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  Different Water

  When a girl becomes a mother there is no fanfare.

  No government re-elections, no erupting volcanoes.

  The baby mops up the praise. But quietly

  there are earthquakes, realigning planets.

  When you ask to hold her newborn you are

  addressing someone who just became a tiger,

  so be careful. When she soothes the child that has

  shrieked for three hours she is the Matador,

  sunlit with relief. Sometimes, at around 2 am,

  she is the only woman ever to have given birth.

  At the supermarket she is a calm strong oak

  dragging a thrashing child past the strawberries.

  At the school gates she’s autumn weeping leaves

  of every hue for the loss of summer. Often

  she spies the girl she once was and thinks, wimp.

  Like grass trees after fire, like crops in new weather,

  like a river clasping different water, there is

  no fanfare when a girl becomes a mother.

  Each Thing Observed Closer

  Now I weigh everything

  on unseen scales of a kindness hewn

  from new stone – my impulse to trap

  spiders in a glass has flown,

  it is as though the world has become a hall

  of mirrors, throwing me endless faces

  of my children. And so the slugs

  in my kitchen are gentle, spared the salt.

  So the spiders that echo my son’s curiosity

  are carried on envelopes, placed reverently

  on the porch. Even weeds are torn

  with respect. I think of tribesmen who kill,

  then pray, thanking the still-fresh beast

  as they eat. Each day the pieces lace

  more cleanly together,

  the edges of my life-

  questions curved, all life re-quickened

  by maternal meekness.

  A dandelion clock wheeling its silver tufts.

  Three blue bobbing V’s in the brown

  cup of a nest

  high in the roof.

  Two white boats in the bay – hands

  asking and asking of the horizon.

  Nights!

  Such tame dawdling hedgehogs

  before my children came, I had

  twenty-eight years of domestic, nurse-ish nights,

  harmless as cheddar

  or new balls of wool.

  Warm-apple-pie nights.

  Such regularity! Night factories,

  clock in, clock out,

  eights hours’ unbroken sleep

  (ten at weekends), nights that were reliable

  as gravity, waiting teacherly at the end of each day,

  no glitz or zing to them,

  they were the Hush Puppies of earth’s orbit,

  sensible as knee support.

  My nights were made of Egyptian cotton,

  now they are rabid marsupials,

  lemur-eyed, full of jangle.

  These nights since my children came –

  gallery of genres,

  occasionally Picasso,

  occasionally Pollock.

  Nights of small elbows

  in the face, nights upside down, nights

  assailed by colic and cold.

  Tchaikovsky nights! Percussion of

  waterproof sheets, nursery rhymes on repeat,

  howling, howling.

  Nights of find-the-dummy

  and change-the-nappy, nights

  I have to climb out of,

  the moon a gaoler.

  My nights are the novels Coehlo dreams about,

  flamboyant as peacocks,

  nights that are gardens

  of fantastic ideas, forgotten

  at dawn. Pregnant at midnight,

  mothered by morning –

  nights that are, frankly,

  bananas,

  nights at A&E,

  nights that make me grateful

  for day (O carpe diem!)

  Sometimes they are blessed,

  saintly relics, uneventful as porridge,

  filling sleep’s beggar-cup.

  Each morning a different woman

  in the mirror, reshaped

  in all the ways

  only night knows.

  The Second Way to Skin a Cat

  The forgetfulness began like any avalanche.

  That first thick crack, whip-sound of riddance –

  appointments I was glad to shed, memos

  I’d been reluctant to fulfill. It was only when

  my loves became cumbersome to summon

  that the cold drip of time

  seemed something more. Like my name.

  I had to make it up. Hobbies. The order

  of each day. What sauce went with lamb,

  what a bus was for. The space between one

  moment to the next yawned and filled

  with floodwater of arguing genes.

  I floundered, hooking at whatever floated.

  Dredged up some phrases

  that sat neatly in my mouth. Dead as a

  doornail. More than one way to skin...

  what was it?

  Memory, denuded. The old personality

  dropped like a white skirt of snow

  from the mountain’s hips. Sarcophagus

  weaved from the thinning dew.

