Tag Archives: Story

Gloves

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Robert Browning breathed an hour in our house today.
I was reading his poems loudly when I heard his spirit say,
‘Close down your fusty office. There is naught in here to keep
an adult’s full attention. Come outside, where there are sheep,
where magpies mime and mock us, where fat rabbits hide in dunes
and foxes follow secret trails. Come outside and hear the tunes
the lorry wheels go chirping as they stress the cobblestones.’

‘Live your LOVE!’ he added. ‘When I had life, my hobbled bones
were happiest those times I dared. When I was thirty-four,
my dearest (six years senior) made a pact with me: we swore
to live the years we’d somehow got, no matter long or short.
I bid you, lad, to do the same. It will na’ help to snort
and say that you’re too busy, too august. That’s juvenile.’

‘Thanks for reading,’ he appended. I was silent for a while
then I kicked the office door shut, slammed it hard and something broke.
In the hall I sought my rainwear. I was surprised to find a cloak
on the jacket’s rightful peg, I took it down, and wrapped myself
in old, soft-coloured plaids. I also freed the cloakroom shelf
of leather gloves I didn’t recognise. Had they been left for me?

My lethargy recalled me: ‘Don’t exert yourself and be
inveigled into going out. Stay sitting on your pride.
You expect work’s enough to see you out. Your oh-so-precious hide,
for years unhindered in its old and hibernating habit,
objects to trips to seek the fox, to look in on the rabbit.
You rattle sabres in imagined wars, and think you look for stars.’

‘Leave unknown loves to Cupid. Leave walkabouts to Mars.
Life’s not been kind to you, this week, nor even this whole year.
You fantasise heroic deeds? Your ‘actions’ don’t come near!
Ebenezer’s role is one that fits you better than does this antique cape
that you imagine gives you style. In fact its woollens drape
you in the guise of a forlorn don. Sit. Rest your bones awhile.’

This nagging doubter, an inner self, the one that acts so mild,
almost brought me down. I would have sat, but right then my cat
bristled down the hall and through the door. With my cloak but with no hat
I hastened after her. My steps guided (I had the notion)
by something today more purposeful than lazy Brownian motion,
I almost cantered, approaching the sea. My cat stood already there,
conversing, I’d swear, with a darkling lady whose abundant hair
blew away all doubts I’d ever had. I felt elated in its breeze
when I heard her friendly call: we both spoke Portuguese.

My lady (yes, she is now that) and I both like the cloak.
On darkling evenings, in what is now our home, I hang it up and stoke
the fire and think my reading caused that phantom ‘Live Your Love.’
I see ‘our’ Maine cat smile at me from her perch on Robert’s gloves.

Hitchhiking Nigel Gets Florida Holiday Ride from Psycho Patti

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Nigel, thinking full frontal means lobotomy
and wondering should the church oppose free sects,
walks along the highway from Ochopee.
He looks for where the tarred state road connects

to take him down to the Everglades. He sees a wind tee
and guesses where the airport intersects
the flat horizon is where he wants to be.
A Dodge Viper, kicking gravel, disconnects

him from his thoughts, and he looks in to see
a short-shorted, tank-topped driver who erects
her middle finger at him. ‘You mean me?’
he asks. ‘See any other derelicts?’

Psycho Patti pouts. ‘Do you want a ride? It’s hot?’
Her décolletage makes hot, tired Nigel mute.
He jumps into her car before he’s got
a glimpse of the Glock she points to show the route

to the Everglades. She offers him some pot
and things go well until he says, ‘You’re cute.’
Patti’s eyes pop red. She brakes, makes Nigel squat
at gunpoint and duck waddle to the boot

of the Viper and get in. She bangs it shut,
She’s sweating, knows this time she can’t be late!
She races fate to reach her swamp-edge hut.
She wonders how long alligators wait.

Menelaus

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I should have lied when Helen took my hand
and asked me quietly did I want to see
her room. She said her parents were away
and I said yes and followed up the stairs
and down the too-wide corridor to where
we stopped at nothing but an open door.

We stopped there too, and kissed, and time ran hot
and hurled us through the door and through the room
to stand beside the window and look out.

Look out, she said. This is my father’s realm.
It runs down to the river and beyond
those tumbling waters up that harrowed hill.
My father received this as a gift. To work.
He’s worked it up, and when he starts to tire
he’ll pass it on to me and to my man.

Are you that man? she asked. I should have lied.
Instead, I said I was and asked if this
window where we stood was of her room.

No, she said, here’s where my parents sleep.
We walked back through it then, climbed further stairs
and trailed our hands along a banister
she said the servants waxed three times a year.

We reached a landing. I reached in her dress
and she resisted after a short while
and we went further than we’d gone before
but stopped again. I tried to hide my pain
and made a joke, I don’t remember what.

Dó you, Helen asked, have rooms like this
where you live? Nó, I did not lie, we don’t.

She let me enter, shoeless. I was scared.
Scared I’d sneeze or something and she’d laugh.

Je t’adore, she said. I locked it too.
We acted like we did not hear the click.

My father’s rich, she said, are you so tired?
Come over here, let’s play like we’re asleep.

I played I had control. I tried to count
my heartbeats and not think about her breasts.

A thousand miles downstairs a ringing bell
persisted ringing every time we moved
and peacock sentries on the upper lawn
cried warnings I alone was cursed to hear.

And Helen took my hand. I almost died.
The sun came up three times in half an hour
and I learned Heaven’s not that far away.

A small cloud passed her window and returned
then fell like feathers, landed on the strip
that separates their stables from the pool.

Her father, back from Paris, looked our way
and disappeared. I heard him in the hall
and on the lower stairs and then on hers.

