Strip Light
No more loving in the dark,
that inky aquarium
where we could be anything.
Though we unplug the lamps.
Though we blindfold each other
with scented masks.
Still, our eyelids glow like neon lips.
Still, our breath particles
fall up around us like digital rain;
sighs become strobes,
fog lights then searchlights
scanning for cons
on the lam from themselves
as we squint hard against the back walls
of our brains, star-fished and wanting
to stay lost but dirty
socks flame on the floor now
like night vision snakes and each liver spot
tea stain on bedside mugs
makes itself visible, re-dressing the room
in separate details
like a nightclub at closing
or a glass booth in which
a new school receptionist
calls me ‘the mother’
then turns to you, asking
brightly
‘And you are?’
The title of Caroline Bird’s latest collection, Ambush at Still Lake, kidnaps a once-popular movie genre that advertised its basic plotline in titles like Ambush at Tomahawk Gap. Bird heightens the dramatic and symbolic potential of hers by an imperturbable-sounding location, Still Lake. Although the title poem features an angrily satirised police chase, drugs-bust and arrest (“so many / Bobs and Bills and Bruces who couldn’t / wait to say, ‘I was there. In the bushes’”) its final metaphorical tilt is nightmarish: “We carry on / dying forever, always almost home.” In Strip Light, the attainment of home and the romantic ending it should signify are under threat.
