Four Poems by Claire Crowther

Ars Filia

My mother, dying, saw me sad and said, ‘I
apologise.’

When I won Palgrave’s Golden Treasury for ‘The Funniest
Poem of the School Year’ my mother told me, ‘That’s the way
to write. Do comedy. Write prose. Get rid of your lines. Don’t
cage things.’
Among the sombre poems Palgrave published, there was
one I loved, and loved almost more than I loved my mother. I
copied it in blunt pencil. With rubbings out. Inserted two cool
terms. Messed with the punctuation. A bit. But it was still all
Edward Thomas. Then I asked her: ‘Could this

bed of rows
convulsion of words
this fever of lines

ever be published?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘No hope.’ ‘Read it properly,’
I said. Pushed my scrap of paper against her screen of fingers.
‘No,’ she said. I brandished Palgrave. I laughed. She said, ‘Not
funny.’ I did not say sorry.

I never did say sorry, never, even when she
whispered her apology.

The wise nurses frowned from their panopticon.
The best enjambment turned
dies on the sheet and is remaindered.

Her hospital room was warm. She
lay under one sheet. Not asleep: ‘I
said poets are mad. I
was wrong to say that.’

Each grain of light, and lack of light
hustled by her bed as she
asked for forgiveness.
She muttered ‘Us…we’re
good.’ She asked, ‘Why do you
write like this… ?’

Still, I
could not say sorry.

So, the maternal body is not
unbreakable.
So she calls us to her
lines. They radiate and blind.

The Shy Chef

The messes contract on our oak table In the swill
of left red wine are flecks: fungus flies
They drown or climb up the bowl
of my glass, crawling
like weevils

Everything in this dining room grows small The expense
does not A thumbnail shell of date cake
a thumb-sized swirl of hummus
an eye-sized pancake
All food squeezed

by hand: a grape slice is a green breast bared on veloute
of stringless celery In such thin cream
our forks can’t find their kicks
Not on the speckled
porcelain

Nor in the half-poached egg topped by a red-ribbed newborn leaf
Not in fish slush mash Why does the chef
not show herself while we shrink
from aerobatic
bugs amok

above our three pieces of cheese – micro, mini, palm-fit –
tied down and draped with tired chives
They melt Then, fruitlessly,
flies close on my mouth
plain and sour

hunting a digestif…not fruitless…at last we find where
the shy chef hides: inside the dessert
among cacao fragments Tastes
I can’t identify
bite, nip, sting

Moot Hill

Flush of new flesh clung to my breasts and my back
Lentils and beans took too long to render and soften
Chutney sobbed glupglupglup glupglupglup glup on the Aga
Where? Where was that?

Bird in the kitchen could not cheepcheepcheep and it shivered
Dresses flew up the bare aisle to an altar and nestled
Children would lower the moon when they pointed up Look
When? When was that?

Subsequent houses loudpartied on subsequent nights
Dancer coughed into my palm as though my hand was his
Child in a rocking-horse cottage cried out and was silent
Who? Was she me?

Green fogged with snowfall lay like god’s body in bed
Kerb kept two ravens and harboured their car-tossed claws
Sodden grass trodden
Why? Was it marked? Whose fleet feet?

Lane meandered me home like a hedgehog or vole
Carriage house shrank in its stone to a fainting couch
Vicar escaped when a cat broke its spine on the rug
Which we were we?

Chairs in a circle wake-waited for silence to speak
Graveyard under the hill upraised each lump of earth
I thought at that time that beyond me was nothing but soil
Was that fear?

Winter trees stripped and gaped their briars ungardened
Roadside bumpbumped bumpbumpbumped along rut-runnelled field
Folly proposed to the A road ‘Alight This is Home’
Who asked what it was that I wanted? Who asked?

That body that body was mine when poor-nothing was mine
Did that stead that confine that civic that parish enclose me
I don’t say that girl who watched then was not me then I don’t
Ask why then

This is the now that I have to remember in
I show you those bodies of mine and I choose what was me
I ask what has gone
I ask you

Sward in Suburbia

Map, have a heart.
My home is in you.       Carving, Halfheart Green

The walnut tree huddles
into worn-out Halfheart Green.

Crash, small walnut,
bounce
on soaking turf.
~
The householder is driving wooden stakes
into her land’s end border
with Overlong Green: lengthy boards, boards at the ready.

The tiniest flowers spread purple under fences,
defenceless fences.
~
Who left this
in Ballgame Green?
Pigeon shit, squelchy
white and grey,
cushions the new
handhewn bench.

Who gives a bench
should clean a bench.

Someone is pitching balls from
the irritable tarmac.
~
Stitches of fissured gold
ring old elm trunks cracked
underneath. Elaborate fungus
tissues Little Green.
            ~
Boots, be the happiest
meeting of mind and matter,
lurk far below faux-leather
weather-brimmed hats
in the L-shape of Lightheart Green.

Claire Crowther has published four collections and five pamphlets. Her current collection (Solar Cruise, Shearsman) was awarded a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2020 and her first collection was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Prize. Claire is Deputy Editor of Long Poem Magazine and teaches creative writing at Oxford University.