Jenny King
From the Depths
Your rockery says my neighbour
speaking of what I call ‘the side of the drive’.
He’s telling me what I could grow there
but my mind is unrolling the word ‘rockery’
and here attached to the end of it is ‘stones’,
and at once I am five,
playing in the garden with model animals,
setting them up in hollows of damp gravel
between limestone peaks.
So many ages they’ve stood forgotten -
You’ll find plenty of things to plant there he says.
Behind the camels and elephants,
through a wartime window,
a baby sucks at my mother’s breast.
Yesterday I was allowed to watch
but today one of the twins is sickly
and I am out here
among the sharp-edged rockery stones,
seeking company.
War comes from beyond
but not the babies’ illness,
caused by my stored resentment.
Days later it’s dark.
I sit in the armchair trying to cuddle
the fierce blue rabbit. The twins have died.
Guilty, I clutch its unloved head
and stare through no longer blacked-out windows
past the humps of the rockery
where the malevolent crocodile and tiger
crouching neglected
await their resurrection decades later
when a bewildered neighbour in another garden
suggests aubretia but is thanked with tears.
Page(s) 57
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