An old poem: Dry Stone Walls
You can find me in the Xs, marking random dates in my teenage diary.
In the felt-tip dots that mark keys of the piano, one black smudge on the middle d, e, f#, g.
Looking closely at my left ear you’ll notice it’s been pierced three times, the right ear twice.
My carpet’s fluff could provide a clue.
There is something to the perfect hot-rock holes in my oldest jeans,
the certain degree to which I singe my toast.
Or, how my hand remembers the grip of its fountain-pen fist;
my collection of handbags, dresses, hairclips and LPs.
It will help you to see the picture my fingernail traces on your back
while you tell me a story to send me to sleep,
with a boy named Cauldron, who lives on the beach in a cave
carved from diamond, and his best friend Finch, a girl you base on me. Tonight
to catch crabs, Cauldron smashes limpets from the rock pools with his blunt knife. Finch threads them onto seaweed lines. They wait in the night, befriending sea birds and fishermen, until Cauldron pulls up the line heavy with lobster, which they boil on the beach just to see it turn pink
Under cover of your studies, I escape to fields hemmed with dry stone walls.
I climb, giddy, over each wooden stile and tug at the heather, the fleece caught on barbed wire.
I have a rucksack packed with a grown-up’s sandwich, a pen and pad to record my observations:
there are three cows in a neighbouring field, a slight stream on the hill –
it may yet rain. But I’m the only person here, I’m hypnotically alone.
Wishing me asleep, you’re woozy with clues: what to make of my fanged tooth?
Go, I think. Snag yourself on it.
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