The Alchemist
The house was strange without one.
Corners where it could be swelled
daily in their emptiness
and threatened to topple the festivity.
Contrary under her gaze, he determined
that a squat bought thing just wouldn’t do,
and, shedding skeptics,
picked me as acolyte for misadventure.
And so in speckled overalls, like skins,
treading dampness into itself,
we left Crosby-carolling
for the trees who shivered at garden’s end
and saw in hand and hand on trunk,
he hoisted me into the twiggy innards
and spiced stench of sap
to amputate a branch or two or three
that we might puzzle together
in counterfeit of Christmas.
Metal teeth chattered bark to pulp
until my knuckles roared.
Then on the grass he laid our loot
and crouched and bent and sculpted,
rehearsing imperfect forms
gloveless, beneath the limbs’ original,
and twisting out an edifice, like origami
patterned from some secret
blueprint, invisible to me,
he stood content over his design.
Inside, we propped our patchwork nature,
boughs shot out like a mad star,
where he hoped it might not
shout its own lie loud enough
for her to tear it all to pieces.
Still, she came, and stood, tramadol online no rx and, silent,
circumspected for a hanging second.
And she smiled.
From one angle it was almost a tree.
But from every side his alchemy
now seemed to warm the house,
fuller in its strangeness.
James Parris writes from East London. He has just begun to turn his mind to poetry
The single woman and the lights
They’re bunched in the bag like an addled brain.
Last Christmas it was easy: he shook them free,
or maybe it was the mulled wine, the thought of his hands.
Now each strung head is desperate, locked in a final kiss.
I spider them apart, an afternoon lost to unpicking,
set them straight as graves on the living room floor.
It’s dusk. I take them in my arms and we slow dance
round the tree. When they wince through the tinsel
my eyes swell. These plucky buds. Another year.
Catherine Ayres lives and works in Northumberland. She has a pamphlet published by Black Light Engine Room and a collection – Amazon – to be published by Indigo Dreams Publishing next year.