Shedload – by Chris Andrews
RUNNER-UP, GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2023
I shove the shed door open. That smell:
turpentine, creosote, ivy, mouse.
Empty silhouettes on the pegboard.
Who kept all these broken promises
of repair? OK, all right, but I
can’t have been the soldering angel
who restored the heirloom crystal set.
I insert the dummy-like earpiece
and gingerly nudge the tuning dial
until the cat’s whisker starts to twitch
and a voice powered only by the waves
washing through your body all the time
stirs in its brittle nest of static.
Harvard Sentences meet the Buzzer:
The crooked maze failed to fool the mouse.
This test message is from Nadezhda.
Mother pattern and father matter
fother and mather me still I am
the stubborn promise of a fragment,
a toothing stone holding its low place
between a dreamed and a ruined house.
But less the rigour of crystals more
the diffusion pattern of a smile
fading and quickening passed from face
to unfamiliar face through a crowd.
Wherever I am written it is
on water and sand on drift and flow.
I will be gone. A determined search
will find only an abandoned coat.
Hard eyes aim for the plangent facet.
It would be neat if there was one way
to complete me. Dull too. I am not
a test to measure any quotient.
If you thought soft eyes had no designs
here is a whole fluid catalogue.
Some learners are prodigiously quick
but there are lessons that just are slow
like a pitch drop stretching (watch it live).
Be hot be cool you still have to lose
your shoes before you get those pants off.
I am the mystery artefact
only an abandoned search will find.
Every night I sing the very change:
the ivy reign changes everything.
I am the pattern hard eyes glance off.
There’s my alarm. I pencil a mark
on the baseboard. So long Nadezhda.
I have to take my medication.
A wattlebird flings two scarlet drops
into the deep green of lime tree leaves.
There is the wall and here are the gaps
left for us to garden in. A cat
steps gingerly among strawberries.
I may never sort this shedload out
but I’ve cleared a way into the mess
in a corner of the locally
(just how locally nobody knows
beforehand) in this corner of the
locally reversible collapse.
Image: Ariana Prestes/Unsplash
This poem appeared in Island 167 in 2023. Order a print issue here.
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