For my nephew, who I hope will read this one day and know how deeply he will always be loved. If only because he is, as my nephew, an extension of my sister, the only person I have ever loved.
for toby
observe.
there are cracks in the world.
at first small and threadlike, picked out in red
across
these spades you call my hands.
when we curl our palms like
peanut shells
dancing in
rotten black bins on the street,
the cracks curve over and under and disappear
under
the flat moons of our fingernails.
our fists ringed with
hairline fractures
of the skin, which flatten out and vanish
with the tightening of our hands. left. right.
we are
shadowboxing, face to face, fist to fist
but cushioned between with a slab of air,
gritty with pollution from the
motorway below.
we never make contact but we feel it just the same.
now in your face there are lines forming, whirling
like water pirouetting on open drains in a
hurricane pattern
around the soft black round gutter of your mouth.
would that I were there to see them grow
and reach out like tender vines across your skin,
and in your throat a
Scottish accent stirs and sends out tendrils
vapour-thin and insensible to the eye.
in later years your voice will crack,
splinter from inexplicable spurts of growth
and your bones will ache in time, you
piano, you,
time falling like hammers on your throat and limbs.
I remember the smell of your head
was like
newly varnished wood, an oasis of smoothness
in the cracked-and-weary
hospital ward.
observe. between us there is a
gulf or
chasm,
scar tissue bubbling at the borders, edging an
open wound
too wide to bridge with any falling tree or oar:
only the teeming
morning flight, filled with
cracked lips
shouting splintered welcomes into
mobile phones,
forms a double stitch across the gap
and fills out every crack.