(PROSE POEM)
EVERY SO OFTEN ALONG MANOR ROAD
LISA DART
EVERY SO OFTEN ALONG MANOR ROAD
LISA DART
Every so often along Manor Road,
hanging over walls, the red lanterns of fuchsia with long, delicate, inner filaments, all those years ago. The road stilled in sun-cut heat, gulls and our slow, sauntering steps away from sea-sand days at the beach. Had I really forgotten what we called the popping flowers, starred red and purpling when open, before that, though, a pod almost plastic to the touch? I don’t know, but when you brought a straggled clutch of fuchsia in from the rain yesterday, there was my mother somehow in her blue towelling robe, her tanned and freckled shoulders glistening with oil, beach-mats under her arm and I knew again, the smell of salt on an inland wind, and seeing my grandfather in the cool interior of his house, fallen drunk. But this is too conscious now. The damp flowers I put in a glass jar, held all this without words, a kind of interfused of things, and my fingers of their own found, with the ease of expertise, the perfect pressure to release the fuchsia’s popping sound. My hand, a child’s. My mind, all those summers backlit by the lamps of time.
hanging over walls, the red lanterns of fuchsia with long, delicate, inner filaments, all those years ago. The road stilled in sun-cut heat, gulls and our slow, sauntering steps away from sea-sand days at the beach. Had I really forgotten what we called the popping flowers, starred red and purpling when open, before that, though, a pod almost plastic to the touch? I don’t know, but when you brought a straggled clutch of fuchsia in from the rain yesterday, there was my mother somehow in her blue towelling robe, her tanned and freckled shoulders glistening with oil, beach-mats under her arm and I knew again, the smell of salt on an inland wind, and seeing my grandfather in the cool interior of his house, fallen drunk. But this is too conscious now. The damp flowers I put in a glass jar, held all this without words, a kind of interfused of things, and my fingers of their own found, with the ease of expertise, the perfect pressure to release the fuchsia’s popping sound. My hand, a child’s. My mind, all those summers backlit by the lamps of time.
Lisa Dart has a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Sussex UK. A winner in the Grolier Poetry Prize USA (2004) and The Aesthetica Poetry Competition (2013), she has two poetry publications to her name: The Self in The Photograph: Tall Lighthouse (2005), and The Linguistics of Light Salt Publishing (2008). Her poems have also appeared in many poetry magazines. Her creative memoir entitled Fathom is forthcoming.
