Poems by Sue Hubbard
Mary
You called me wicked,
claimed I had lain lewdly
in your absence with other,
younger men when you saw
my belly swollen, ready
to split open like a ripe fig,
did not know how I had knelt
quaking with fear, my hair
like new pressed oil spilt
from a pitcher falling
across my bowed shoulders
onto the dung floor, as the light
was upon me, all milky and sour
as dandelion sap and how
that breath of sulphur had filled
my mouth, a hot metal tongue
making me gag, until my whole
body shuddered as if a bolt
had struck the red ground
up through the roots
of a dark yew splitting it in two.
Now my nipples are brown as prunes,
my womb rises like warm dough
as you ask forgiveness, laying
your white head on my stretched
skin, my damp sex, listening
for the heartbeat of God.
Stereoptica
They did not know, inhabiting their real skins, unconscious
of the moment's true currency they would be frozen as history:
the bell-boy with the band-box has set slightly askew posing
by Landseer's lion in Trafalgar Square or the woman hurrying
along the cobbled strand by Tower Bridge under a silk parasol,
the heliotropic tilt of her head leaning in towards her
two daughters, hair in braids under boaters of straw.
How could these tea gatherers, young girls bent
like saplings under the overseer's brutal gaze beneath
the weight of panniers in the blue hills near Galle in old Ceylon,
or the grizzled traders - twigs of mahogany in white dhotis -
in the dirt street below the Madura Pagoda in 1893,
know that a palm-slip of silver, the morning's weighing
of saffron or rice would be preserved like those
albino babies in filmy jars in dark museum shelves labelled
in Indian ink? Or that from these erased histories,
I could, through this lensed masque, like Lazarus, make them rise
from their matt solitude - not themselves but something
of themselves - freed momentarily from bleached effacement,
like damp-winged moths ascending ephemeral in evening air.
Dolls
Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood
Skin waxy as white candles. Beneath
velvet bonnets they have ringlets
of real hair, painted eyes that stare
and stare in periwinkle blue.
Their cherry lips are chipped,
cracks craze their bisque faces.
Ruched and frilled they sit on glass
shelves starched and prinked in stained
lawn pinafores endlessly pouring tea.
But they will not tell. Will hold fast
their secrets beneath percale and pink
foulard, dumb witnesses to those cold
nursery fears. Downstairs: lights, oranges,
a Viennese waltz… in her window-seat
the beaded sweat of glass.
Lulled by laudanum she hugs the limp
cloth-body to petticoats and shift, in cambric
shadows reaches for a cool china hand.
Cooking Fish
Quick as a flash -
under the ventricle fins -
a steel blade piercing wet flesh
mottled as muddied pebbles,
he scrapes out a dark trail
of guts, a mauve heart
like hidden secrets beneath
a twist of clear water
from the cold tap.
Pink flesh pale as the hidden
skin of his groin. Row
of tiny dragon teeth, milk-
white eye, a filmy moon
in the beak of a head, body
curved to the hump of the bridge
where a Chinaman hurries home
among willows of blue -
smell of dark reeds and ponds.
A meal a deux.
She poaches it slowly,
stuffs along the spine
with fine feathers of dill,
black pellets of peppercorn,
mushrooms, slivers of garlic sliced
thin as the aorta of her heart
that hisses and hisses
he loves, he loves me not.
Ghost Station
Rosslyn
Wild garlic and rain in the woods and between invisible tracks
that lead from here to there I sense them glide
through their lost narratives down platforms of damp ferns.
Think of a bent hair-pin lodged for years under a wooden carriage seat
fallen from a stook of auburn hair, a single collar-stud trapped beneath
the floor that once fastened small intimacies behind a film of beaded glass,
or an old man's knotted hand, knuckles raw in the niche of his lap
carrying home a gift of speckled eggs. Imagine the pallor of rain:
ashen, pewter, stained watery-sheen along a backbone of glinting steel,
and shadows of coal-dust, steam and sparks on iron where green tongues
of larkspur grow. Turn your head and glimpse between verticals of larch
and beech blotched autobiographies like smudged footprints in wet grass.
Listen, where the wind throws back its dialogue of despair behind
the raindrops, acknowledging lives drained away, like a plume
of smoke recalled along invisible tracks by a damp bird's solitary song.