  Motherhood Diptych

  Like a blade pressed to the artery

  before exams are sat, reversed

  rainfall of mortar boards, before

  that first witness of a replica corpse

  with convincing pews of veins,

  before the reverencing encounter

  with the real thing, an actual cadaver,

  before the tutor blithely cut a giant horseshoe

  into the sternum without a shock of blood,

  peeled it back like a sticky carpet

  revealing the organs in neat arrangement –

  the blue canoes where once he breathed,

  this man, the unheartlike heart, still purple,

  its pale pipework flushed of every wish,

  then the odd aubergine liver, failed,

  the gut’s many long roads –

  like a surgeon required to heal the ruptured

  but still beating and quite naked heart

  without anything before, not exams, calm

  tutor uncurtaining the chest,

  before the triumphant rainfall –

  think of her forehead strung with clear pearls

  under five theatre suns,

  white moon of clock dragging doubt,

  lonely chirrup of the ECG,

  yet another blind cut she is forced to make –

  here? how deep? scalpel or saw?

  so too this daily shaping and saving four lives

  with just my own

  and a hundred wilted plants

  to draw upon

  Symphysis Pubis Dysfunction

  I explain it to the doctor, regurgitating Google:

  one in 5 pregnant women affected; debilitating; caused

  by hormones and hypermobility. She’s never heard of it,

  asks how it feels, what it prevents

  me from doing. I go back to a moment branded in memory –

  first pregnancy,

  17 weeks, the sensation of a hot poker

  laid horizontal against my bikini line. I had stopped

  and yanked my waistband forward to check for the sure strip

  of burning flesh. Nothing, but by

  28 weeks

  I had to shuffle, subservient to the clamp

  around my groin, my legs rusted scissors,

  each morning a caesura in the doorframe,

  impossibility of stairs.

  At 35 weeks each breath chained

  to the pelvis, anchor

  of spine and thought, black canalr />
  between the white rocks of my pubic bones

  flooded with flame

  when I turned over, stood up, sat down, sneezed –

  now, 15 months after giving birth

  there’s a broken basket at the top of my legs,

  or rather this white-winged nest, stem of sacrum,

  root of coccyx and ischial tusks, the iliac

  crest fluted beautifully like the petal of some rare lily –

  just without the requisite cartilage

  fusing the two halves of me together.

  The Only Dad at Playgroup

  Actually, I’m at an eighteenth-century fair

  amongst the bearded ladies

  and conjoined twins, regarding this mild-

  mannered man refraining from

  removing his blue anorak, accepting

  tea politely and not hesitating

  to whisk up his son to sniff

  his bum, visibly doing his best

  to ignore the sideward glances

  and smoke of curiosity that has filled the room.

  I see the man and his boy behind bars,

  met with the stares of frocked gentry

  and prodded a bit to see if he’ll

  reveal the reason why on earth he’s here,

  and if, like a medium, he might spill

  some existential truths about modern parenting.

  Eventually, he cracks – I’m a house husband –

  and is instantly wrapped in cloud,

  ascended into heaven, and crowned

  with stars. Later, a male friend

  scoffs and yanks the man down,

  casts him back into his cage, reveals

  him to an astonished and knowing crowd

  as a wife-battered unemployable eunuch.

  Only in the twenty-first century

  could he possibly be both. Ladies and gentlemen,

  it’s The Incredible Only Dad at Playgroup!

  Working Mother

  Sometimes I’d hold her long after

  she’d fallen back to sleep, until her soft

  blonde head had imprinted my arm,

  harvest moon on my chest from her cheek.

  Some days I’d cry all the way to work

  and all the way home, I was not ready

  to leave the softness of her. My life before

  peeled keenly from me, old weather.

  I had emails in my head, shopping lists

  on my hands, a corset of memos.

  Justified myself to strangers.

  Argued over Child Tax Credit

  and nursery policies and childcare hours,

  whether daycare created criminals

  and divorce. Comfort ate. Sometimes I see

  them, those women still on the rack.

  I see the space they feel between them

  and their child, the one that feels too young,

  too helpless to be left, too soon.

  I imagine them sitting in that chair at some

  dark hour, wondering if a part of their love

  can glove their son or daughter like armour.

  If their love will stay when they cannot.

  Poem Made From Bits of Newspaper Headlines

  after Cornelia Parker

  Childhood obesity to blame on working mothers.

  Working mothers link to school failure. Welfare

  reforms could force stay-at-home mothers to work.

  Working mothers’ children unfit.Working mothers

  may cause breakups. Kids of working moms are more

  likely to get hurt. Working mothers ‘less likely to cook

  healthy family recipes.’ Companies ‘not planning to hire

  working mums.’ Kids pay when mother’s away.

  Who’d be a working mum in the UK?

  Silence for Schumann

  Clara Schumann, wife of the composer Robert,

  gave up her successful and thriving career as a concert

  pianist to support her husband and their children.

  My husband’s notes

  hang like wet socks

  on the line and shall not

  dry in any other wind

  but quiet,

  thus my own hands

  will tangle only

  in the raw minors

  of child’s play,

  clang the silver’s

  discordances

  and the sweet shy chimes

  of china bowls at supper.