I hurled my clothes and shoes and then myself
out Helen’s window. On the balcony
I met her mother, massive and composed.

Son, she called me. I put on my clothes.

I work here now, for Helen, on her farm.
I have my own rooms. I don’t see her much.

The few times we pass each other I look and think
she once was pretty, on that fateful day
that she asked me up and I forgot to lie.

Coronation

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What can the women say about the pails
of beer the sexton’s ordered me to place
at intervals around the cemetery?
As little, I imagine, as they said
about the naked lodger at the parson’s.
They as a rule are not that much for words.
They keep their counsel, keep their clothes on till
Dionysus commands nocturnal presence
and suddenly at the bottom of the hill
there’s only sexton, pastor, churchyard, me.

Their music, scarcely audible down here
to humans, makes the dogs crawl under beds
and beer that had gone flat among the headstones
gains body and a modicum of froth.
What tourists think are fairy lights ignite
the ridges, and another young man’s missing.
Returning women rinse their faces clear
and walk unseeing past us to their beds
and dogs come out and stretch and sniff the breeze.
The one I throw a stick for bites the sexton.

The sexton tells me I can have the pails,
says there was no naked lodger. I go home
and smell the day-old beer, avoid the bed.
Dionysus has weathered leaner times.
A garland and a heavy, pointed stick
and pieces of a cat lie on the hearth.
I can’t abide the smell of fires gone out.
I hear the parson outside, softly crying
and saying were the candles here on time
there would be no women sleeping in today.

The sexton’s answer’s mumbled and I miss
what held delivery up; a washed-out road
was blamed the last time. We don’t have police.
One woman does the laundry. One pours tea.
The one who never would return my gaze
stares at me till I blink. She takes my hand
and leads me to the parsonage where mead
and meat and biscuits and a ruby wine
are given to me, and a splendid room.
She asks for and I give her all my clothes.

Burnt Ochre Battalions

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Prologue

He thought, ‘I could get into this book I’m reading
or indulge in illicit love all afternoon.’
Not true. He lived alone with unread books
in a low-rent high-rise far out near the sea.
His penknife broke his pencil point. He wept
for as long as he’d read that heroes should. His cat
made sounds from purring care to impolite.

Together he and the cat walked to the door
and back again. And sat. They heard the wind.
They imagined hearing waves break shells and shale.

What they actually heard was moaning. ‘Let him loose,’
he told the cat. Who did. They watched the mouse,
too traumatised too long to hope, believe
it was free to go. It wasn’t. The cat struck
the last midnight for the mouse. So little blood.

The doorbell rang. The candle gutted. Wires
implanted in the carpet glowed and smoked.
‘It’s your turn,’ said the cat. He half agreed.
He threw open the door, winced and said, ‘Come in.’

The hooded creature, tall, without a face,
came in and brought the front door in behind him.
No outside left, no single place to run to.
‘I might as well,’ he thought out loud, and died.

‘Not so fast,’ the apparition said. ‘You have a task.
Your so-far clueless life acquires a mission.’
It handed him a wax-sealed parchment scroll.
He saw the cat was packing for a journey:
catnip, roach clips, goggles, tinned sardines,
and a silver whistle polished like a mirror.
‘You know more than I do, Cat,’ he said.

The apparition rubbed sand where the mouse had bled.
It said, ‘You both are criminals. That was foretold.
Get out, get out. Get out! I’m getting old.’

Outside was colder than he had remembered.
He carried the cat in both hands, like a muff.
The backpack the cat cradled weighed them down.
He walked the ridge, descended through the mist
to the shale that bore the onslaught of the sea
so easily that he said, ‘Eternity.’

‘Not ours,’ the cat said. ‘I think it’s time we read
our marching orders. Break the crimson seal.’

He tried and slipped. A rogue wave took the scroll.
The cat’s paw swiped and saved the red wax seal.

They shared the wax. As they chewed it, crimson fumes
spelled out instructions the cat read aloud:

‘Proceed to and surmount New Mountain Ridge.
Descend and commandeer a sturdy boat.
Sail to and anchor above St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Wait there for further orders. Don’t be late.’

That’s all?’ he asked the cat. ‘No how or when?’
The cat shook her head as he carried her up the beach.
New Mountain Ridge shown icily ahead
but the intervening forest was pitch dark.

Night fell further. The cat said, ‘We must camp.’
She, the cat, climbed a tall oak tree.
She let a length of coloured cord descend.
‘Tie it,’ she said, ‘to the ladder in our pack.’

He, the man, looked in the pack and found
among the catnip and the tinned sardines
and a snarl of things for which he had no name,
a ladder lashed from ropes and wooden rungs.

He tied it to the cord. The cat pulled it up
and made it fast. She called down, ‘Hurry, climb!’
With his rucksack swinging wide the man climbed slowly
until he saw red eyes below him. Then he sprinted.

From a moss-blurred branch they watched broad lowering creatures
congregating at the oak tree’s base, and sniffling
and exhaling, turning wet leaves into ash.

‘Don’t breathe a word,’ the cat joked. He said, ‘Hush.’
The no-neck creatures heard but could not gaze
upwards. He said, ‘Good you packed a ladder.’
‘And a small sword,’ said the cat. ‘But they are big.’

They watched the creatures circle. Then one stopped.
Its right side opened up. A man jumped out.

‘Those are vehicles,’ the cat said. ‘Like in old books.’
He shushed her, ‘Please be silent.’ Hours passed

in the seconds that the strange broad man below
looked up into the branches, seeing dark
and nothing else. He got back in his ‘truck’
—the word the cat kept whispering— and drove off.


The other trucks kept circling, burning leaves.