In All Our Clothes

IN ALL OUR CLOTHES

SINÉAD MORRISSEY

1

Arms up in space says my mother
standing in my bedroom in 1976
and I hold up both my arms
as to an altar or firing squad
and the whole of the summerlong day
peels off of me broken glass
in the playground my skipping rope
I think I must stagger slightly
under the tug of the first
few minutes of Kojak getting yanked
back over my head then tossed
on the floor like an animal
my bear my white-paper folded
boat down comes my jammy-top
a quick pop and a poke of my two
hands out and I’m ready when I
lower my wrists at last red planet-
dust glitters on my fingertips

Give and whatever you give shall be
given back urges our protagonist
standing on the dock
in Stories From the Life of St Nicholas
not later not piecemeal his one visible
arm bent impossibly at the wrist
his tonsure covered in blood-red cloth
two blue angels coax grain
from the sky as if wringing the palace
sheets while a single overturned
barrel rains wheat on the ships
anchored in the harbour
as generously as they empty
there is no deficit he insists in beneficent
syntax his head its own dazzle
when the universe is a weighscale
as finely calibrated as
this and this equals that

Here is how you search a house
for evidence do not ring first
do not check if children
may be present wear HandSafe
GN91 blue nitrile gloves downplay
the seriousness of the case for ease
of access say routine say over
soon underdress ascend and descend
the stairs like Jacob wrestling
the inevitable bring leaflets
Feeling Suicidal Call This Number
see-though plastic bags there will be
plenty to take away too heavy
to carry you must carry it anyway
call back later the woman
left standing in the wake
of the arrest won’t have heard
a word you’ve said

Space sparkled above my head
when Pluto was still a planet
but in summer got stagefright
what nightscene was this no stars
no intergalactic crackle just
the one sunset refusing
to bleed out ABBA singing
Money Money Money
on repeat I lay awake listening
to the estate dogs sirens catcalls
a boy kicking a can
kicking a can along the alley
inside was warm and safe beneath
the blankets my brother beside me
slurred murmur of my parents
downstairs outside meant pocket-
knives fires wild teenagers I never knew
what they’d do next

They cut up the Majesty altarpiece
with knives and fretsaws
peeled off the Queen of Heaven
from the Crucifixion front from back
the open gilded plain of Mary
indigoed on her throne
flanked by saints and angels
from the busy killing boxwork
of the Passion its minor parsimonies
brutally cumulative no way out for Christ
in these rooms and porticoes a cock
crows above his white blindfolding
Mother of God be thou the cause
of peace for Siena and of life
for Duccio because he painted thee
thus each one of his twenty
worshipping angels
wearing the same face

Not hard to paint the devil
because he’s quicksilver-quick
magnetism sparking from his fingertips
hard to paint an absence or a lack
negative integer defined purely
by its opposite far restive
starving galaxy charity
cannot touch hence
this sad botched counterfoil
in The Temptation of Christ
charred remnant pulled inside-
out inadequate to the task whose powder
only serves to set the sky’s gold
off the game was always
already up from the start
no matter the polish and flash
of these cities or his black
coelacanth wings

In my house the devil took wing
through the wiring the routers
the plug-in signal boosters
passed through me invisible
of all the ways to crash a family
I could not have guessed this
slick prince of the air
I didn’t believe in stuck
fast in our fibreoptics of course
he shrieked unmasked the day
I walked in from the post-office
to workmen wisewomen woodcutters
villagers prising him out
of the walls with pliers
the din was unspeakable not
me never me many me pity me
as the door clicked shut
behind him the house collapsed

Twice fixed sits Mary in her
arabesque dress twice pinioned
Hail Full Of Grace The Lord
shooting towards her
out of this gatecrashing messenger’s
mouth as above her the dove
unleashes his tactical light-
strike pivot
of history through whom love
enters whose yes permits not only
word made flesh but speech made actual
as a carpenter’s chisel raised up
in gilt and white no similar
picture exits in trecento
Italy fifteen years exactly before
that other crepuscular visitor
comes lifting a bony finger yes you
and you and you and you and you

If in photographs
I cannot remember my children’s
faces when they were little their mutable
presences I remember their clothes
this yellow t-shirt dipped
in a Berlin fountain this navy
duffel coat worn on Petrovsky
Boulevard how many hours
to fashion an angel’s
tartar-cloth mantle in paint as many
as made it two children blew
through me but while
they were with me I washed
their clothes as carefully as for any
city saint or martyr a
mortgage traded on water as all
love is a transit-
privilege

By 1978 the game was up
for our stacked
miraculous card-game
house its peppercorn rent
its scarlet pebbledash imagine if
words built streets say lake
and a blue sheet shimmers say school
library playground church
and they spring up from scratch
astonished checking their New Town
teeth why is there always a catch
to bewitchment the future
flamed like acetylene
round the derelict flats
my friends left first
I hung up my poncho
on a digger bucket
before everything vanished

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