Helen Mort

The Ground Effect

Hunched by the small lock, I watch the swans take leave,
how their wings’ pale chevrons skim the gloom
dipping low, then ploughing up through mist.
This trick of fight’s no accident, the way earth tilts bodies
upward, the way birds lift half a wingspan
from the water. It’s only when they’re close to ground
they feel the air grow buoyant.

I think of you again, how well you know
that drag and lift. How you stood on the bridge
at the head of the reservoir, staring at the bottom of the fall
and saw it glimmer green
like the glow of rare base metal. How you startled
at the headlights of a coach and turned your back on it,
stumbled for town and redbrick houses

and woke to a thaw, as though the sunlight
didn’t filter but sparked through your curtains.
You said it was some gift of light that brought you home,
the dim beams of the bus, or the first chink
of dawn. Watching swans, I can thank nothing
but the river, that close shift of water
that nudges us to air.

Carnation

They’ve built a Body Shop
in the old butcher’s district —
caul and pig skin giving way
to coconut oil, jojoba,
as if the cloying air
should remind us there’s no such thing
as a simple kindness —
like the spring carnations
fetched from earth to roadside
and, while you wait, beheaded
for your buttonhole.

The Collector

There’s something human in a broken chair.
You found them cast away and brought them here.
Tonight you are as close, impalpable as air.

Armless, seatless, cleft beyond repair,
sitting out the slow end of another year,
there’s something human in a broken chair.

Their bodies miss the weight they had to bear,
the strain of lifting what they once held near.
Tonight you are as close, impalpable as air.

I think of you on the gilded rocking chair,
its empty rigging and its bead veneer.
There’s something human in a broken chair.

I’ve sat with you without meeting your stare,
I’ve felt your quick breath whisper in my ear.
Tonight, you are as close, impalpable as air.

All you’ve left unfinished, blemished, rare.
All that’s rough and useless, rescued, dear.
There’s something human in a broken chair.
Tonight you are as close, impalpable as air.

An Editor’s Preface to the Language of Love (Volume 3)

Imagine love’s our youngest language.
Two lexicographers in charcoal suits
must spend their winters dotting parchment
to trace soft plosives, map conspiracies of lips and fingers.
How they’d stammer at the accent of a parting handshake
or tremble at the easy grammar
of heads tipped close. How they’d stand, hawk-eyed
and watch two skaters glide, poised to catch the syntax of their dance.

And like the fullest dictionaries, their books fall short.
They pause in the kitchen, stall over ritual tea.
They face each other speechless
and turn out pockets for the glance translated,
find nothing but ancient small change
shabby with a tender long since cast away.

George afraid of fingerprints

thought of
them on patted dogs, the purple leaves
of late geraniums, or gathering ancient
in the pockets of his winter coat.

Their gauze
was on his bookshelves, from the heartwood
to the spine of Henry James. They trailed him
as he clutched the banister at night.

At length, he thought of how they’d linger in the yellow
of his first wife’s hair, their savour
on her temples, or her own quick fingertips

and saw
them spread through every hand he’d shook
and every shoe he’d forced, still laced
onto his foot, and every door handle

he’d tried
and given up. The shape of them
when he closed his eyes, like something
jammed at the dresser back,

a vision
of his childhood street, the varnish tin
in the corner shop, its silver lid,
its weight so startling in his fist.

His mother’s voice.
The careful turning out and owning up.
Even now, his mark there in the centre,
those brilliant spirals burning on it still.