Michelle McGrane
January Triptych
1 Father
The coffin is unvarnished pine with six rope handles, tawny resin beading a seam. The viewing room is empty. You are gone, striding out across the veld heeled by our childhood hounds. Someone should have warned the undertaker you would never agree to lie in this box. 2 Grief It arrives in the mail with a licence renewal, wears the thin, grey socks never returned. It curls up, settles in where I least expect – a note slipped between pages, a bald head in a supermarket queue. 3 Grace The day she brings your ashes home, my mother cradles the box to her breast before placing it in a cool, dark cupboard. In a kitchen, miles away, I unsheathe long-stemmed roses – removing thorns and leaves, trimming stalks – the creamy green guard petals beginning to open. Rising, then receding, her voice wavers through the telephone – and, here, in my fingers, the cellophane label, 'Esperance' If You Are Lucky
If you are lucky
you will carry one night with you for the rest of your life, a night like no other. You won't see it coming. Forget the day, the year. It will arrive uninvoked, an astrological anomaly. You will remember how every cell in your body knew him, this stranger, how you held your breath, the way you searched his face. This is how such evenings begin. And you will be real in your skin, bone and sinew; the way you always thought you could be. Effortlessly. This is how you will fit together. His parted lips between your thighs, your half-lit nipples darkening, the hot-breathed arrival of desire, the frenzied coupling as you opened soundlessly and the world flooded into you. In the morning, maybe, soon after sunrise you will walk barefoot above a waterfall in the forest, light-headed with the smell of sex, laughing in your déshabillée. You will carry the music of this memory with you; and from time to time, in the small, withered hours, your body will sing its remembering.
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Pipistrelle
He had forgotten how to walk,
the child they found roosting upside down in the cave depths, cauled in silence and darkness, arms folded across his chest. For years he had gleaned beetles from the chamber floor, snaffled moths and mosquitoes in mid-air, lapped from the silted pool at twilight. Startled by halogen beams, spelunkers’ thudding boots, his family, roused from torpor, had abandoned its crevices, swarmed above the harnessed men, through the hibernaculum mouth and disappeared into the woods. Now, monitored by behaviourists behind an observation pane, the boy huddles on a cot, his head against his knees, eyes closed, squeaking as if echolocation might guide him home. Exhibit 'A'
The McGillivray barn
before the family murders: To the right you can make out the timbered stalls, the chaff scattered across the stone floor and at the far end the open double doors; then, you may notice the recycled iron hooks hammered into the central crossbeam. Six of them, newly installed by the blacksmith who carried out the instruction insisting with a shake of his head they were mounted too high for halters and bridles. You won’t hear the children’s laughter as they clamber over the combine harvester in the yard or see Sissy McGillivray, framed in the kitchen door on baking day, wipe her hands on her apron, call them in for lemonade. Ipatiev House, July 1918
Some days, we're allowed a quiet hour
in the garden. The girls and I sit on the grass, pearls and diamonds stitched into our corsets. Alyoshenka dozes, confined to his wheelchair since the sledding accident on the stairs at Tobolsk. Yevgeny says he will never walk again. Beneath palsied poplars, birches and limes, Nicholas paces the pine palisade, split planks imprisoning the Voznessenski Street property. My husband has aged, trim beard streaked grey. He never wanted to be Tsar. I search the sky for sun-grazing comets, the pattern and movement of cumulus clouds, some divine sign from Our Friend, Rasputin. A murder of crows recedes on dark wings, cleaving light, fleeing our fated daguerreotype, a strangled screech taking seed in my throat. Note: In April 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, their five children and four retainers were confined to Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. On 17 July 1918, the Romanov family and their servants were murdered by Bolsheviks in the house's basement and their corpses buried in an unmarked grave outside the Siberian town. The Recalcitrant Muse
Sunlight blisters through moth-eaten curtains.
In her mildewed apartment high above the city, the Muse stumbles out of bed, stubs her toe in the kitchen as she fumbles for a cigarette, reheats last night’s coffee and loneliness, gulps it down dark, bitter, thick with grounds that refuse to dissolve her tongue’s furred lining. She is late for the morning’s first appointment with a middle-aged divorcée at 52 East Avenue. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, this muse business. She’s tired of being aloof, untouchable. Give me strong hands, warm flesh, a hairy chest, a plunging prick, fucking on the formica table. She could use a drink. A few hours’ sleep. Immortality doesn’t pay the bills. |
