Tag: reading

Music To Cook To

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He had made her a CD. Initially, he thought about making a tape, providing a useful segue into discussions about old sound systems, a topic about which he knew a lot. He imagined how this vintage gesture might be charming, and give way to his being able to tell her things she might not already know, like how hi-fi is an actually an abbreviation of high fidelity, or how to tighten the belt inside a record player. He thought she might like that. She seemed to like learning.

He recalled, on more than one occasion, her having mentioned almost winning the pub quiz at her local, and she had seemed interested in telling him some of the answers she hadn’t known. Did you know that? She had asked. Sometimes he had, but he never let on.

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Architecture

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I know the shape of your face
so well, I could trace it onto

the arm of the sofa
the loose flour you left on the counter
the leg of my good jeans

I see the lines of you
and the directions they run

The frame that holds you –
an original

These contours cut
into my line of vision
when you aren’t around
to look at

At Work

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He knows what’s there
before it is

A seer

Not brushes but hands
and fingers

Each colour speaks –
a language he can read aloud

He moves shape together
and shifts something
as intangible as cloud

It is mercurial –
abstruse, like time,
both deliberate and imprecise
at once

When he is finished, he
stands back – peels himself
away from the canvas

Beer spills
from the neck of
his clutched bottle and
beads down his fingers,
warm by the time it
reaches his wrist

The tongue races to catch it,
tasting only its colour

On the fridge door,
a rogue fingerprint

of yellow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hit and Run

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I killed a fox, last week. I hadn’t meant to, only, once it had begun to drag its one rank hind leg from under the dogwood and across the lane, I was already going at around forty or fifty, and I just didn’t see it. Jack did, even from the back seat, and, just prior to the moment of impact, I heard a soft ‘fff’ noise come from his mouth, as the full horror of the impending collision was laid bare to him.

I’d picked him up from school only an hour or so after I’d checked out of the clinic. He had been reading one of the books we bought him for Christmas: the hardback annuals full of facts and trivia and records, of men with eyeballs that pop out of their skulls, and women with nails like beige coils of measuring tape. He’d been trying to show me something, in the car.

As we stopped to get out and check the now mutilated orange carcass spread across the road, it occurred to me that I might have missed my chance to swerve because I’d been looking at Jack in the mirror.

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