Dead in a chest,
 are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.

Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
   always Third week in August

We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims

Illness had left me
brittle as frost, icicle-thin
swaddled in borrowed warmth

on marble tiles bird like
I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl

Doors

My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors,

where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk 

or clutter to rest themselves upon.

Winter dusk soughs in, dark
clouds threaten, tangle her wool.

Black is the colour inside      black light   on
blackened brick and slats

Necessity, that scold’s bridle, held her humble and mean,
So that she no longer spoke, just looked –
Her world reduced to a search for special offers . . .

Mrs Norris had thought ascension
would be whirligig rides in bright violet rays,
as the training books all implied.