In that top corner, my torch picks out
the eight red eyes of one cunning spider,
wedged like a camera in its nest of wires.
I am the mote in each eye. Her gazes
trap me, like weighted nets
which have floored me more times
than I care to admit. Once I’m felled,
down she abseils and crawls
tickling, inside my ear, to lay eggs
into my brain. Those cells adjust
to their guest with seasons of migraine
through which I rest, until she emerges,
triumphant, through the arch of my mouth,
clad in chainmail of living armour:
glittering spiderlings, hatched from my mind –
if that can be called my own now, or home.
*
Snare
I won’t call her spider,
though I do.
I live in the cage of her legs.
I’ve speared
my heart on a pointed stick to attract
carnivorous angels
which make a great racket of wings
but can’t save.
‘It’s easy to leave, what stops you?’,
others ask, baffled.
It’s the snare in the brain, spring-loaded
for suicide. The knots
throb, electric, the anguish swells
till the trigeminal
nerve slithers out – a hot, pulsing snake –
through my eyeball,
leaving a spider’s web tattooed
on my face
like a shattered windscreen.
This pattern alarms
employers but, honest, though I tell
of such horrors,
underneath, I’m a bit of a sweetie.
*
Maze
First, locate your original wound.
I come to in the bathroom, a body beside
me. Did we? Could I have? Check between legs
for dampness. Next, torso. Is this
my own blood? If not, then whose?
Tied to my hand is a thread of scarlet,
an electric cable zinging. Lose it, I die. So I follow
its pull through this house and its generations,
a crazed enfilade of dead ends, cluttered box rooms
while outside– huge thud, a gull
flies into a window. The bird is shattered
in three: the flesh slides down but its shadow
veers off at an angle, climbs, clicking sun’s shutter
right in my face, the third is a burglar alarm
wailing, ‘Emergency!’. Which one should I follow?
*
Missing
So, did I give my luck away? For piano
exams and degrees I wore a chain
with a silver spider plucking death
like a tune on her web, but in my favour.
I passed – how fortunate! My mam
‘kept it safe’, but now I can’t find it.
No sign in the shoebox filled with Whitby jet
in tissue paper, moss agate brooches and –
swift recoil – underneath, a foetus mother
made from my nerves, nourished by ichor,
sour as wasp soup. She mewls for attention.
Too late. On me, her charm’s broken.
I’ll knit my own token instead: fling a cable
woven from habits of mind, the skill
of not-being-me flung over the chasm.
Once fast, I’ll test the tension,
step out, eyes fixed on the other side,
to dance its wide road, with my parasol.
*
Not My Doll, But Just Like Her
I never loved mine, Siwan Elin: I opened
her clock face, its movement clogged dead,
seized up with dried spiders. She told
the wrong time because we were trapped
in rooms snowed under by dead-skin blizzards.
Round here skips mark the implacable massacre
of parents, each one a Pompeii. A hand sticks out
in appeal from a luggage landslide, I rescue a blonde
dolly: hand-knitted pinafore in sage, matching
knickers and vest. Who says you can’t choose
your own household gods? In the past
my lares protector had been repaired
with elastic, holding head, torso, limbs
together. That perished, she fell apart,
so I’m forced to dispose of more body parts.
Contents List
I. Falling
Spiderings
15 Spider Mother
16 Snare
17 Maze
18 Missing
19 Not My Doll But Just Like Her
20 Any Eight Legs Will Do
21 Spidering
22 Away!
*
25 Principalities, Dominions
26 Stage Manager’s Notes
27 Helpless
II. Unwell
31 Auras
34 Another Day Ill in Bed
35 Red Waistcoat
36 Will I?
37 Too Far
38 Persephone in CERN
39 Damage
40 Lips
41 Earrings from the Anti-Matter Factory
42 Under
43 Rogue Female
44 Fooled Me for Years with the Wrong Pronoun
45 Fallen Objects that Can’t Be Saved
46 Relic
47 Chronic Fatigue
48 Desolation
49 Ice Mummy
50 The Long Crawl up Humanity’s Beach
51 Ear, Nose and Throat
52 Grottarossa Mummy
III. Recovery
55 Awake
56 Flowers of the Wayside and Meadow
57 A Litter Herbal
58 Late Blackberries
59 On Stopping the Anti-Depressants
60 Three Ways into Water
61 The Beat
62 Riverlarking First Rain in Paradise
65 Previous
66 Shame
67 Kidnapped
68 Floods
69 Expulsion
*
71 Ornithology
72 An Explanation of Doily
