She would find later,
in a grandfather’s forgotten
store of nautical sights,
a pair of eighty-year-old
kid shoes, and later yet,
a polished old brass-bound
cabin door, and then a skeleton
that was later to get stuck
in a nitrate film, killed
in the East Indies
but advancing westland,
crowding the deck
of a clipper ship
whose captain, her brother,
steered her through
the gathered seas
and winds of last century.
Her, with little snapping
sounds, as of cold clay,
should never reach
the well-lit teashop,
where the small tables
shine so warm
on the old pavement
and the sliced fruit shows
a heart of gold,
lit with amber and sugar.
If she were to stop
not at the eyes, but to slide
across the top of the skull,
down the Chinese-black nape,
then to drop down – how far? –
in search of the crowd,
the chocolate pool
of the non-beings,
the slaves of light,
who wait on nobody, nothing,
and nobody’s desire.
She would find herself
no longer in a warm house,
no longer an inhabitant
of simple rooms,
no longer a woman,
 a child, or an insect
but in a room closed
off from the world
full of notes
on the theories of relativity,
stacked with sonnets
and translations of Gogol,
a calendar on the walls,
a still-life of a flower
utterly overlooked
Having taken to the jungle,
a hairdresser’s card shining
in the pocket where
the second marriage
had been registered,
to petal the crumpled roses,
shave the ageing dandies,
crinkling up their ears
and curling their dog-like toes,
steading with quiet paws,
stooping, with the instinct
of simple life, to the ear-worms
of the corridor answering
the sense of each note
of the incantations of grief
as a seashell, rubbing its
forehead in the sand,
flattens out, she and the oceans might wash over each other,
should she dare leap
into her eyes.