Vicki Feaver Poems

Talking about the chemical changes
that make a body in love shine,
or even, for months, immune to illness,
you pick a grub from the lawn
and let it lie on your palm - glowing
like the emerald-burning butt
of a cigarette.

(We still haven't touched,
only lain side by side
the half stories of our half lives.)

You call them lightning bugs
from the way the males gather in clouds
and simultaneously flash.

This is the female, fat from a diet
of liquefied snails, at the stage in her cycle
when she hardly eats; when all her energy's
directed to drawing water and oxygen
to a layer of luciferin.

Wingless, wordless,
in a flagrant and luminous bid
to resist the pull to death, she lifts
her shining green abdomen
to signal yes, yes.
...

He was in Paris for the weekend:
on his own - she was mad
to think otherwise.

She took the children
on an expedition with friends
to pick sloes - small bitter plums
from the spiky twigs
of the blackthorn; best picked
after the first frosts
have loosened the stones.

Her friends were going to soak them in gin
ready for Christmas.

She couldn't think that far.
She couldn't even think
as far as next weekend;
or the stallion, black as a sloe,
galloping above her
down a sloping field.
...

My sister's screams
brought Mummy running:
Did you push her?
They drove to the hospital
leaving me alone in the house.

I read a book by the window
until I couldn't see the words.
Too scared to turn on the light,
I watched ghostly white roses
disappear into the dark.

Once, in a fever, I'd dreamed
of witches who lived in the loft
flying through the hatch.
Now they crouched
behind the wings of my chair.

I tried not to breathe,
pretending to be dead
like the stone girl in the churchyard
or my sister if all her blood
rolled out of her leg.

If she died, people
would think I was sad.
The witches knew the truth -
smelling my wickedness
with huge hooked noses.
...

Cavernous - and empty now -
no shouts of dockers,
no barefoot women shovelling
molasses - it has the chill
and hush of a cathedral.

Like a pilgrim arrived at a shrine,
wanting something to touch
for a vision or sign
that a saint or god is there,
I rub the tip of my finger

against the rough bricks
of the wall and lick, tasting
sweet dirt, seeing, shining
in the gloom, an obese boy¬
like Elvis in a sequin suit.

What prayers should I offer
to this god of sugar?
Most fitting and proper,
prayers for the slaves
drowned in leaking holds;

or for those who survived
the voyage to the Caribbean
to cut the cane, lashed
until their backs were striped
with festering wounds.

Or prayers for the child
who spooned golden syrup
from the green lion tin, dribbling it
in spirals to form amber pools
in her porridge; who stole

from her mother's purse
to buy red-tipped sugar cigarettes;
who ruined her teeth
on lollipops and seaside rock?
Prayers for the woman

who still craves sweetness:
savouring strawberries dipped
in the sugar dish, gobbets
of crystallised ginger, figs
almost rotten with ripeness?
...

When I was young and miserable,
a misfit and a rebel,
almost never out of trouble,
desperate to escape school,
time dawdled.
But now I'm older
and happier and want it to go slower,
time's an out of control mower
careering through the borders
decapitating all the flowers.
...

Turned seventy, and not wanting
to waste the years left, half-asleep,
I'm stocking the shelves of a larder.

Each day is an empty jar to fill:
yesterday, with the silvery teeth
on a leaf-lichen; the day before,

with a thin mist rolling slowly
across the valley, fading a line
of beeches to pencilled ghosts.

Today it's the powdery bloom
on the skin of a blueberry;
turning it, cold from the fridge,

between my thumb and finger;
noting the petal-shaped crater
where the flower shrivelled,

a small hole where it was pulled
from the stalk, crushing
its tangy pulp on my tongue.
...

‘Do it now, say it now, don't be afraid.'
Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham

Your house with its lovely
light studio overlooking the sea
is sold, you work dispersed.

But in my head there's a painting
done in your nineties
when just to lift your arm

was an effort: a single brave
upwards sweep with a wide
distemper brush so loaded

with paint the canvas filled
with the glistening blue wall
of a wave before it falls.
...

When my memory
was a film library
with a keen curator

who knew precisely
where to find clips
of every word

I wished unsaid,
or deed undone,
to play back to me

on sleepless nights,
I'd have welcomed her
muddling the reels.

But now the curator's
retired, the ordered
shelves are in chaos.

I roam the racks
without a guide
searching for scenes

I've lost. Sometimes,
unable to remember
what I'm searching for,

I find Forgetfulness
kneeling on the floor -
an old woman, pale

and worried as a ghost,
rummaging in a tangle
of shiny black ribbons.
...

You are not in the tulips,
not in their flailing stems
or shrivelled yellow petals
that alive you'd have painted;
not in the pearly wintry sky
or the scarred slopes of the hill
that before your legs failed
you'd have climbed;
not in the spiky firs
or eddies and swirls of the river
or in its still sandy pools
where in your youth
you'd have swum;
not in the beginning drizzle of snow,
or in the deer that hangs
in the larder with black hooves
and long delicate legs,
not in its heart or liver
that we ate last night for supper
and you would have relished.

I don't know where you are
who loved all the things I love
and who I remember hauling
out of the bath - tugging
on arms that I was afraid
of pulling from their sockets -
then drying and helping to dress
and guiding down slippery stone steps
to watch flycatcher chicks
leaving the nest, hearing
the peep peep peep
of their mother's warning call.
...

My sister's screams
brought Mummy running:
Did you push her?
They drove to the hospital
leaving me alone in the house.

I read a book by the window.
until I couldn't see the words.
Too scared to turn on the light,
I watched ghostly white roses
disappear into the dark.

Once, in a fever, I'd dreamed
of the witches who lived in the loft
flying through the hatch.
Now they were crouched
behind the wings of my chair.

I tried not to breathe,
pretending to be dead
like the stone girl in the churchyard
or my sister if all the blood
rolled out of her leg.

If she died, people
would think I was sad.
The witches knew the truth -
smelling my wickedness
with huge hooked noses.

(both poems from Vicki Feaver's forthcoming (2015) collection from Cape Poetry, provisionally titled I Want! I Want!)
...