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Rose Flint

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Hold Me

Everything is too big now my hands soft clouds
hunt about independently, only loosely
attached to my arms
but I am thin
a small deer bone of white
curve face in horror
at how the oaks loom. The garden, oh
the garden. Everything twines and kinks
and goes up swarming and swarming and in the house dust
collects like rabbit fur under the armchairs
f ills the red carved tufts of the turkish carpet
the mouthy gapes under sofa arms.

This is all too far, too high, a bridge to fall from -
I can never do this

Can’t keep the garden
where it should be.
And it’s not verdant or beautiful not
that fullness of camellia, primula, trained mimosa.
Can’t keep the house in my pocket
of holes where everything falls
into the street and becomes water drops
like tears washing away. All the shirts
are big as Fathers, all the shoes have souls
big enough to hammer air into light
as they tread up and up white stairs
surely going to heaven, the child asleep, and no
I am down here and it’s all to do
garden and house and my books and the dog
and you
and you
with your bags full spilling into the hall
too big, too tall, too much
to hold even in fat fingers like these
out-of-control clouds
that waver in these storms and terrific thunders.

Hold me
a moment let me be still
put down the world for a moment and hold me, still.

 

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