Cambridge in October

The smell of lemons on linoleum,
Early morning, as I tread the boards.
There are four flights of stairs and a door.
It takes two hands to open, and a foot.

The light is white filtered through grey,
Not warm like handfuls of earth at sunset,
But hallowed and pure like a well-scrubbed tomb.

There is a coffin in my room.
This is not a metaphor.
It wears a serious expression;
As does the light along empty corridors.
I have been given a list of instructions
upon how to tend it.

Only the worms inside the wood are amused.
Their faces look at me, and not into, or through.

Three days I have stood waiting
for the body to appear.

I do not sit, here.
I perch, alert like a startled bird.
I am sorely wounded -
A sacrificial red breast upon a field of crows.

When I am gone they will dust for prints
and remove me cell by cell.

I know I will pay
for shedding my skin;
for leaving an impression -
now ever decreasing;
through not eating,
through growing thin.

They slide wafers under the door to keep me alive.

Finally I will pay
For the release of white mice
Who cannot feed themselves and may die.

Each day I ask myself “What am I?”,
That alive inside this paper built Eden
My body should, like a worm-ridden apple,
turn inwards and begin to feed upon itself.



*


The Daring Young Girl on the Flying Trapeze

This is where it begins; in your wake
Awaiting the return of the trapeze.
As your descent punctuates the silence
Applause from the crowd erupts like a wave.

You cannot pin it down, though you try,
The first hand which moved to disturb the air.
It leaves you as a mime before the mirror.
Talking to glass. Open mouthed in despair.

Balloons approach like shining buddhas,
Impart their advice, then leave me behind.
“Give in to gravity, you cease to feel”.
“Movement through space will slow time”.

Here, awaiting the return of the trapeze,
There is a world woven into the wire.


Nicola Brindley