Tests and treatment. Hand pain after punching a wall. You cannot be everything they need. Your jawbone dislocates in full flowered bloom. You cannot be everything. You pop the unhinged joint into place with weary resignation. Swelling timber beams squeeze out freshly hammered nails. You return to the drawing room where your lit fingertips glow embers, searing back to charred bone. The same tired parlour trick year after year. (You cannot be) Everything we need. Around you the house groans loud and spreads its gabled wings.
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Delivered from a crisis of common names, you ripen with the first blush of binomial nomenclature. Latinized your epithet lavishes sinews of scientific syntax. Rifling days upon days through abundances, ambiguities, you carefully repeal the herball's vulgar order. Slow! Lest one slip of the tongue cite sentimental synonyms.
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To hell with garden boundaries. More dour proscriptive tendencies to dull your senses. Singed or burned, dug or doused in herbicide, you cannot be eradicated. Your ornamentals outlast frenzies. Thrive alone for generations. Ramblers trace your cottage rose across their wracked foundations. The patron saint of outside species.
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Fired soils crack as ancient stoneware. Amputated boughs slump to heat-kissed orchard, pale dirt. Each day another scorched earth policy. The garden blooms its pallid clumps. An open wound of chronic maladies. At least the rugged weeds in fervour, and by god the all fermenting stench. You shrug off blistered skin, but
Words cannot convey your faith in ruins.
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You spend these quiet years unravelling. An ungroomed, unbrushed spectre, half-haunting half-lit hallways. Disuse spreading with every broken fixture, blocked chimney, rain-rotted plank. Year by year the liveable space closing in. You and the house shrinking down and stretching out. Spread thin in sync, a cluster of joints, a bundle of tissues animated in parts. A patchwork of discreet absences adding up to less than the expected sum. Your threadbare decline worn as warm as comfortable cardigans.
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The parlour folds. The second floor and attic succumbing to a not insubstantial case of rot. Ears ring with the thrust of collar beams through floorboards. Rafters exploding under sudden pressure. The room a ricochet of iron nails. Regal linoleum ripped apart. A florid extravagance of shredded wallpaper. Outside the gable roof sags limply, sloughing burnished tiles. A chorus of dropped ceramic. A whole wing of the house sinking into itself, shedding ornament. Like a mushroom spoiling in the forest, its shape collapsing into clouds of spores. Window panes burst as frames compress, the back porch spitting out a single splintered breath of glistening shards, broken steps, Summer bench slats. The lawn a spread of ochre panelling, puzzle pieces of carpenter’s joy.
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Lungs drought-baked draw dry breaths of dust. Smothered in blankets, circled in chalk, you are a consecrated granuloma splintered deep in heart and home. A desiccated mass of foreign body trauma.
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Bryophyta gather ephemeral, perennial, steady as the glaciers cut clear through this land. Your body slumps to acid-drenched carpet of Hylocomium splendens, Pleurozium schreberi, tufts and tufts of Dicranum scoparium.
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Buried beneath. You are the old house smell saturating floorboards. The unscrubbable blackening spreading through beams. A jangle of loose teeth and finger-bones wedged out-of-sight in timber folds.
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Bone-deep damp laps at walls and windows. A frame of timber beams laid centuries past, set with rippling panes through which a little of the weary morning light refracts. You breathe in breathe out attuning to the house. Lungs gulping shallow, sick miasma. Body a languid huddle of contractions, expansions. At release bliss blooms an abscess, your skin a copper-tarnished mesh of weeping pores. You split and spill through every cobwebbed crevice. Stone foundation. Hearth and threshold.
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