red booth
review

Everybody knows
the Thames has tides
he’d said,
when I inquired about the lines.
Increments of demarcation
twined around the bulwarks,
blackened rings and at the top
something else maybe – something
lighter, salt stains maybe?

Primrose Hill:
A quieter corner of London.
Babies arriving in hospitals
overlooking the Heath.
Somewhere from a tiny window
— my face.  I looked too, thoughts
of freshly burst skin, pressed through
the glass, all the while he pressed himself
inside me.  You like this
Don’t you he’d said.
As if I had been given
an honest decision to make.

He showed me his new coat:
It’s shearling,
the latest thing.
Bought it in the vintage shop.
Shearling, I thought.
And pictured the trusting
lamb standing quietly;
not flinching.
The hide flayed away, snipped
thickly from its frame –  still
alive.  And later, a silent chalk,
salt and iron left on the alter to dry;
the dusky brown skeletal outlines
of flower petals bursting forth
in patterns of irregular bloom.

Bathwater tides: such
a languid thing, the Mediterranean.

Wave your arms; this will
call the silvery-bodied sardines
closer to shore; the dizzy, icy swirls,
a swarming hive.  Summon
them to suckle at your toes.

Little droplets evaporating
up and down the lengths
of my downy forearms, the
dolphin skin of my abdomen,
leaving behind tiny white rings.
Such an exquisite leprosy –
this coating of fish scales
might make.

Lean nights and long days.
In the right instance, under the right
light our two bodies might take on
the shades of an expensive meal: flesh,
rubbed tender with the coarse crust
of sea salt and put to writhing;
bubbling, bursting on the spit.

He finds us
licking one another
with scratchy cat-tongues;
his rowboat bumping rubber
buoys with the rocks,
his smiling lips wide and shiny,
tight and puckered with sunblisters.

There is a showerhead
inside the grotto
just under the chapel,
says the fisherman.
The water there is cool
and clean; some say
even holy.  But it is no good.
You cannot leave
without passing first
through the salt of the sea.
 

 - Suzanne Rindell