpool floor, a limpet grazes –
a stray magician’s cup,
moon-textured, the shape of light
pointing through frosted glass.
It is a modest party hat
in which something like a head resides
oblivious of this dog whelk
that pads against the thick, still brine
and climbs upon the limpet –
an ornate seat upon an elephant.
Carnivorous mollusc, tiny fracking rig
clocking in with its drill-tongue, clutching
as the limpet rises from the stone,
to become half-mushroom, half bucking bronco.
Difficult Cup
after Wu Hao’s ‘Duke Cups’
The china cup is frilled at the rim
like tired lace and all over it
ceramic tentacles extend
to whisper if you drink me that way
I’ll poke your eye out, you
can’t quite press your fingers here
your lips – like walking a mountain ridge
at night with some romantic
ideal ahead, you are not
not figuring each step among
the rocks –
there’s want and caution
caught in you and a new
vocabulary of pouting to be learnt.
Spirit Human
Let’s do it like they do on the discovery
channel the prowess of the lion, the deer’s
intuition tells us animals don’t like to be shoes
because animals love to be shoes
gummy sweets, similes, like people
they long to be airlifted from being themselves
amongst candles, cheap incense, the hum
of a fridge and the chatter of next door’s
animals, even when dog-tired, will pay
attention and skill are needed in modelling
themselves after retail assistants and chefs
after penniless artists and presidents, after
all animals need to discover themselves
The Scrotum Frog
The day is unendangeredly bright
when you kiss your lover in the hope
he’ll turn into a frog. All the windows
are open and it’s still
too hot in the house.
The lake? you ask your loose-skinned one,
pink-grey as that old part of himself.
Somewhere you’ve read, like many others,
that the best love is the unattainable kind:
a dreamy stranger with a wordless mouth
sits among the reeds and crisp packets.
For weeks, you meet by the shoreline
when it’s cool, when the sun is a come-to-bed eye.
Then he’s gone. One and then another
speedboat snore across the dirty water.
You close the windows, draw the curtains.
You fall asleep and dream of him
with his brothers in the lake like men
in a changing room; sweaty, doling out nicknames –
Sac Magique, Sir Chicken Skin.
I Keep You
at a difference:
a thought I won’t allow myself
to think for thinking
it’s a matter of time
till you, a cargo
ship of foreign goods,
cross my kitchen table
like a butter dish.
Nectaries