  Sometimes I finger the kitchen top,

  arpeggio linen pleats

  for a piano.

  What clamorous lusts sforzando

  the silence.

  Staying at Home

  Do not imagine us three curled up in tame domesticities

  of picture books and occasional playgroups,

  neither believe in painting-time

  and story-time as ways of killing the hours.

  Motherhood involves the vagaries of industry.

  Imagine the home as a realm of immaterial business,

  commerce of nurture. Fathom the architecture of confidence

  and patience. Here is the laundry, the stained and pocked.

  Here are the hills of plastic cups, horizon of battered toys.

  Watch. Soon armies will come and all the palaces

  we built in the minds of our children

  will shine their bright and fervent lights.

  Hare

  I kept you in bed with me so many nights,

  certain I could hold the life into you,

  certain that the life in you wanted to leap out, hare-like,

  go bobbing off into some night-field.

  For want of more eyes, more arms

  I strapped you to me while I did the dishes, cooked, typed,

  your little legs frogging

  against the deflating dune of your first home.

  Nested you in a car seat while I showered, dressed,

  and when you breastfed for hours and hours

  I learned how to manoeuvre the cup and book around you.

  Time and friends and attitudes, too.

  We moved breakables a height, no glass tables.

  Fitted locks to the kitchen cupboards, door jammers,

  argued about screws and pills someone left within reach.

  I’ll not tell you how my breath left me, how my heart stopped

  at your stillness in the cot, and who I became

  when at last you moved. There is no telling

  what skins of me have dropped and shed in the fears

  I’ve entered. The day beyond

  these blankets, beyond our door

  is known to me now, fragile as moth-scurf,

  its long ears twitching, alert,

  white tail winking across the night-field.

  Thetis

  Not a rite-of-passage rash-and-fever, not a week eating ice cream

  on the sofa,

  this was not chickenpox but a biblical plague

  the month before he turned two, his skinny frame covered entire

  with penny-sized bulbs sagging, fat with neon green pus,

  as though he had been mummified in bubble wrap, victim

  of the world’s bees,

  skin around the pustules souffléd with red welts, coat of

  monstrous nipples.

  I was furious, convinced the pox was an intelligence,

  as if it had divined by vengeful will

  not only to smother his skin in sores but the insides, too –

  I could not bear to hear him scream

  each time he passed the drops of water we managed to smuggle by

  the flames in his throat.

  In the hospital I cradled him

  to my eight-month-ripened body, the night and his fever terrifying,

  a stand-off with wolves on a treeless plain.

  I had believed his birth had finally split the

  world wide open

  to show me the precis
e flesh and wit of horror, formed a shell

  around me that makes child’s play of pain –

  but I had forgotten

  that a species of pain rises up in giving birth that is lord above

  all others,

  persuades dominion of my heart, rules penitence, makes me kneel.

  Lord of inflicting my son, lord of hurting him

  even in his tender places, lord of stealing his breath,

  I who thought I had conquered all by giving life

  submit

  submit

  submit

  Speech Therapy Candidate

  Bring me your coastlines of sound,

  the ancient coves wherein song

  becomes word. Son, I read you like a text

  written on my skin

  and yet your silence insinuates

  where for you the tide charges like white horses

  where the small conch snail is a glyph of delight

  Bring me perforating symphonies, sinewed

  with your truths

  bring me your hooked consonants, an apostasy

  of vowels

  bring me numbers echoed out of order

  bring me babble like a bag of spare parts

  we will assemble the engine of speech

  Let the whole foal-voice come stumbling up

  the paddock knock-kneed in the shushed

  psalm of starlight

  Daughtering

  I should not fault you for adorning

  my paperwork –

  scene of daisies, fairies and a moon with eyes

  brightening a contract,

  edits to a novel palimpsested by purple hearts,

  phonetic verses about your friends, a six-year-old codex

  of the world as you see it –

  nor should I correct you when you scold

  your younger siblings in my telling-off voice,

  when you pinch my clothes and shoes, echo my laugh,

  walk with my sway –

  my first-born child, as I write

  the contours of motherhood on the pages of your days

  so you print upon the world with borrowed ink.

  How deftly you tell my many weathers, human barometer.

  How my mother’s words fall out of my mouth

  and then from yours, the females of our lineage

  matroyshka bells, love’s echo chamber.

  Melody, this one life sways on the stem

  of your glitter pen. Each of my words, each act

  a signature of so many ripples.

  The Possessed

  When I was eight I saw the ghost of my mother.

  She was alive, but she was a ghost