Retta Bowen
Letter
I met you in Calcutta. The streets were flooded with heat;
we breathed an exchange of shallow pockets of air, our white clothes
beiged in minutes, and when it rained that once
dirt threaded down my face from my hair.
The bag-liners we slept in were smeared across with brown –
earth that seemed to fall from the sky through a gauze
to dust us. Each night, elastic sleep, in which we’d reach out
and writhe to fend off the heat, as the fan paddled and paddled.
Our skin shining with sweat made us radiant, slipping
out of the day’s grasp; our feet thirsting to flipper in the Hoogli river
ran ahead, and we only looked back at the ledge
to the pain of streets. In a silver spark of a flash I caught your face
blurring as you turned, a quivered smile.
Now I stand with my Marigold hands, like wellies, in the suck
of washing up water, and look out on an English sky lathering a moon
anxiously in the blue, as if there might not be time later.
A letter arrived from you today – I tore open those expectations
to get to you – a perfect J bolstered by crosses. You say
I fell in love with a girl here last Spring –
and I watch for her face in the loop of her name, the long hair I hear
as I hold a rubber hand to my stubbled skull
and make me love me.
we breathed an exchange of shallow pockets of air, our white clothes
beiged in minutes, and when it rained that once
dirt threaded down my face from my hair.
The bag-liners we slept in were smeared across with brown –
earth that seemed to fall from the sky through a gauze
to dust us. Each night, elastic sleep, in which we’d reach out
and writhe to fend off the heat, as the fan paddled and paddled.
Our skin shining with sweat made us radiant, slipping
out of the day’s grasp; our feet thirsting to flipper in the Hoogli river
ran ahead, and we only looked back at the ledge
to the pain of streets. In a silver spark of a flash I caught your face
blurring as you turned, a quivered smile.
Now I stand with my Marigold hands, like wellies, in the suck
of washing up water, and look out on an English sky lathering a moon
anxiously in the blue, as if there might not be time later.
A letter arrived from you today – I tore open those expectations
to get to you – a perfect J bolstered by crosses. You say
I fell in love with a girl here last Spring –
and I watch for her face in the loop of her name, the long hair I hear
as I hold a rubber hand to my stubbled skull
and make me love me.
Retta Bowen studied in Leeds and Manchester and now lives in London. She was co-editor of Poem for the Day Two published by Chatto & Windus in 2003.
Page(s) 19
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