Geraldine Clarkson

Daily, daily scathing roughens the psyche and veils are unhinged. I too was a planet, planed and waterless. Wolf-roved. Our roofs leaked, mischievous sisters locked the Mother General out in the garth where she prayed to the Foundress and the dead and the living looked on, entombed and disapproving. Gray nuns, grave, gave out. There was weeping in every stall. Though the stalls be empty of cattle, we trust. Though our intellects rust, we grow tweedy-brown and opportunistic, feeding off morsels. A cosmos of relics in the crypt and a senior sister led the laity around brilliantly by a twisted adamantine-ringed nose, to see broken finger bones, bloody cloths, brains. Blood so blue and white we redden and hide our film-star faces. Cagey. Margaret crushed by a door. Martha martyred by a window overlooking the park, with swaggering ducks and blinding water. Paddlers. What if you had held a grudge, fondled it, and found that you had fallen in love? He has turned up finally, his jaw like the suspension bridge, magnetized with stubble, cheekbones like girders. Oh no, I am not a cliché. See my inside. Ten years inside but without the comforts of bantam mornings. Bodies on beds shimmied into corners with shifty valances. September blues. Fat satin. Sidling in from the green room. In the gut, a vagabond ache like disgust. I walk cumbersome honesty sideways through several doors, park her in the smoky alley. Pull up compunction by his Jaeger collar, kiss his spandrel nose, expel him into the snowy street. I relish jealousy on the side with copious dressing. Feed depression to a gull called Guillaume on a bleak beach during lunch break. Simplify the universe with a pie chart and chomp down three-quarters of it with mustard and beer.

In the end, some are incurable. They use lint to mop up the leaking, or apply cold poultices. Creeping mess can be cleared up with pink paste or trapped in sawdust and swept. Blood can pool from their sitting and standing, but they avoid clots by regular shaking, and the sucking of sherbet. Blue blue for the sky, white for the walls, apricot for glass and woodwork. They devise a timetable by casting lots. They scrabble around in the dirt for clues. Seven is too magical a number to hold, but the soft ones like to handle it constantly. They polish its fine teak head, drive theories through its shaft and talk into the early hours about how it can resemble an ax, or sex, and how it solves, as well as creates, all conundr/ums/a. They admire their creosoted fence for protection and their own faces in its misaligned hasp. A Mrs. Milkwater puts baby brushes to soak in milk and water (and vinegar). Her sons are successful barbers. At precisely midnight the blue lights go out. The red lights stay home.

Sees him at the far end of the strand, squamous in rubbery weed, his knees bobbing urchins, his lean trunk leaning, sea-treasure for her. After it all (they mate, like carapaces, in parentheses) Dora feels coolness in new places, lifts a reused razor shell, mother-of-pearly and straight and signals out to the swell of moldering green. Dora is electric, in love, and deep water. Dora, Dora, Dora, in which dread is. People people the beach, peering through splayed hands, appealing: DAW-RAAaargh. A boat sees her passing. Sea-scribbler’s chest buckles in aftershock: his quill is primed: squid-inked and witful.