Home furnishings
Sensing revelation on the fifth floor,
she reaches – self-defensively –
for tools
and next, she is all pocket: the more combed
the colder, while at her toes
a little pool
of not-this, not-that flotsam grows (biros,
chocolate, children’s photos, strands of sample
fourth-floor wools)
until she stands divested, swaying
like a vertigant,
nothing
between her and truth she’s waited
– oh, time cubed –
to spool,
missing her tape measure
and every inch
the holy fool.
*
Kneeling, she counts fourteen
hand-spans across the horizon
of a sofa (Elgar Small,
pumice), fingers kneading
the truss. A passing
pianist is struck
by the key
of her attention; a child
smiles back to smiles
that in the country
of her face, lie dozened
at all angles, while
unassailing sales assistants
statue the far corners,
like church saints.
*
Near an Osterley Occasional,
she gives way
to laughter – a sobbing
spindle of years, unwinding
itself from story.
How much easier
and more difficult, she thinks
looking round, trying
to see things just
as they xanax online rx are…
Every wing
chair and swan sofa
stands waiting.
I have only to sit down
and a silence will begin.
*
When the floor manager finds her – in a Suffolk Sewn – she is floundering
like a kelt. Behind her stream plot-lines of love-lies-bleeding, family tangling, beginnings
and endings she’s attempted to alter, various subscriptions to cure or coddling. Ahead, a simple sea of careful, furnished rooms … an anchorite’s grammar: I will sit by my sitting, lie
by my lying and attend to the phrasing of gestures—
*
She offers up
her cheque-book
and he takes it
lightly, too young
to guess at
all the waters
that chop
between them.
Lucy Ingrams has worked by day in gardens, schools, children’s book publishing, a theatre company and a bar – by evening she has had the luck to study poetry with Michael Donaghy, Liane Strauss and Philip Gross.