Claire Askew's Poetic Works

Bridesmaid

The function room is filled, like a fridge,
with the edible and the dead. Filled
with blank, fish-like stares
and limp handshakes - limp
like the green, week-old lace
of a lettuce - it is cold, white, too-bright.

Here am I, bleeding under my purple dress,
quivering female aubergine. I gulp
at words that drift my way,
but eat nothing; pad the cream
linen chair with napkins, secretive.
I switch the place cards and stuff
my handbag with cutlery, a domestic magpie.

Later, in the softly buzzing kitchen
(a grey-metal Marie Celeste, strip-lit)
I find a trifle, untouched; a beautiful,
shuddering pool. I plunge a hand in,
but do not find Excalibur.
Sugar-spattered, I check myself.
Guilt leaves the stolen cutlery at the door.

Up

Built in

I am still in here, despite the siege. Still here,
behind the maze of scaffolding and duckboards -
business almost as usual, though I daren't leave.

I watch the men through the drawn blind like TV,
as they paint over the rotting windowframes,
drink tea from flasks, sandblast, dig up pipes outside.

I keep the windows locked, just in case - paranoid,
I hide the jewellery box . On cold days, they slither
about on the slats, four floors up - a precarious ballet.

Some nights, I like to haul myself through
the wet window with a steaming cup, and sway
on the scaffold, scaring myself. I can choose -

to look out over the rainy slates, streetlights, the stretch
of council yards, or plunge. (Cobbles wink in the alley
below, its discarded mattress a festering fall-breaker.)

But it will be gone soon, this crows' nest, climbing-frame
for drunks, this cage. They will come in the morning,
wake me early, and pack it away, whistling.

Up

Where was Satan?

Where was Satan when I was six?
When I was doing child things -
scuffing my school-shoes
on the chalk of a hopscotch frame,
losing bouncy-balls forever
into the greedy throat of the gutter -
was he crouching close-by?
I don't remember Satan,
not even from the many Sunday sermons
I endured - squirming in a pew
under dust-in-sunlight window-beams -
though his name must have been mentioned.

No, Satan only came along at sixteen;
swaggering top-hatted into view -
the same grin, though never quite
the same skin. It was Satan
who cheered on the sidelines as I slapped
the local schoolteacher's daughter;
Satan who slipped me
the heady high-school cocktails of sunshine
and lust, and Satan who spirited away
the last bastion of my innocence
in a dusty garden summerhouse, taking notes
no doubt, to pass behind God's back.

Nowadays, Satan sits quietly
on my kitchen stools, or lurks behind
the basement door, chilling my neck.
He plants the stray thumb-tack
in the bathroom rug, tornadoes
through the plate-rack, inching crockery
over the edge, reminding me I'm human.
Satan hums the fragmented tunes
that set up home in my head, and refuse
to leave. It makes me glad that God stops by
sometimes, drops the occasional £5 note
in the pocket I'd forgotten about.

Up

Homecoming

We came in the cold afternoon, having driven
miles; late - the fire lit for us since lunchtime -
and lost beneath the shuddering tent of sky.
We are strangers in the land that birthed us,
long ago; though our speech coats quickly
with the curve of its tongue, its Nordic towns
familiar - Broxa. Hackness. Helmsley. Thirsk.

This country is stone walls, whitewash
and farms; the woodsmoke tang of chimneys
on plateaus above the sea. We stoke our fire
with inexpert hands; drink tea,
boil potatoes in salt and scour the plates.
Outside, the wind tests the windows, and upstairs
the old bed warms and warps, like a woman.

The room steams with stove-warmth.
Lightbulbs sputter, and we light candles, nervous.
We miss the yawn and gape of the city -
the morse-code of streetlight, the restless cabs.
Here, our feet flap like fish on the cool flags of the floor -
the wind peels back the slates, and sighs,
restless, in the dark grey skull of the hill.

Up

At the weekend

The schoolgirls are all reading 1984,
scaring themselves crazy.
They crowd on the gum-pocked steps of the amusement arcade,
alongside drunks with souls for sale on cardboard signs,
and chain-smoking Saturday boys.
And they shuffle a weary dance among discarded newsprint,
fag-ends and beer-bottle caps; wind-blown,
they settle like sand in window-ledges, back-door steps,
and mourn – all the world’s a fruit machine, and no change.

II

Across the street a park full of purple dusk waits,
under thrashing trees.
Up

Copyrights @ Claire Askew 2007-08

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Treasure

Tonight, as I drive along a purple lane
under the swallow-tail of the evening,
I will think of you.  I can picture you -
your delicate skirts like the petals of a poppy,
stalk legs, black, with heels clicking -
your quick-step, on cobbles in a lamp-lit square.

