Three Poems by Sarah Corbett

Mirrors

I’ve broken three mirrors in this house.
The first, a slim dress mirror that wouldn’t fit anywhere
tipping sideways from a corner

and shattering across the bedroom floor. The second
was my father’s. I saw it happen before
it happened – the drop from the wall, the smash

then the total collapse
within the pinewood frame, its silver spilling
in one slowed-down unstoppable fall.

All my teenage years it hung by the front door
watching me appear and disappear
like a bat at dusk, me with my spiked hair, my pills

and secrets. Dad on all fours crawling
into the kitchen those months he couldn’t walk;
the years we were falling apart.

The third is a hand-sized disk clear as water
my son gave me, whisked from my grasp
by god knows what imp, what demon.

See me at the top of the stairs, palms splayed
and a cry from the chest as it cracks
mid-air
and is caught.

Near Miss

The rust-red Range Rover
mounts the pavement
coming from behind so fast
it grazes my arm, the air pelted,
compressed, kicking
me sideways. Seconds later,
the shock catches me –
a middle-aged woman
no one saw, no one sees –
and I shake my fist at the car
as it crests the hill.

Clouds come in in great loops
and folds like a butcher’s pile
of intestines, grey and slick,
and I am momentarily flipped
from here – outside Billy Lane
Post Office – to the Kingdom Come
of the field where I lie
amidst cowpats and wet grass.
He was going so fast death
is complete and sudden,
like shutting off a light – snap!
I lift from my ruined body,
serene in the rain falling
from the dough-like clouds,
light in the distance a new land
illuminated, an arc of hope,
walk the road home.

For days I am airy, insubstantial,
about to leave earth
as if the strings that held me
have been cut, like the time
when I was five and saw a girl
killed by a car, or rather
heard the Bang! of the impact.

This Mortal Coil

Some days you meet death
head on, almost casually, a car
mounting the pavement
and missing you by inches,
or drawing a self-portrait
marking all the lines, grooves,
bags, collapses. Some days  
she is behind you only
out of step, like a bad dancer.
Some days she sits down
and waits for you to come
to her out of your time,
like us four women here,
our hospital gowns open
at the front as if for lovers,
lovers we will never catch,
arms across our chests
to keep out the fear
freebasing on the air,
while in the next room
the mammogram machine
sits with its plastic tray
all squares and sharps.
Here where fate is coiled
in family history
or simple bad luck,
death lurks, ear cocked
for moans and gasps,
the babble of an ancient
wheeled past on a trolley
plucking at her blackened
toes. In his office
the consultant pauses
as he checks the results
and you hold your breath,
look away towards shrouds
and mourners and flowers.
All the while death
is at the door, listening in
like an eavesdropping child,
rubbing the papery skin
on her bone-white fingers
as if you can’t hear her,
as if you have never heard
such patience.

Sarah Corbett's fifth collection of poems, A Perfect Mirror, (Pavilion Poetry/Liverpool University Press, 2018), was Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prizes; she published the verse-novel, And She Was with Pavilion in 2015, and three previous collections with Seren Books. Her work has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes, and widely translated and anthologised. She won a Northern Writer's Award for Fiction in 2019 and is working on her second novel, and a new work in poetry, forthcoming from Pavilion in 2023. She lives in Hebden Bridge, where she will direct the first Sylvia Plath Literary Festival in 2022.