Clavicular
I turn a long bone in the palm of my hand
I think I have unearthed your clavicle:
Turning over the earth with the toe of my boot
I see I have turned up your collar
Bone white and long gone
Ago to be done to this turn in the clay
When this your only scion was sect
And clave from its brown and knotty
Shoulders and knees the lintel key
Where your heart had hung
Its clever chords that tuned me
And turned me and hearthed me to home.
Laughed and clasped you in a shower one summer
For drops run down your neck to collect
In the tendril young bones of your collar;
Married my wildest to your gentler stock,
A key-keeper turn-key spiral shell
Pressing the ribs on both sides –
Absent since climbing clamber claver claw
Choppered the cleaving wood.
Strange it should come to turn on earth again
To tell you your clavicle’s collecting the rain.
(Spring 2012)
Grin
A warped sun of gold drips upon my head.
I hear the sleeper lying next to me
Flash teeth from out the darkness of our bed:
Bright array revealing her mortality.
Stranger, full of holes seen as soon we met,
Speaking tongues; she’s base and tangled – yet
Earth, earth presiding, groaning in her sleep,
Grinding precious metals in the bony deep.
That ivory darkens and breaks neither
Startles nor pains her to wake – she knows,
She’s glad that daily bread to daily shit
Is turned, will say it’s this that feeds the rose.
But I still dream the sleeping crime I may commit
And wake to find my mortality sunk in the skull of another.
(Nov 2012 – Nov 2013)
Chastity
Came to die every day a new flower
Of carnality on her breast. She said
“So this is the cost, to hold for an hour
A man a dog a child a woman’s head
Until my arms too wisely hold them dead.
I’m a grave each morning! On the unmarked stone
Of my belly may be read
That no one has tended, I lie here alone.”
The blossoms went on falling, and falling
They are still. Covered in drifts of appalling
Flesh she suffers her dreams – a vengeant nature’s
Sentence: for her resistance,
To hear and desire the footsteps of strangers
Passing unseen at a distance.
(August – November 2013)
Ecstasis
For many years I did not even know
It was a small bird I had that left me
Time to time – on what lightened ways to go
I cannot say. Impossible to see
Its taking flight – but sitting once outside
My house I saw at last what I had lost
Pecking for crumbs unseen in the dust
And tried to call it back; it only eyed
Me indifferently. At times I’ve trailed
This severed wing through absences so long
I doubted if I had ever held
A bird at all. I had, but I was wrong
To think it tame. Not one feather out of place,
When it comes it’s without warning:
Sudden fall from above as unlooked-for as grace.
No relief so great as its talons gripping
My finger a moment before it hops
Back into my chest. And what joy that wings
So small can lift my weight! Inscrutable, it sings
As it will never cease. But nothing stops
Its flying off again – it slips through
Gaps I cannot close between my ribs and shows
No apprehension that if one day it goes
Too long there will be no cage to come back to.
(November 2013)
Laura Jane Gallagher is an aspiring novelist living in London and currently working full-time on a project to invert space and time so as to have more of the latter in which to write. If this is successful, her first novel, set in Uganda, will be finished nearby.