In the cavernous chapel of my mind's eye,
I will watch you emerge, moth-like
in soft reams of white - watch as you waltz
between pews, take the arm of a man
I recognise.  I will think of your smile

behind a newspaper counter, the sound of silver
against the rings on your hand - I will think
of your pearls, like a cold, smoothed spine
across your neck, of your thumbs, turned black
with newsprint.  I am reminded

of your best teaset, the tall, slim coffeepot;
the Welsh dresser, full of porcelain horses
and silver spoons.  In my mind I will pass
the lake you loved, glimpse its shimmer between trees,
then speed away.  I will wander through

the rooms of your house, still heavy
with flower-scent and the breath of your cigarette -
finding your knitting and handkerchiefs,
the secret bottle of whisky, your stockings
and letters in the coffin of a drawer.

I will fold you away in crackling tissue,
carefully, with the yellow photographs
of soldiers you knew.  I will fold up your image,
to carry with me - white, brittle and dry,
like a word, a whisper, always on my tongue.

Up

Christopher's wren

I shiver at the kitchen window, watching Christopher
as he works the garden. A dim figure
in the dusk, he ducks in and out
of the steamy greenhouse, flexing his hands
over the heaters. I remember the time
we slept in there - drunk, and locked out, lying
on concrete under glass and sky. His tall marijuana
hid among the tomato plants, and we were sleepless.

I blanch the window with breath. He throws a match
onto a mound of leaf-mould, and the lawn
stutters with sparks, then smoulders. Back-lit by this bonfire,
he muddies the path to the door, arrives - boots
and everything. He holds out a skinny hand, black -
dirt in the creases from hours of splitting soil,
sowing, stirring the earth like dough. Look.

It falls in my palm - a smooth, white skull, the size of
a matchbox, once a bird. Christopher blows silt from the sockets,
and it sings, an ocarina. He leaves, to tend to something
still alive - amyrillis, snapdragon - this man my mother
is right to disapprove of. The leaves on his fire sigh
into smoke, then nothing; dusk settles. I let the skull fall,
smash, soundless on the tile, and see him shudder.
As if he'd listened for it, heard. As if he felt.

Up

The last cigarette

All day he's been reminiscing about them,
one by one, as if they were lovers.
There was the first, of course - surreptitious,
cold in the concrete backyard with Brother.
He claims he never coughed - a natural,
exhaling his absent youth into the coal-dust air.

Then there was the pack his mother found,
hidden in a cassette-box on the floor of the car.
She yelled, but bought him a filigree case
for Christmas that year. Later, his parents
divorced downstairs, and he amassed ashtrays -
wore the tang of their scent with a strange pride.

I met him when his hair was long.
He'd been to Canada , loved and lost - learned
to cut with herb and cloves, a connoisseur.
For a while he kept a pipe like a pet,
liked one in the pub, when you still could -
thick smoke and a dark pint, seething, half-alive.

For years I tore myself in half, trying
to stop the endless draws, the late-night
filterless flings, save his lungs. And yet
at the same time, loving his shaking hand
as he lit the first - of the morning, of the pack -
loving his hunger; this devil's curse, his flaw.

Now we sit, silent and transfixed, like chess-players
in the presence of his swan-song cigarette.
He says he's picked it specially - a beauty,
the best of the pack - fizzing with the silver foil
of his favourite brand. This is the last, he says,
the very last - and the Zippo's delicious click.

I almost believe him.

Up

The locket

A package arrived for me today:
no bigger than an eggcup, or a Christmas bauble;
it rattled in my mailbox, among bills and bank statements.

In the palm of my hand, it felt light, slightly damp -
brown and crinkled, like a teabag; the leaves inside
arranged to tell some strange fortune.

Inside, when I peeled back the paper, breathless, was
your locket; the one I remember from childhood -
the talisman that hung at your throat, with an air of witchcraft

about it.  Back then, I remember trading whispers under quilts
in your spare room, lights out, with my sister;
about this locket - this strange, hollow heart, its properties.

She - always a little afraid of you - supposed it was laced
with poison; some crushed black leaf from the garden,
some powdered bone, some explosive.

To me, it was akin to a crucifix; a small piece of God, captive.
Inside it was a prayer, a spell to ward against death.
Inside it was a lock of coarse hair from Jesus' donkey.

And so, this morning - with eyes blurred by tears I thought
I'd long since exorcised with acts of closure -
I undid the tiny clasp, swung your heart open on its hinge.

And inside, so logically, there was almost nothing -
only a tiny, cut-out photo, in monochrome:
my sister and I, small and sunlit, sitting in your lap.

Up

Copyrights @ Claire Askew 2007-08

Back to Poets' Letter Magazine Archives Poetry Pearl