She put it to the back of a wardrobe,
in a bag of mismatched things,
none of any use these days
but none the sort you throw away.
The sort you keep until they’re found
by curious small hands cooped up
by the rain on window panes.
Discovering you before them.
Half this family tree has been watered
until the branches hang heavy with fruit.
We know all the name, if not the faces,
see the resemblance in the variety.
On the other side we know much less,
can’t quite feast on what is left.
There are wanderers in this blood,
apples that fell far and wide and distant.
Strangers in stranger places bobbed,
grew their own trees from loose cores.
People put down roots, grew branches,
spread the distance between lines.
When the backboard drops they spill like water over a fall,
woolly bodies frothing from the flight decks,
feet upon each others’ backs.
There is a boy behind the hurdles,
already knee bent in anticipation,
fingers spread for the catch.
Outside, a woman is selling cauliflower.
Holds the head of it like a newborn
between the palms of her hands.
A farmer rattles pounds in his fist,
counts his luck,
passed it on to the winning bid.
In a corridor there is a circle
of bowed heads and five pence jumps,
till the circumference is a singular.
A lone man is loading up,
clicks the gates on what he brought,
tries not to fumble the catch.
Someone whispers at an absence,
shakes a head at suspicion,
does a math of miles inside their head.
They wait to hear the hammer fall.
My father had a VCR tape of One Man and His Dog that we could never get to play properly. It’s probably still in the bottom of the cupboard, with the Disney films and MotoGPs that never quite make it across the living room anymore. Some people have got rid of their VCR players these days. There’s nowhere else for them to go but the bottom of a plastic bin so they stay in the dark with the dust and the spiders. That is the way things move on.
In October I re-learnt how to be by myself. Sort of. Just me and the dog, and the crunch of autumn on farm tracks. Even the walkers seemed to be absent or perhaps I had fallen out of step with the world. Found the time of day when no one ventured further than their front-door or garden gate. I’d found a time when all of it, all of the emptiness was mine for a while. So I let it swallow me, completely, for as long as a thing can last.
Brambles like barbed wire
snarl up the barren verges,
and pheasant breaks loose.
There are motions that crack open the audios files inside my head. I don’t realise what they are until your voice is playing on the loudspeaker in my brain, blotting out all other thought with the echos of your absence. Salted caramel for the mind, both sweet and salty, love and tears. I will hit repeat until the lump in my throat jams the mechanism and you stutter into silence.
In the months where I’ve lost track of time, I cannot tell if you have begun to sound more like me, or if I am becoming you. Rolling the words around my mouth before I speak as if to stain them with your voice. Familiar phrases still clutter my tongue as I sift through the vowels jumbled between my teeth. You spoke so easily compared to me, I do not think anyone notices that I am using your words instead of mine.
Learning how to thread these sentences into conversations is a little like taking the waist of a dress in a few inches before learning how to sew. My first attempt was loose, hung off me in waves of excess fabrics, clearly too much for this frame to fill. Now I have perfected pinning those syllables to the slope of my belly, the valley between my breasts, the skim of thigh and knee and calf, the strain in the hollow of my throat. I can speak without catching my heels on the hem, so the words pout forth like water now. You are there in the current, but I have found how best to navigate the flood.
Roots grow down deeper,
seeking the center of it.
I am just one thread.
Carol J Forrester 
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