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Anna Crowe

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Greek Vase and Sussex Lady

in memory of Claire Crowe

The sideboard stiff with scones and tea-bread,
at least three kinds of cake;
your table was a dazzling beach
where silver gleamed like fish.
You sat pouring Darjeeling from a blue
and gold pot; white-haired, still beautiful;
black velvet ribbon and cameo at your throat.

This is how I remember you, and yet –
roller-skating in nineteen hundred and seven,
the first girl in your road to ride a bike –
you were the one who plunged
into the Black Sea out of Sussex,
out of your Brethren family, teetotal
to the bone; to surface with this drinking-
cup: two-handled kantharos; elegant
terracotta bossy with barnacles,
with wormy scribblings white as Downland chalk.

Some five years after your death,
we’re celebrating the move to the new house,
broaching your last bottle of blackberry wine.
Twice the strength of conventional stuff,
more potent than any Hippocrene
that might have brimmed your Attic cup,
it’s fairly laid us out among the tea-chests.
Sprawled in an orgy of bubble-wrap
with piled up crockery and dusty books,
it is as much as we can do
to raise our helpless glasses and salute you –
Lady of Eastbourne galloping off
on a horse of Sussex chalk;
sea-nymph roller-skating out of sight.

 

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