Sasha Dugdale

Poetry

1. / Cutting Apples

   

   

   ENGGBR

   This morning I sat and cut apples.
   I cut them into four, and then I nicked each part
   And brought my knife around the curve.

   And through long practice I kept my thumb 
   Up tight against the blade, and when I twisted
   The blade inside each quarter it returned to my thumb.

   And the quarters I put into the pan with lemon
   And the peel and corners of apples I heaped on the board.
   There was a silence. My thoughts wandered.

   I thought about absence, which so hates to be considered
   It throws the thoughts back out like thieves
   And bolts the door behind them.

   More and more my thoughts besieged his hovel
   Tarred wooden shelter on the beach,
   Again and again the thoughts came limping 

   Black-eyed, dented, tossed by the inhospitable
   Absence, back to me at my cutting board
   To be dispatched again with an oath

   I want to know, says the despot mind
   What this place is, what is inside the home
   Of absence? Where are my best men?

   I sent my best thoughts, the ones I keep
   To guard me through the dark hours
   They too came reeling and bloodied back   

   At last my youngest thought came to me
   Father says he, let me try, where others failed
   Let me enter the house of absence

   Whatever knowledge it might contain
   I will fight for it and bring it home 
   And off he flew, my most recent thought

   Who came to the home of absence
   And found the door wide open
   Swinging like a thumb on a knife blade

   He fell in love with absence
   And threatens now to return forever
   He is betrothed and thinks of nothing else

2. / Headland

   

   

   ENGGBR

   Waxy sporadic grass knitting the sand…

   A loudspeaker on a car proceeds slowly up the far quay
   and a wedge of sandpipers lifts in fright from the shore:
   The circus king is back for one last stand!
   Last performance of the season – tonight!

   His old gardening jacket hangs like a phantom behind the door
   I have a febrile energy for undoing endings
   tying the old twine to new twine, so when he came to me in a dream
   and asked to come back I was surprised
   to find myself rejecting him one last time

   pouring myself a solitary drink of seawater
   and reminding him of how we saw the old vessel of his body
   and it was no longer fit-for-purpose
   could not be recycled or rewound
   like string, or green glass or driftwood.

   The whole place reeks of him, who in life smelt of railways
   sugar soap and the commuter tang. Sand, salt,
   thrift and rotting wrack, and stubbornness:
   a vast firewood stack, a few elderly tools revived
   with rags and oily fingers to massage working parts,

   string tied into rolls of barbed wire.
   I am walking today on the hollow old dune
   September chill, the children are off buying shoals
   of pencils and the circus cut-outs on the sand bank
   are blanketed up for the year.

   What are years? They last no longer than the tide.
   I read the tables, I pore over them and seem to find relief
   in the mathematical appearance of water
   and how by degrees it creeps upon us,
   another ten metres to swill around the back gate.

   Last performance of nostalgia out here, where it burns 
   with an acrid smell. Throw on an armful of regret, it fires up
   odd-flamed like rubber or plastic flotsam
   or household chemicals glugging themselves empty.
   My fingers smell like his.

3. / The Ballad of Mabel

   

   

   ENGGBR

   ‘…her eyes filled with tears again as she went on, 'I must be Mabel after all’

   
   Mabel. Brown-eyed, unruly curls 
   She knows such a little!
   An empty vessel, a swine amongst pearls 
   A stain from the inkbottle.

   Her boots are old and the leather is worn
   (The scuffs are just spat on)
   Her dress is thin and her pinny torn,
   And a sign round her neck reads: slattern.

   She rubs her eyes with her fist till they’re sore 
   And dozes with her cheek in a palm:
   A sister that died, a father at war
   Nights jigging babies to calm.

   So many lessons to learn every night
   She nurses, reads in the lull –
   She must be a dunce, she can’t get it right:
   Dates just dance in her skull.

   Mabel knows nothing, her house is poky
   Her bed’s as narrow as a coffin
   And once she woke and her sister was choking
   And the doctor – he couldn’t do nothing.

   Mabel’s brother says he saw the Crimea
   But came home for his chest
   Once he told Mabel she had nothing to fear
   And felt under her dress

   Mabel knows nothing, nothing at all,
   And her face is aflame
   When she’s cuffed by the teacher and turned to the wall
   Her ears go pink with shame. 
   Mabel’s hoop is at home, she says
   She left her doll in bed
   Mabel is standing alone – she says
   She’s playmates enough in her head.

   Alice has a hoop and a man takes her boating
   And her tea is ready on the table
   Alice once had a dream she was floating
   In tears, and feared she was Mabel.

   The river is quiet, it’s late and dusk
   Mabel is wetting her toes
   And watching the fish swallow her crust
   In gold little O’s. 

   She’ll catch it, she thinks, if the splashes are heard
   Or if she’s seen –
   But here she can lie in her spreading skirt 
   And dream her own dream.