Old English Songs
Poetry by Cathy Stonehouse
i.
Open the door, cross the threshold. Stairs rise up like tides. Drowned songs sway across the landing. Down here, your abandoned skin still breathes: an unseen spider quivering on a web. You are home; you are not at home. A plant which is not alive, a wildflower trapped in a frame.
What is the price of this cocoon? How may it be dismantled? Its eggs dead; its larvae desiccated into paper models. This is how life was once lived. A room full of women weaving lies into capes. A mechanical contraption for slicing eggs. The rudiments of inter-species conception unwinding inside a battered Sony cassette deck. Your old thoughts, laid end to end along the skirting boards, eaten into by ants and ghosts.
ii.
To go home is no longer possible.
The church you prayed in, playground you swung in, prison you broke from
lies empty, a converted anachronism.
By taking off your fingers, open the lock.
Maple syrup cookies, Scottie dog shortbreads. Shit-stained tiles.
Touch nothing; inhale nothing.
To go home, unzip the mouth of your suitcase. A flaming pair of gloves flies out.
iii.
Open the door, cross the threshold. There is the ceramic hen, the metal teapot. There is the Assault Commemoration Plate, with its delicate motif of intertwined forget-me-nots, mounted against the wall. There is the green-upholstered, mid-century armchair under which you smeared excess snot. There is the blood-stained bed, the dog with one eye, the field where you split in two. No one has yet put a hotel on park lane. The knives and forks have their own secret door into the kitchen. And there is the wallpaper, peopled by mermaids, some of whom have since become famous: David Bowie, Princess Margaret. When you raise it, the roof comes away in your hands.
iv.
Their dream house floats. Their dream, small as the tip on a snail’s horn. Set well back from social norms, on a service road with trees and a green embankment to the front, this extended three-bedroom semi-detached property, which needs a little updating, offers spacious aberrance and stunted moral stature along with garage and long driveway. A mollusk of hope, positioned on a nub of earwax. Viewing is a must, to appreciate the claw marks within.
v.
What matters when conjugating absence is to separate present from past. Her handwritten thesis the first obstacle to eliminate — its perfect spelling matters not. Next, pixelated crenellations: her holiday snaps from Spain, Mallorca, Bermuda, Switzerland and again Spain. Tasting blood, you flick through her Letts pocket diaries, age 13 to 83, exterminate, exterminate. No one can read her copperplate handwriting and who cares how she felt about the sunset on December 22, 1963. Next, unfinished paintings — Spanish dancers in acrylics, moored boats in water — most are bad, and those which are good aren’t good enough. All the brushes, plus the adult diapers, unsent letters to the county council, creased-up programs for ballets, and the labeled remains of her final, middle-aged love affair which ended in his marriage — to someone else. what matters when transcribing are the elisions . . . Here is where some words fell out, because they were considered [by the transcriber] irrelevant . . . a lock of your baby hair . . . that fractured clavicle . . . her recipe for pineapple upside-down pudding . . . In other news, hundreds of bleached-blondes in 1980s track suits have been condemned to death.
