Fingerprints Other Traces and
Poetry from Lancashire and Cumbria
Deborah Swift Martyn Halsall Mark Carson Maya Chowdhry Emma McGordon 005
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Contents
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Foreword Deborah Swift Boots on the Moon The Stone Rubbing Cairn Self-portrait with Binoculars Obituary Martyn Halsall Scalpay Legend Blackthorn Rembrandt’s Sandwich Mark Carson Cat’arsis Per Ardua ad Nauseam Offshore System Designer makes Dodgy Decision Maya Chowdhry Barter Kali Mirchi been sprouts Genderality Emma McGordon Death at 22 from a Curable Disease Gutter-Witch Blue Black Zac
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Boots on the Moon
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They’re still up there, size nine-and-a-half, medium – where micro-meteoroids swirl like milk in a washbowl of ink. The boots stand nights colder than the black silk skin in an Eskimo’s borehole. Silicon is unstable in the gases exhalation, so the soles crumble in their own footprints. Their buckles have fallen away, and glint, float silvery against the pock-marked crust. Grey sandstorms wear the man-made fibres thin; threads of polyester detach themselves, glow softly as they sashay into space. In their linings, yellow plastic bladders designed to protect and cushion the foot, encapsulate the 1960’s breath. The rock samples are calibrated, boots left where they stand, their precise weight in rocks, carried home barefoot. The air bends, quivers in the boom of the shuttle’s returning velocity; the men begin to plummet, stretching toes through zero gravity to terra firma. A shoemaker in Delaware inhales, sees the shuttle break the waves, looks up at night to where his outbreath hangs, left behind in the yellow stomachs of their footfalls.
The Stone Rubbing I hold the film of paper over the stone as she rubs in the paste of pearly graphite. A shoal of fish bloom from the white space, then dart away under silvery dust. The paper pecks in the wind; from above the marbling of shadows, a flock of birds calling.
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The blue sleeve of her raincoat is bruised black from rubbing, kneading other ages into here and now. The sandstone blushes under her lead caress. Her gold hair blows; a Midas in reverse, as she tells me how Winifred Nicholson teased out the mysterious braille, her hands blackened rain-clouds drifting. The cup and rings won’t come, reluctant to be lured into a flutter of paper. Fixed in hard crag, the pebble-in-a-pond circles have sat in the same question for centuries. She kneels, fingers absorbed in the marks – axe tracks, old grooves and faint trails – shoals and flocks following.
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Scalpay You could sit out here all day; nothing would happen. A tide might stain the slipway in the lochan, gulls would glide over, trailing cries and shadows, hard plait of gneiss and turf folds darken, lighten, small waters smooth, then pattern to a salmon skin.
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Sky would be kneaded, rise to spread a squall creating a widening stipple on open water and blot the painter’s sheet or punctuate a line before it’s written, glaze a new stone as it’s lifted for setting, matt the colour scheme of lichen along brown runnels of a worn tin roof. You could look at the rock and count four billion years, read of a range of mountains higher than Andes or Himalaya, see these hills worn low by this same rain, sense how it was changed gradually each day; how it goes on.
Legend The rest had gone back up the track to the rented farm. She stayed with her two daughters by the shore, facing the island wide as a mother’s welcome. Light gentled, oil lamp turned down in slow motion. She heard the families’ voices fade, the odd laugh left hanging, protest, squeal of a tease. They watched far coastlines haze, tide gather evening, sky’s glowed hearth settle to the ash of their driftwood fire.
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Daughters drew stillness round them like their blankets, shared the watch with her; poised gulls, frill of tide, last burn of sunlight coppering sharpened crags. One note. A ripple, scale, then tentative chords; soon a tune fingered, floated, keyed to breeze. A solo clarinettist far down the shore riffing dusk; drift in woodsmoke; pipes knife-sharped as oystercatchers always dressed for evening. Each note stroked through hushed brush of folded water. Do you know the story of Orpheus? They shook their heads. He played a lute, a small harp you can hold. Its music made the world: trees, plants and flowers, those summits across the bay where clouds are rising. The children waited, quiet for once and listening to the man who could summon nightfall out of music. In a moment their mother would say: we’ll have to go now. But not yet. Not till the world that he played was finished.
Cat’arsis Cat fur was used for early electrostatics experiments, before the Wimshurst Machine and the van de Graaff Generator. With van de Graaff caress I sweep cat-ions to the tip of each tapered hair stripping them free charging her up to a perilous puss-potential.
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Lithe with gigavolts on dielectric paws she fairly crackles with coulombs. Now, a deft approach to the tufted tip of her conductive ear. Phuitt! Six thousand microns of desiccated air crack and a whiff of ozone drifts away.
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Per Ardua ad Nauseam The oceanographer’s motto: through difficulty until seasick The door crashed back. Diesel roaring a man falls stumbling, shaking and grabbing my shoulder he shouts yells by my ear, slams out. The bulb burns orange.
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The ship is uneasy: rolls hangs falls. The brush in the toothglass topples, drops a relentless irregular beat. Dulled, behind my eyes the dazzle pulse slows to a sickly heartbeat. Up in the lab, squalor: ashtrays and cups, cans, crusts and the hot smell of solder, logbooks, litter, tooth-marked biros. Tubes flare out the features of unshaven faces, grey-blue from the shades.
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Fathoms below, the towfish streams sensors through layered Atlantic. Five little pens scritch a trace on the scroll; one pen is still. We go through the motions of hope, speed up, slow down, high gain, low gain, no gain.
Barter i swapped a purple sports bra for my first dress ready-made didn’t recognise myself as the skirt skirted its mosaic mirrors suburban Noida ringing in the mid-distance in the second dress i was shrouded in a bluebell’s bell the seams were seamless traced my spine despite the lack of measurements she said she’d dreamed of me naked
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i imagine her in the sports bra its lycra pinning her breasts to her rib cage she told me she’d worn it in Defence Colony Bazaar acquiring haberdashery in small newspaper packets tied with string later i found a pink ribbon in an inside seam an embroidered motif that grazed my navel and wondered what it spelled
Kali Mirchi kali mirchi predicts the fall of nations pursuing a palatable future in the Malabar mangroves her emerging flower-spike ripening red climbing the coffee crop blackened skin abraded to white to pepper a jar of Patak’s
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kali mirchi (Punjabi for black pepper)
Death at 22 from a Curable Disease Outside they will be getting married, buying houses deciding on tea-dipping biscuits. Outside they will hold each other until they squeeze the very life from that which they cherish. Outside all of this will be repeated in 18 or 15 or 20 years time.
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Outside they will die young and know little, and I will hear about this as I pass through isles of supermarkets. Outside they will smoke each other’s cigarettes and believe themselves to have lived to live and to have life forever. Outside they will not know of WH Auden, Anne Sexton or Barry Patrick MacSweeney, nor will they care to know.
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Inside there will be two lights, a radio, several books scattered, a half drunk lager, an empty coffee cup, a pen with chewed lid.
Inside there will be no knowledge of the latest eviction or the care for the status of celebrity. Inside four plates will be washed, one to be used again tomorrow. Inside there may be the anger of a young man, although outside they will not feel his wrath or dependability or envy in the slightest.
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Outside they will go blind in one eye and again I will hear about this through temporary connections buzzing with sounds of news-speak, gossip and have-you-heard-abouts. Inside and outside we will know that these connections are futile, full of non-passionate failings, too late for preventing avoidable accidents and opportunities missed for diagnosis.