Issue 23: Ruth Valentine
The Aralqum Desert
male eighty
five foot nine
hospital gown
3 January 10 a.m.
to shelf A7
4 Feb to freezer unit
nobody’s claimed him
not
his landlord
postman
barman
betting-shop manager
card-players
creditors
till a cousin-twice-removed
who's moved to Reading
spring morning
street trees flowering
the man melting
curtained viewing room
coffin lined
with plastic sheeting
in case
calico sheeting
lavender oil
can't shroud
the dissolution
*
Barsa-Kelmes
Land of No Return
once island
now desert
Aralqum
bleached seashells
broken boat-hulls
the one ranger
found seated
five years later
head in his hands
*
I woke in a god-size bed
with a goose-down duvet
sea bright-blue sonorous
through plate-glass windows
she was still alive
asleep
in another room
I didn't have to see her
I thought I might
inherit the cliff-top house
be rocked to sleep
each night by the loving water
in early morning
walk
into the sun-
and-spindrift blessing
*
Christmas cards
windowsill bookshelves dresser
red and glitter
fifty-two times my name
love
signatures
at fifty-two points
in space-time
recollected
*
new festival
Day of the Unwanted
whose fathers wiped their cocks and went downstairs
whose mothers couldn't pay for an abortion
bottle-fed
every four hours
by harassed nurses
a day to celebrate our resourcefulness
having no option
our courage
walking the grass
above the cliff
into the wind off the sea
our determined dying
Cobalt Variations
with acknowledgments to Edmund de Waal
i
reclusive not tracked down
in mountains chalkdowns streams
too barbarous
to breathe our air hidden
among nickel and copper
the malleable the brazen
indifferent god
arriving in the hold of a meteorite
not at the time we pray
at the time we are hollowed
ii
In the photo you are Jackie Kennedy:
black hair, that sway of the hips, the dress and jacket
you must have made in the evenings after work,
having cooked and cleared away, got the boys to bed,
your husband watching the evening news.
You stand
at the dining table, pinning the paper pattern
onto the glazed cotton, reach around
for the big dressmaking scissors, in your head
the plan to do what you’ve always wanted, walk
along a ward, the sunlight coming slantwise
through the long windows to a glass of water.
You knew who you were: not Jackie Kennedy,
one rich man after another: your orphaned self
on a street in a small dull town, in black and white
and the confidence you could pretend until it landed.
iii
a ship sets out from Cyprus or Lebanon
cargo of olives logs tin terebinth
thirty-four centuries on
still undelivered
and cobalt glass
colour extinguished in
the deepsea dark
finding its glow at last
by the grace of divers
iv
porcelain merchant
wrecked on a desert coast
his crew build a new boat
he heaps up stones
ships back an evening sky
to an inland town
looks for that lode again
but the beach has vanished
v
Exiled to the north, a cottage on a hill,
a view along the valley, an old milltown,
canal, Methodist chapel, the hospital
fifteen miles away on a snowy road.
You left the car at the bottom and hauled your shopping;
the next time harnessed the dog to a sled, came home
victorious, like Scott of the Antarctic.
vi
mined in Persia
along the Gulf across the Indian Ocean
Sumatra China
to be dragons phoenixes lions
the eight immortals
a sparrow on a branch
a straight blue border
black on the tip of the brush
put to the flame
emerging bluer than oceans bluer than summer
vii
When your best friend’s son, a few days out of prison,
sat on his bed wrapped in the counterpane
and put the gun to his head, you were the one
she phoned. You’d given up
for more than a year, but that day she handed you
one after another, lit, when you took a break
and went back in to clean the blood and flesh
off the furniture, carpet, ceiling.
It’s only now,
after the first stroke, you’ve had to stop
smoking again: just the one, you tell me,
last thing at night, and first thing in the morning.
viii
grey northern light grey sea
silences plainsong
then a sea-crossing a sky
spires above cornfields
colour trapped from the wind
scattered on stone
meaning not joy not faith
not the mother missing
toccata and fugue a touch
escape from being
ix
When I came to the hospital it couldn’t be
you in the blue flowered gown, with thin grey hair
greasy against your scalp, and dentures missing.
You, you kept insisting. You. No, you,
no other words with the strength to clamber out
into the bewildered overcrowded air.
You looked at the gifts I’d brought – lavender handcream,
expensive chocolates – as if they might have been
dug from an Iron Age fort in the chalk downland.
The words are mostly back, and the understanding;
though sometimes in your hand the TV remote
becomes inscrutable, the coloured buttons
arrows and icons an archaic language
that one day may open and reveal its function –
a list of grave-goods, prayer to the moon goddess –
though until then it’s hard for the news to reach you.
x
denser than summer sky
more matte than water
colour to lean against
to gaze no answer
indifferent god that blocks
absolution meaning
surface as deep as truth
solid as grieving
xi
What you have lost is still there, only hidden
like cobalt in a mountain, kobold, goblin,
trickster, disguised in copper, shape-shifter,
that goes into the furnace a black powder
and comes out radiant, butterfly, dragon, dolphin.
Ruth Valentine’s most recent publications are Downpour (Smokestack 2015), Rubaiyat for the Martyrs of Two Wars (Hercules 2017), and A Grenfell Alphabet (self-published in aid of the Grenfell Tower fund). She lives in Tottenham.
Copyright © 2019 by Ruth Valentine, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
