My History Of Curry

First time. Vesta in a box,
that only Daddy ate.
Two bags, rice and sauce,
rolling in boiling water.
(But rice is for pudding!)
We watched, sniffing.
Once, in the dark kitchen,
I licked his cold plate.

First love, first date,
Cinema, chocolates,
dinner in the evening
at the new Indian place.
He chose from the mysteries
on the menu, nothing hot.
Then sex, with spices still
haunting the mouth.

New bride, new recipe book,
Shelves full of curry powders,
Sultanas, apple, boiled eggs,
A misfire of flavours.
Two newly married couples,
entertaining in convivial ignorance.
courtesy of Schwartz, Pataks,
and Sharwood,

Today, my curry contains
lemon grass and root ginger,
fresh chillies and minted raita.
Puffed up, charred fresh naans,
lean back to back, cooling.
Though the house is aromatic,
in a moment of doubt, I recall
the shock of Daddy’s cold Vesta.

Best Medicine

A phone call,
‘Come and get me…..’

My first child,
turning to man.
Insect jacket,
leather plated,
worn with worn denim,
patched like acne.
Chains add bravado
to his precarious self.

Bumfluff mouth
yawning,
Eyes to the kitchen,
‘Could do with a nibble.’

Those mother questions;
When did you last
Eat,
Wash,
Sleep?
Asked silently
in case he fled.

Sometimes,
the best expression of love
is two bacon rolls at midnight,
and no comment.

Walking with Bosch

Foot and Mouth,Spring 2001
after a calming interval

I

Usually, I walk to my bus
up the gentle curve of the hill
my back to the sea,
forever turning round to
examine its glittering advances.
In the browsed fields
some inexact number of
sheep and cows graze.
Jackdaws, lapwings and gulls
toss themselves into the air,
quarrelling.
Nearly every day
there will be a weasel undulating
frantically across my path,
or an electric vole in spasm,
and always, buzzards mewing
across an open sky

Across the water, Cumbria farms lie
under a playful, streaking mist,
Skiddaw, head up, basks in its own
precipitate sunlight.
At Great Orton, the windmills bat
silver light back at the sun.
From this rose-tinted distance
landscape is both fresh forged
and ancient.

II

One Tuesday, things are different.
The fields with their ragwort dregs
have emptied.
There are mud tracks at the entrance
and notices flutter on the gates
like gulls pinned by the wing.
By the gate-post a sawn-off plastic can
offers a disinfectant ritual
for a new sacrament.
On the hill the smoke starts,
cooking beef turns to burning beef,
choking hair and bone smoke,
reeking, reeking.
The sheep and their pipe-cleaner lambs
have disappeared.
I walk with Bosch,
with pestilence and burning.
The windmills across the water,
Mark a sacrificial burial place,
and many fields fly a plume
of orange hearted smoke.
The plague markers are on the gates,
red capitals, keep out.
On my walk I meet the farmer.
He shakes his head, shrugs,
folds his arms, scratches his head.
‘Oh well,’ he says, disintegrating.

III

Once again, I walk to the bus
up the gentle curve of the hill.
This mild winter has healed the fields
with flushes of new grass
and lemon gorse flowers.
Today, there were thirty four sheep
and eighteen cows in the fields,
wandering amongst rabbits that
had appropriated the empty fields.
They have no folk-lore, no historian.
They do not know that the woman
who paused to count the sheep
is not in search of sleep but
suffers a persistent smell in the memory.

Strange Flesh

I spied a grey log
beached
on a grey pebble shore.

Coming near,
a glint of bone showed
it was not a log.
A glint of bone showing
through a scoop in flesh,
made crosses, a spine.

A jaw with broken lines
of thin teeth,
gums stabbed away
by complaining gulls,
no fins, no tail, no eyes,
no name.

A sea creature wrecked
by a violent tide,
a dry rotting banquet on
hot stones.
Because it is nameless,
small boy like, I take a stick
to punish its leather carcase.

Log Pattern Quilt. C 1900.

This tells my life, this quilt,
this sequence of incident in
stitches as numerous as the tears
shed for each lack, each loss.
The colours tell a true tale,
brief greens of spring and summer growth,
the splash of the blazing blue stream
gives way to longer dry harvest gold
and the dull grey slabs of winter.

In the middle is the non-colour
where Jamie died, I stitching
all through the dull days of waiting.
Those red circles are not flowers
but record the spray of his red breath.
Three summers old when we buried him
beside his sister, not yet one year.
My forefinger is dented with the
blunt press of the needle,
felt, not seen, in the faint autumn light
as the quilt grows across my knee
and the pile of infant clothes
grows smaller by my feet.

Churching Hat. 1894. Parton.

Mother opened the cardboard box
and I beheld my churching hat.

Such soft bewitching browns, the brown of fur,
some creature’s coat wrapped round the rim
to warm my Sunday neck in Parton Church.
The stroking brown of velvet, warm on the hand,
pocked with spotted leaves and skin tones,
rosied into a flower above my forehead.
a swirl of weightless brown feather on top.
My ignorant open-eyed question ;
‘Are ostriches brown, Mother ? And do tell me,
 where, near to Parton, are there ostriches ?’

With trembling hands I set the V at the nape
over my knotted hair; I pull the speckled bronze
net over my face.
Mother looked at me through the gauze,
she sighed.
‘You’re all grown up now,’ she said,
so sadly.