Carola Luther
Waking to the Cat
For the hollowed out inside
of mummies: spices, sand, linen
mud. Lichen also, to give bendability
to the corpse, preserving tissues
and scents of sweet smelling
stuffings. Apt botanical for belief in
resurrection of the body, switching
off as it does in adverse conditions.
Maplike rhizocarpon geographicum
survives in the Arctic, on, off, on
for 8,600 years. I who fear death
would find comfort in waking to cinnamon
camphor-oil, myrrh, my chest warmed
by pseudevernia furfuracea, this frangible
head like an egg, guarded with patience
by a sacred African Ibis, and purring, purring
beside my frangible hand, my frangible cat,
my Mau, my Mau, still with some of her fur.
Sometimes in the forty-ninth year
he looked at her in the same way
as you might look at a mirror.
Saw about her mouth, a closure,
like shuttings not quite shut,
or fenestres, uncurtained and unlit,
windows of the sort
you might see in Edinburgh or Leeds,
the older, richer parts of town
now flats to let.
He sees a rage or sorrow there, a wanting
for someone to shout Stop!
(as if that alone would clear a stoppage
on say, a railway line, branches
he always hoped, from last night’s storm,
not a rageful and despairing human.)
He must calm himself, forget
his own rage, allow his heart
to open up. And if he opens
wide enough, wide as a summer window,
he prays today he’ll be surprised,
and he finds he is
surprised—there—that glimmer
in the periphery of his sight, her
looking out towards the garden,
lovely, unguarded, lit, believing herself
in that moment to be unwatched,
not thinking herself
a picture behind the open window,
her face lighting up, as if to fly free, or forgive,
he hopes it’s to forgive,
forgiveness being a light to him, like sunset
streaming through the grasses of a forgotten,
rather than a lost, or imagined pasture.
Snow in Autumn
(i)
So sudden the cold Unknown
talon clenching a passerine
The leaves on the careless tree
play dead twist inward
bearing snow on yellow-green backs
They could be finches
their burden a raptor too early
too deathly white
(ii)
Everything quiet
black and white balance
Branches carry
white insubstance
In the small breeze
powders drop
as if they hold weight
The black river accepts them
not stopping
not stopping
Layered
(i)
I miss other countries.
City pavements made of stone.
This surprises me.
Ochre stone
so shiny after rain.
You come to mind, your wet shod feet.
Though I am certain it was dry that day
only an hour from the airport.
And I see how light and time lie lightly
over themselves
like yellowing paper
stacked high in an attic room
sunlight from the window
making a container of light with dust
that could also be pollen
adrift in this garden.
How slowly it moves
the afternoon.
(ii)
My feet on this city pavement
are yours. I remember the shoes
not pretty but shaped for comfort.
And I think of all the unknown shoes
that have hollowed these stones,
the concavities of air
they’ve left behind.
I could pound grain
in that indentation.
Now after rain a shimmering pigeon
dips its neck and drinks,
orange eye so deep
it seems to see
depressions of stone are shaped
like water, circle
on uneven circle.
As if a stone could dream
the rings of a tree
and the tree could remember
an October pond
brown water sunlit and shivering
after something new
had fallen in.
Perhaps an acorn.
Carola Luther moved to the UK from South Africa in 1981 and now lives in Yorkshire. Her most recent collection is On the Way to Jerusalem Farm (Carcanet, 2021).