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Clare Crossman

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Weather Watching

My mother weather watches these days,
no longer goes out alone, and lives on bread.
In the brightness of the sun she can see ice
in gutters and the pavement's treachery.
 
Feathers she found in the wood below the house
she keeps in a glass pot. The sienna brown
of pheasants' plumes remind her of trees,
paths in the wood below the house.
 
She dresses neatly every morning, cardigan buttoned
to the neck, before she sits to look out at the street.
The stark red berries, the Christmas roses in the border,
as if she is waiting for the world to begin, like when she was a girl.
 
She says she feels stiffness: her legs are wearing out,
refusing to hold her up. At night I see her in the garden
in an old coat, a glimpse of snow white hair,
slowly walking the hedges that make the boundary, like a nun.
 
She is talking to my father, telling him how she sold
the house they shared. Almost as if each floorboard creak,
object mislaid, is him concerned for her in an upstairs room
where he rustles the newspaper.
 
He is with her somewhere waiting.
Like on December nights when they were glamorous
and he was a visitor in a strange town.
She comes back in, to weather watch again:
 
above the street lamps and the roofs which hold the sky line
of a northern town. Where seasons change slowly,
and one light from her room falls, square
onto a patch of grass. On a night of snowfall and stars.

Page(s) 56

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