Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Come to think of it, in a certain light
it looked ochre, all down the staircase,
marking the site of some terrible accident,

except that we all knew it had been tea
and that it was me who had dropped the tray,
collecting every fragment before an audience

of twenty in the hotel lobby, going to pieces
but acting like it was a regular clear-up.
The interior scar I lived with for months

like your death at twenty-one. Six weeks
before you jumped, you gave me your old desk -
but it was only after you'd leapt that I found

the inkstain in one of the rosewood drawers
and thought about the colour of the stones on the shore.
...

Tails you lose, so for the exhibition
I fired ten ceramics as the apology
you never got round to making

in pen and ink. This one's a bijou collage
of all the phoneboxes I cried in as a waitress
between split shifts. That one's my glass slipper.

You see, it fits perfectly. Manolos, if you must
know. And here's a game of poker
made from the buttons of a shirt you left

behind, twisted and stuck on green felt.
Let me get this right, you both being lawyers,
did you say you were the loser and she the liar

or vice versa? Word for word, please.
Oh, and, can I have that in writing?
...

Stripped to the waist in a hotel room in Arles,
the sword-valet has already unbuttoned
the top three of the matador's mother-of-pearl
clasps when I, the cameraman, am ushered
in with the drapes half-shut against the molten
pavements, the faint baying of the crowd's desire
to see once more the blood-spattered ornate vineleaves
woven in gold all the way up his thighs.

Cocksure in his cape he'd strutted beaded and clean
into the ring, prim in a waistcoat, on fire
for the bull as I was for him, my lens trained
on his torso, tasselled to the hilt. His arms'
geometry provoked the horns to a goring.
Then raised on the shoulders, an ear in each hand.
...

Above the stove his longjohns hang
where he pegged them on June 10th 1911.

A pin-up of a girl's naked back
beside his bunk is curling up to his

spilt shelf of charts and logs, the diary's yard
of ink. Frozen to death, outside,

the remains of a dog, chained in ice.
And here, Ponting's darkroom, reliquary

of vials and plates splayed like cards.
On the table where Scott raised a final

birthday glass, a visitor has tried a slice
of a hundred-year-old ham. Tins

of boiled mutton, brawn, Tate & Lyle
syrup lie thick and slow as the snow's

drift, preserving an era's hour.
And what of the women they left behind,

pausing each night on the stairs
to wind the heart of a clock,

folding and unfolding clothes, reading
and re-reading letters, weighing

each word, like a body?
...

Last week I saw it again, staggering
like a shot beast in the high tide,
the pavilion a skull half sunk, gnawing

at its stilts. A telephone receiver swung
from the tangled guts of the bar.
Of course I have witnessed dereliction before:

mantelpieces three floors up,
the remnants of passion fluttering
in the torn wallpaper of virtual rooms,

the cross-section of intimacy.
But this reclaiming by sea of our
tentative steps leaves me

precarious: those Saturday nights
when I would catch my breath outside
its stuccoed façade, stilettoed,

tiptoeing between strips of sea foaming
below, a note from a saxophone
thrown to the wind, hearing his voice

on the line half a century ago,

still swaying there.
...

And so it happened I found myself
for the first time in two years
propping up the bar of the Three Tuns
in Borehamwood, not really
my local, only I'd not got
much choice, I was thinking
as I pulled out the only five-pound note
I'd seen all year, uncurling it
on oak like a revelation when
some bloke tapped my elbow
as they would in the days before
I changed my clothes
to white sheets, black shoes.
So where're you from, love?

I presumed the startled look meant
he knew the place, so as he choked
on his third Guinness I recounted
how, barely an hour ago, I had
unveiled and crept below
the level of the hedge to avoid
setting off the lights, thereby
alerting the nuns who would
otherwise have had to summon
a committee to determine whether
permission should be granted
or not on this occasion; and why
I felt the need to leave the grounds
at all. Why indeed, I thought, as I
tiptoed back to aforesaid hedge
in the only pair of heels

I'd kept. Exactly when
they took against me was
hard to say as I'd scrubbed
enough floors in my time and
cooked a hundred pies, picked up
all the leaves in autumn, one
by one, visited the elderly, sick
and dying, led vespers, sang and read.
The thought I might be,
well, writing a book was
a little troubling.

So when I tried to apply
to travel the two hundred and
sixty miles to spend one day
with my mother who was
dying in the hills, the Superior said
she must be really ill for you
to even think of asking.
When they finally voted me
out, in my own time, of course,
but preferably before the 4th,
I could think of only one reply
as to ‘whether I'd be able
to re-adjust without help':
not in these shoes.
...

The day of your post mortem
I cleaned the kitchen
to blot out the hour you'd be cut up,

made apple pie, scrubbed the table
again, wondering how
you were getting on. If you were here

you'd be sat there with your pinking shears
thinking in appliqué, stencilling
quilted queens: Branwen, Marie-Antoinette,

long-necked with their net coronets,
sewn into chiffon gowns, sequins pinned into their eyes,
silk lips slit into diamonds, their cheekbones

slashed indigo lines.
I reconstruct your mosaic face
in my head as I wash up, I,

restricted by nine stitches in my back,
itself a collage of red lines and thread,
my deckle-edged tumour out of the picture now.

We were trying to piece you together,
your new tenant explains on the phone,
what you leave behind tells a story, doesn't it?
...