Broken Crockery

Another flush of snow and deep cold at the weekend left me staring at the sleepy orchard. The pruning is done. The tidying is done. The birds are already in the trees, shivering even as they claim their territories for the coming spring. The grass is late in its spring flush. I was left with no excuse. I had to clean the study.

 ...seasilver succubus, bitter and bold ...

The study, or the Slough of Snoutingdingle as it has become known, is beset by fragments of mosaic and other projects. The tight "V" of shelves which once made it a cosy, impregnable refuge now make it seem somewhat closed and dark. I took two black bin bags and an armful of boxes and made an expedition into the dark interior.

...the gods lie graved here, our sawmarks on their bones...

I variously threw away, recycled, re-organised and 'lofted' material for a whole day, then moved furniture, hoovered and then dysoned, polished, opened and liberated until Lady Snoutingdingle pronounced that 'it looks like a bedroom again'.

...they say that in the softest breast, the darkest magic works the best...

At this point I knew that I'd gone too far. No matter. In the process I'd emptied two whole drawers in the desk, freed the work table, re-sorted all the mosaic tiles and filled one entire drawer with pens and another with impulse-purchased empty little notebooks. In the process of all that, I got to the bottom of each and every drawer. In the lowest strata, almost fossilised, I found all kinds of strange junk. There were old passes which I'd kept as if to prove to myself that I hadn't imagined visiting these rare and curious places.

...the city eats the worker and pumps him underground...

There were wrist bands from old festivals. There were bits of plastic in interesting shapes kept because I always have kept oddly shaped things, even when I was an infant. There were old coins. There were mundane things of my Father's too precious to throw away. There were bits of broken things, adapters for devices long discarded, spilled vials of glitter, broken watches, bits of electronics, sea-glass, pebbles, stones, fossils. Real fossils that don't appear to have actually formed in the compressed bottoms of these drawers. There were letters and cards from long ago, stamps, photos of people long dead, photos of children long grown, old pets. Photos, that is, not the pets themselves. The Hunter's puppy teeth. My puppy teeth. There were polished stones and the seeds of trees. There was a box full of once-scented balsam pine cones and herbs from a remote island in Newfoundland which I'd collected and sent as a present to an aunt going blind. Now dried and scentless they returned to me the last time I saw her alive. 

... I'll make good the aching before I grow old ...

In amongst all that detritus there was a tub of old data cards. Among those, a backup of old fragments of poems written log ago and stored in almost forgotten formats. These lines of unfinished poems are just like the other gems in the drawers. They were written for projects I can no longer remember, using thought processes that are no longer mine. They are like pieces of broken crockery, or fragments of masonry found at the bottom of a plant pot. Their form hints at what they once were, like holograms which contain a a hint of the whole in one shattered fragment. But now I can't imagine what they were destined for, or how I planned to finish each poem. My mind no longer follows those old furrows. The sparks of desire fly in different paths now and these old ones are burned out. They are curiosities. They can never be finished. 

...and among the tumult, high as oaks...

So I shall put them here, at the bottom of this post which shall be their plant pot, their home for a while until something else grows out of them. They are too old and inert even to be the seeds of something new, but they will let something new grow over them. In the way that old posts here grow through and over each other, they will provide good drainage. That one about dark magic, for example, was the opening of a book about elves. It's already pushing its transformed little head out of the compost, a dark, brooding little seedling of an idea.

...where lie my father's bones...

I'll make good the aching before I grow old.