Framed Woman
After Cape Cod Morning by Edward Hopper
Somewhere in the kitchen
there will be mackerel or snapper,
boned and gutted on a plate:
their scales lying in predictable ranks.
This is the odour of her life.
She can’t quite spoon herself out
of his crabshell house –
its pragmatic clapboard: so flat,
so regular, each slat casting
a thin blue shadow.
Her breasts are haltered
inside a home-sewn dress,
her hands welded to a table.
Panes of light frame
those pale arms, soft as roe.
She tries to shut out the pulse
of Atlantic rollers,
the taste of youth in her throat,
but a memory is ripening
under the cloche of his windows –
a tendril unlaces
in the white-hot sun.
Claire Booker Poetry Society Stanza Competition 2021 (runner-up)
Deadline
When all else fails, I turn to St Jude
with an inventory of the desired miracle:
annual statements, consolidated tax vouchers,
certificates of deduction of tax
with (from memory) the ominous addendum
a duplicate statement will not normally be issued.
They’re holed up somewhere in the house
inside a green folder (how hard is that to spot?)
Kneeling in the under-stairs cupboard,
I grapple with boxes, tennis rackets, old papers,
my mother’s last walking stick.
Even her waxed shopping bag gets up-ended –
a handkerchief
drops onto my hand like a dove.
It smells of her.
Claire Booker Published in Poetry News (summer 2016)
Quake – South Island
His hair is light as cloud bleached by sea-spit,
skin the colour of roast suckling pig –
whittles a stick of green beech, smells of sweat,
Speight’s Old Dark, chewed cheroot.
Says his father has plant-cunning.
Herbs grow like family here; brother root, sister leaf
hide and seek him under cob trees, rock mazes,
wrap of meadow, guile of night.
Best time to pick is with the ancestors beside you,
the right knife, heart open to the magic.
There’s true protection then, from faithless wives,
kidney stones, tortuous births and the worst . . .
He makes the outline of a jaw, tall as a lych gate –
Great White. His father always walks behind
to ward off such swallowings. But we’re nowhere
near the sea; just scrub, flat as an open palm.
Then he tells how the land can boil rougher
than sea-anger, shoot waves in concentric circles,
hurling flotsam: brick, skulls, car bonnets.
All you see are the fins, splitting seams.
Last week they took a child, four months old,
wrapped her in a white box with roses,
lilac, forget-me-nots, winched her down
into the jaws that cracked her.
Claire Booker First published in Magma (issue 53)
Annunciation
after Damien Hirst’s installation Black Sheep.
At the conception came a rustling of wings draped like a slung coat.
The angel lifted his trumpet, blew one clear, continuous note,
cast shadow across the flock so they skittered, fleece-deep in fear.
One unraddled ewe fell silent – felt life leap inexplicable in her belly.
‘Hail, most highly favoured. Thou shalt bring forth a son, dark as pomegranate,
perfect as a spanned bridge. And he shall be embalmed in a mighty hall.’
And it came to pass, when her time was due, that she stretched her flanks
along spring snow and was delivered of slurrying, steaming life
that suckled and bucked and grew as the grasses of the field
under big skies, glorying in its thick pelt, the warm chocolate curl of it.
Then, at the appointed hour, that the prophecy be fulfilled, the lamb
was delivered unto a place that is called The Physical Impossibility of Death,
sedated (for art is no butcher’s shop), dispatched with a bolt
as mighty as God’s spark on the Sistine vault, its bowels scooped, scoured,
muscles re-strung for a playful leap into the Kierkegaardian void –
the whole, suspended amniotically in Marian blue,
bubbles, tiny as thoughts, trapped without caption about its lips
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Claire Booker
First published in Poetry Salzburg Review (issue 28)