Martyn Crucefix – two poems

Flight

Two gloves have appeared overnight on my lawn. They make a pair. Two casually disposed hands are lying out there right now. Early Christmas gifts. I dare not. I have gone close to the glass and they appear to be, I’m sure they are, working gloves. I mean, they are not knitted kids’ gloves. They are not leather, fine leather, with an elegance you would need to pay good money for. They are not the kind of glove I’d grab from the drawer and venture out into last night’s snow with. These are – what’s the word – protective gloves. Can I see thicker patches of material on the pressure points, the palm, the pads of all five fingers? I think I can. Yes. The mystery is – ought I to have mentioned this before? – the back garden here is wholly surrounded by other gardens, walled gardens, stretching off for a hundred yards or so. No-one comes near. What working man or woman has passed over my garden during the night? At what height? On what sort of journey? I’m surprised they felt they would no longer need these gloves.

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Wet July

I need to get out of the house to buy garlic. I’ll put boots on. I will take down an umbrella from the bookshelves (I keep it between Atwood’s Alias Grace and Wolf Hall – in this house only books of verse are carefully arranged). I will take my door key from the pot on the dresser. How does all this sound? On the chequered path from the door to the gate, I skirt snails enjoying the unseasonably wet weather. She was here this morning (an early train) and she said, ‘I don’t think I know what snails eat’. Vegetation, we decided. Greenery. Wet greens. Snails love salads. No dressing. And now I have lost my train of thought. Garlic. Because whoever it was went shopping earlier in the week forgot it. Easy to overlook, I admit. Its creamy white, purple-daubed, fat-bottomed, multi-lobed little bulb filled with fumy aromas all wrapped (I know – the word implies intention and there has never been intention) in papery layers. Once, years ago, I lay out in the sun too long. For days afterwards, the skin across my back flaked off in little wisps of garlic wrapping. The bed was full of it. I step out through the rainy July afternoon.

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Martyn Crucefix: Between a Drowning Man (2023) is published by Salt. Recent publications: Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019); These Numbered Days, translations of Peter Huchel (Shearsman, 2019) won the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, 2020; translations of essays by Lutz Seiler, In Case of Loss, is forthcoming from And Other Stories in 2023. A Rilke Selected, Change Your Life, is due from Pushkin Press in 2024. Blogging at http://www.martyncrucefix.com.

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