I

    Sunday Morning


    Since I've stopped praying
    I've got so much more done:
    the fridge is cleaner, I read more fiction,
    the telephone is less often off the hook.
    Since I've done away with God
    I've done the bathroom up
    and tried a dozen different recipes.

    Since I've stopped considering the nature
    of the soul, the infinite, all that,
    I've found the joy of gardening;
    I garden without concern
    for the intricate glory of the Hollyhock.
    The news is always on, the multitudes
    keep dying, and what's one less prayer
    circling the stratosphere?

    He'll find me, if he chooses,
    he'll lift me like a woolly two-year-old,
    secure me to the fold. Meanwhile
    I'm eating chocolates in bed,
    the words of the psalms dissolving like an old dream,
    I'm right here with a magazine,
    – Shock New Pictures, All Your TV Favourites –
    the church bells making a distant din,
    the duvet warm and comforting,
    the tumble dryer just spinning, and spinning.


    Oversleeping


    And there are the clothes you dropped, the arms of a green shirt
    raised in surrender, the slough of nylon
        and a dress of apricot wool.

    Sit up and see the sheets fine-wired with pubic hair and eyelashes,
    skin cells scattered like flakes of prehistory.

    Your clothes have been going out of fashion,
    quickly like the turning of a pear, slowly like a bone bleaching.
          No matter,

    reclaim the leather boots you loved so much,
    zip them right up to the knee and walk;

    you are Jairus' daughter, passing through
    the convalescent house, its shelves of misremembered books,
          its shivers of dust.

    What else is there to do but open windows, let the outside tumble in
    like washing from a glorious machine?

    The day is half over, but still blue. Step out and balance
    on the ledge. Below a brown bird darts
       over the garages
    and is gone,
    another yanks a worm from its clay bed and flies with it –
         fly worm, fly!

    The pillow-creases in your cheek smooth to make you young again.
    Your leg hair stands to gold attention. Courage now, step out,

    feel the plummet, then the catch and you're up,
    swimming in cold, eyes streaming.

    There is the park where you broke your wrist, there is the church
    where you first met God and the playground of children

    whose children are running through cities now, as the river
    runs, a silver speck, coursing underneath

    the disappearing viaduct, running through the valley, past
    fields where horses gather, trapped in their nature.

    The houses reposition themselves
    and there are your arms, the arms that used to be useless,
        parting pale belts of cloud.


    April


    Spring again
    But from where no telling
    Sweet as the spring
    That went before

    Same old story
    But still compelling
    Blossom reminding
    What blossom is for

    Question the trees
    But they're not telling
    How they obey
    An impossible law

    Question the mind
    But it's not telling
    How it gives back
    What was gone for sure

    Something stirs
    In a blacked-out dwelling
    Forces the lock
    Of a double-locked door

    That face again!
    But from where no telling
    Sweet as the face
    That was lost before


    The New Mothers


    They have mastered the buggy –
    they understand the awkward catch,
    what force of pressure makes it give.
    They wheel with confidence, more
    confidence, they wheel through afternoons
    of amnesiac light, through mornings
    loud with rain and evenings when
    the sky is soothed to pink, thinking of
    the secrets recently unshelled, the ones
    their mothers kept so long, the bloody
    songs of sealed rooms which day by day
    grow faint and fainter still.
    They pass by women being wheeled,
    women sinking in their chairs who once
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