Point of View

In the kitchen she reaches for the nutmeg grater
and remembers it is in another cupboard,
another place.

In the post office she fills in the address
she has left behind.
She tears up the form
and starts again.
Her mail follows her
like outstretched hands.

In the sky on the way home
a hawk hangs motionless,
moving, yet still,
pinning the sky.

This is Where it Started

Forty years ago, the oak had started
to lean, gentle as a hill, and now
its own weight threatened
to pull apart its trunk.
Mr Moriarty, the tree surgeon, touches
the base of its long trunk and says,
here. This is where it started.

Nothing tells us
what pulls apart our centre.
Something draws us forward
and in that direction
the years accumulate a weight.
So that it may live, Mr Moriarty relieves
the tree of the pull of three downward limbs.
He asks if we want
firewood made of its loss.

In the morning I look up
to see what is not there.
And below, like a jigsaw puzzle,
the limbs are laid out in 16-inch pieces.
When it starts to rain I carry them under the eaves,
each so heavy I am able to hold
only one at a time.

The Call

The sound of the phone
from my flatmate’s room catches
me on the landing halfway
down the stairs, my palm on the handle
not enough to still
the impetus of the suitcase. It takes
a bruise on my thigh to stop it.
From the box of things to give away
— signs I was once here —
I grab my phone, plug it in
in the passage, and sit
on the stack of phonebooks against the wall.
Hallo Mama, I answer.

I am leaving for a new place,
each further from where I started.
Across the seven hour time difference I fear
I will never see her again.
I want to say out loud I am losing
a centre to which I can return,
but do not.

She speaks too in a way flattened
by what is not said, coming only so close
to the parting between us by telling me
to leave safely.

Across the growing distance
I hear her voice receding from me.
I make her leave me
so I can be still.