Poetry

Masonry

Unnamed, faceless, unrestricted,

if it is in anything it is in the weather

as it turns, graceless, towards the West,

the air thick with static

as the roof-tiles creak and flout

and water takes purchase on the house.

Rain plashing the buddleias, it is there again

catching the ends of your hair

and there, as you turn, on your lips

in the mirrored vowels of raindrops,

caught like sequins on an intricate blouse

on a washing line that swayed and didn’t give out

in the distance, as you mouth something

I still can’t quite distinguish.

*

First, the word on the edge of your lips,

on the precipice of promise,

what might have been said or delivered

swallowed like crusts, hidden in fists

or the paper wafer you stuck

like a Rusk to your mouth roof at Mass,

pulling faces as you turned back from the Priest.

Now, gilt-edged, the hymn books are stacked

and the figures cut in stained glass

take off their coloured hats in the dusk.

I will sit here until yeast rises,

until the high tides swell higher

and deliver their pillars of sediment and salt

like the prophesies and conclusions of loss.

*

And all of us intent on sketching ourselves into stone,

and finding in indentation permanence,

our radiance in the chiseller’s tool

and in chippings, chaff we’d meant to release

long ago, like the man who wrought his lover

out of sheer cliff face, turned her from nothingness

to a figure dusting filings from her tarpaulin cover

like sand from a sundress; or the stonemason

who chips into a block the names of lost soldiers

and in the monumental silence strikes against something

like transcendence which, lightweight as it is,

nonetheless is held tightest at night beneath eyelids,

when a figure returns, and contours flesh the emptiness,

bringing in one hand strength, the other tenderness.

Laura Webb