Poems from A Book of Follies
The Secret Life of Houses
Maybe a house doesn’t shed its memories, walls absorbing shreds from conversations which reach a certain pitch. Plaster might, when silence acquiesces, like a shell held to a willing ear, unloose its powdery secrets, voice on faint echoing voice repeating what was said this hour a year or many more ago. Maybe the shiny surfaces in rooms store moments of intensity - freeze frames. If you stand in a place when the light’s right on anniversaries, they’ll ghost across the gloss paint, white on white. And sometimes images will overlay each other. Maybe floorboards hold the agitation of those who cross them but of bare feet only. Should you trace the looping grain with a receptive palm you get a sense of footfalls from the past – but nothing more. It may be just the passing cries of birds or shadowy games played by the sun or moon. Or a shift when the chimney exhales phantom smoke, the hearth at the heart of the house remembering flame.
First published in Orbis #167, 2014
The Book of Follies
tells me that whims made brick, or castles in the air of actual stone are not ridiculous to the minds that dream them. That lone arch on the hill - which doesn’t lead to a grand avenue with tall oaks sweeping one along a graceful drive towards a place to rest - is only a hollow promise where you step from scrub to scrub. A gateway to perhaps, guarded by standing stones, the land on all sides spiked with blazing gorse, seems too remote to reach. But those faux ruins in the grounds of stately halls whose upkeep is a nightmare to the trusts that take them on… Cracks in the crumbling curtain walls that were there from the start Deliberate ivy. No roof to stop the rain. Or stop the stars. The romance of a Gothic staircase spiralling up to nothing but a drop. You know this place and climb to watch the clouds part on a cuckoo land.