Ruby Robinson

Half

Half

Children try certain things to occupy themselves, like speaking with two voices simultaneously          or throwing their voice.  Lying down in the top bunk willing the light switch OFF or ON.

Who hasn’t tried these things?

Where, on the landscape of the great bosom

of grandmother, is the tank situated? There was always a good grandmother and a better one.

A good and a bad mother. One with a look and one with legs apart. A coin lands on its head or it lands on its tail. Materially it lands, regardless of probability.

Did you know clouds and sky make up the other half of everything? Time and cognition being as they are, I hadn’t noticed for a first time, until now, the scent of roses and the stench of hawthorn.

My grandmother drove a car into her eighties. She would run

red lights. Her daughter told me this, although I never witnessed it.

When my grandmother married my grandfather he could touch his thumbs and his forefingers together around her tiny waist.

Like this.

There’s a kind of knowledge that evades straightforwardness.

It’s put inside with no indentation. How would anyone know it’s there and not mere fabrication?

We all wear tracking devices nowadays and nobody would accuse anyone of wild thoughts. I am being tracked. Technically it is true.

Within your pelvis all the hidden doors are off their hinges

I used to keep a pair of shoes in a bag in a bag in a wardrobe.         I used to wash and starch and iron my shirts in secret.

and your mother

and your mother’s mother can tell. They must be communing with scientists in a control centre high up where,

like as I am to a hound, I don’t feel to look.

​

There are some hypotenuses you simply cannot calculate,

having constructed by hand the shape, the territory.

***

Let’s not gorge ourselves on thought when the senses are in optimal muscular condition.

For example, try not to think of a purple tank.

Quite impossible, no?

My, I hear, or our?

Heart is floral. Floral meaning “of flowers” – ours and mine.

Not a single flower. Let me overstate.

Interchangeable.

Fields and fields of – and so on; brutal, fleshy heads.

All this thinking is the size of a tank, a boulder

in a river, a great stuck-ness, a thickening in the throat,

an epiglottis, trapped.

All the hounds I will never know are howling

for me, and I for them.

See our two eyes ajar, yellow as streetlight,

yellow as a screwdriver handle.