Two Poems

Doors and Windows of Wallonia

Before Television backlit them with its haunting blues,
its gauze of voice over voice, dubbings of Dynasty and Dallas,
there were firesides filtered through net curtains, shadows
pulling free from shadows. The furniture didn't furnish,
it loomed; heavy as cannon, it boomed darkness.

After closedown, after the trembling not-quite-stasis
of the RTB testcard, the blue glow lingered,
fizzed against mosquito nets, caught the flypaper garlands
with their incrustation of bluebottle and mouche à merde,
the banal shitfly with his coalface glitter.

That was the house's pulse, a comatose cellar-beat
to which my grandmother, Bouillon's only dressmaker,
pedalled kilometres of stitching, threaded her needles
seven to seven in daylight that took all day to die.
Her only books were swatches; she held them up
...