In the mean-time

The last few weeks I’ve had to set aside my artwork, the lopsided-project and the reading of blogs, reluctantly, but life had other ideas, rather good ones actually, involving a magic trip to Seven Sisters (where the sea sparkled as if the stars were skinny-dipping), curtain poles, Roni Horn’s exhibition at Tate Modern, and a choice of red and purple blossoms – which left no energy for much else.
I’m still aligned with spring though and do not want to let my blog wither so I’m offering you this, written a couple of months ago, and, I hasten to add, not biographical in any real sense.

Cosy for my heart

I knit and knit a useless thing that might have been
a sleeve. Two purl, two plain, a drip-feed of stitches.

No wings for you, no name, no song, just loop
passing through loop and the clicking of needles.

Some stitches cruelly ring a life: rib, seed and moss,
flame, sea foam, little shell. You fell away a tiny curl

of flesh, a blur of nerves and tissue. I fold my life
around the lack of you, this sealed threshold.

You’re a breath held. The mouth that would have kissed
and sung you lullabies and called your name has set.

Instead I drop a stitch and watch it slide its groove, unfurl
down rung by curly rung, unstrip its alphabet.

From there I spin a life, dressed in a poem’s raggedy lines,
this spider lace of letters.