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Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

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Chris Considine

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Visiting my Daughter

She is sitting on the bed
in the corner of a room
that is a pale cube
of fluorescent light.

She has grown smaller
than twenty.
She could be a rag doll
among her stuffed animals.
A round face
emerges out of shapeless woolly clothes.
Small feet stick out
wearing children’s socks.

The room smells faintly
of stale flowers, tangerines
and uneasy sleep.
A tall young doctor
crouches down to converse
on her level.
She speaks in a little dull voice -
and to the nurse, who interrogates her
from full height.
Yes, she has had her pills.
No, she doesn’t want to go
and set supper in the day room.

Once in a dream I turned
and saw her baby legs
in blue cablestitch tights
vanishing from a window.

I feel her falling now
not past the dirty glass
which to deter suicides
will scarcely open,
but through splinters of light
down through the hospital tower,
past foundations cracking open
into a deep place
crowded with shapes that she sees small but clearly.

I want to shriek, lunge,
grab at her, dig my nails in.
She wants to tell me
what it feels like to fall
and fall and fall
and what she sees
coming up to meet her.

Instead, we make small talk
until it is time for my train
- I have a job to go to
fifty miles away.
I have to leave her huddled
in that high white corner.

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