Verity La

He held her body lightly,

shirted as it was,

falling backwards as it was,

away from him.

He read in her arched back

the prow-lines of figureheads

on ships that crossed ancient archipelagos

and churned unknown oceans with oars,

fighting the rips.

He read in her thrown-back face

a thousand men spurned

by women who wished to go their own way

and divined in the turn of her arm

where the elbow bent,

where a soft down furred the tender light,

a strangeness.

In holding her

time had no dimension

beyond this falling-back of her voice

and the running steps of her rib cage,

beyond her shadow,

that seemed to possess his light

and the convex meniscus

of her resilient body.

He was alien to himself.

He was clotted and cauled.

He thought of his family:
how his mother had been locked into grief
about something she couldn’t name
and was passionately present
or strangely, remotely apart;
how his father had studiously cared
but had been poor in anger’s vocabulary;
how they had grown together
and separated—children and parents
now ghosting each other’s lives—
and how every moment was still present
in the places he’d lived,
so that going back was to return to a house
more drab than he’d remembered
and find the conversations again strewn
like tissue all over the furniture
(though the furniture had changed
he could see the old chairs
as if they still had pride of place).
Everything was as it was;
everything was just a moment ago
or about to happen
and although he’d been through it before
the dismay and surprise
suddenly contracted in his guts.
He pushed his way, six years old,
escaping quietly from a darkened room.

Beaking and clawing, they strew the ground
where the glimmer of oil
and hallucinations of petrol
leak towards a broken bicycle frame.
Benny threw it down, stripping the wheels,
boasting about buying a car and never needing again
to wobble-navigate across the wetland
where the haze of mosquitoes
was a plague from boyhood adventure stories
made red-faced real; where Jenny Mason
undid clips and shook thick hair
while stretching pale legs
with beauty’s confidence. The boys ogled her
but she chewed gum and flicked her head
in a gesture that said no. Here
Peter Rymans brought binoculars
to study birds, idealising
the colour and preening habits of the parrots
until one day he was found
half-naked in mud and weed
where the McCullers twins had pushed him.
Now those parrots seem like ghosts
haunting the swamp’s redolent memory,
including the day Jenny Mason
showed the story
she had written in looping letters
about the McCullers twins,
and they blushed and protested
as she watched them with an abstracted insouciance.

They delved in mud under pines needles,
rubbed together like animals,
cupped black pearls of river water
in nail-bitten hands,
drank wind like a tart cordial.

They tasted dirt every Saturday
in scrummaging football games,
forcing the ball forwards
through tackle and pass
towards the skewing posts.

They knew rags of shade,
acrid river flats,
scrags of weed. They picked dessicated birds
from coffins of water, collected maggots in buckets
for the fish they hauled

on twitching hand lines.
They studied moths
while wading in gas-lamped shallows
to entangle prawns
in light and netting.

Under night’s liquid constellations
they were barely shadows.