These Walls

Are black with soot, burnt red clay poking through the embers; crosswords
that are three hundred words across and eighty down frame my Mothers lips.

This yard is for the family dog, sheens of piss on the lower bricks, before
the cancer, before the hind leg cocked up and showered my Tonka trucks.

A place of childhood, of flying brooms and fleeing cats, of washhouses
and privies with grave stones for walls and bubbling cheese on enamel plates.

And the blue sky framed by the wall that is always growing.

Later, much later, comes a place of hedges – privet – and I am scared; what
lurks in them? Scratches, birds and the dead dried nests coiled like snakes.

I attack them with toy planes, prop shafts fashioned from discarded elastic,
wings that bow, vanish over the green roof of the hedge and hit the neighbour.

Hit her clothesline and there is balsa in the knickers of my first crush. Christine.
Her name conjures up sunloungers, balding lawns and the fear of being caught.

And the blue sky framed by the hedge is always growing.

Come adolescence, comes sadness, anger at my parents for being human; stupid
walls that I now throw up in the attempt to be a grown up having a tantrum.

But the walls now are no higher than my waist, no greater than the space between
me and the yard gate that my Mother weaved warnings around as I tried the latch.

For awhile my prop breaks, the elastic inside me goes, my body crumbles and
I go home to high walls, high hedges and clotheslines as far as the eye can see.

And here I am happy to be hemmed in by walls and rolling sky.