Significant Other Read online

  ISABEL GALLEYMORE

  Significant Other

  For my parents

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Ocean

  The Starfish

  Once

  By Ourselves

  Robin

  Choosing

  Slipper Limpet

  The Ash

  A Stranger

  Into the Woods

  Kind

  Goose Barnacle

  Say Heart

  True Animal

  Seahorse

  Together

  Day

  At First

  No Inclination

  Limpet & Drill-Tongued Whelk

  Difficult Cup

  Spirit Human

  The Scrotum Frog

  I Keep You

  Nectaries

  Eye & Sight

  Spiny Cockle

  The Wingless Wasp

  Worm

  The New World

  Rainforest Spelled Backwards is Lustful

  Harvest

  Tended

  Nuptials

  Crickets

  Strawberry & Ship-of-War

  Barnacles

  False Limpet

  Shadow Tale

  I’m Doing You an Injustice

  Succession

  Luminescent

  Crab

  Significant Other

  Examples Include Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’

  Are We There Yet?

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other; in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love.

  — Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto

  Significant Other

  Ocean

  Wasn’t walking beside her

  walking with the ocean below

  when you didn’t know her and wanted to?

  In that heat, along that path

  you hesitated

  at a slug, beached

  like a tiny grey whale –

  thirty tonnes and seventy years

  of navigating the continental shelf

  assumed by this soil-scuffing inch

  and what would she make of you?

  The ocean blinked.

  Say you took that step, or say you fell,

  wouldn’t she move you miles in herself?

  The Starfish

  creeps like expired meat –

  fizzy-skinned, pentamerously-legged,

  her underfur of sucking feet

  shivers upon an immobile mussel

  whose navy mackintosh is zipped

  against the anchor of this fat paw,

  this seemingly soft nutcracker who exerts

  such pressure until the mussel’s jaw

  drops a single millimetre. Into this cleft

  she’ll press the shopping bag of her stomach

  and turn the mollusc into broth,

  haul in the goods and stumble off,

  leaving a vacant cubicle,

  a prayer come apart.

  Once

  there was a question of how close

  to come to nature without being eaten,

  but as the town fussed to build a fence

  someone likened their hands to crows,

  their stuttering heart to a common toad:

  to be at one suddened the air. Rain fell

  on their faces and with it they were one,

  one, they said, with the rivers and stones,

  one with the riverbank’s wig shops of moss,

  with the prickliest gorse and its bees – bright

  as liquorice allsorts: at one and lost

  as the woman wrapped in her lover’s arms

  who accidentally kisses herself.

  By Ourselves

  The too-hot winter sun. No cloud.

  I glanced up to find

  we were finally by ourselves

  and had been for a while. Hadn’t we

  desired to be alone those times we flirted

  with seeing human forms in trees?

  Some evenings we gave over entirely

  to making the moon one of us.

  Still, it felt too fast, this intimacy:

  the overhasty buds, the last few bees

  finishing our sentences,

  their bright cheeks turning pale.

  Robin

  A road sign

  with a fire warning

  in its breast,

  a house built

  for coming weather

  on stilts

  and taking off,

  smoke,

  the landing

  gear pressed under.

  Choosing

  from eight million differently constructed hearts –

  I couldn’t – I chose to love them all –

  the squid’s triptych of pumps,

  the snake’s cardial sac, expanding as it eats.

  To say nothing will come between us,

  to stay benignly intimate was –

  sometimes not calling was easier –

  sometimes I’d forget to touch you

  and you, and you – a natural phenomenon

  dwindling – one of a dozen breakups

  from the world each day –

  like the others it seemed you’d just popped out

  for a pint of milk and now

  nothing’s conjured hearing your name.

  Slipper Limpet

  In the double-dark of the sea at night,

  a shoe of shell bears a belly-foot

  that bears an appetite and so invites

  a dozen to generate a vertical queue,

  a carefully organised high-rise orgy

  with her, its founding member,

  its queen sticking to the ocean bedrock,

  as smaller, younger males shuffle on top

  and when she’s tired of the day in day out

  rut, when her gills have breathed their last,

  her nearest male inherits her sex –

  two moons and he’s bequeathed

  her duct – and yet he’ll remain stuck on her

  empty bone slipper, departed Cinderella.

  The Ash

  Like a single branch of ash

  honed to the handle of an axe

  and made to take the hand

  of a woodsman as he throws

  his body weight to fell

  all the ash has sown,

  I turn your words although

  the line you spoke was simple

  A Stranger

  In one unfamiliar town

  I ask a stranger where

  the small red bus departs

  and, told you’re almost there

  it leaves from where the elms

  once stood before the road was paved,

  I end up searching

  for some past felling,

  an old yawn in the earth –

  although I’m told the only chance

  of love is via falling.

  How easy it is to walk past.

  Into the Woods

  For those who want to invest in disasters,

  the INCH pack includes a sling-shot,

  fishing rod and tarp. It stands for

  I’m Never Coming Home.

  Walk into the woods and don’t look back.

  I learn this from my neighbour’s watching

  of Doomsday Preppers at full volume –

  her
octogenarian ears believe

  everyone is mumbling. On the street

  she leans in uncomfortably close. They say

  such impairments come by degrees.

  We’ll be right back with Brian’s missile silo.

  I give up on my book, fill the kettle.

  Sunlight floods the living room;

  the birds and branches of the papered walls

  fade at a rate not considered change.

  Kind

  Being steeped

  in his keeper’s routine,

  the owl anthropomorphises

  himself upon the plinth –

  if we put a female in with him

  he’d still make love with the hats on our heads –

  he’s been here twice as long as I’ve been

  captivated by you,

  like him I don’t think of myself

  as possessed

  until one night, loosed to the world,

  I find myself expecting

  everyone to be your kind

  of kindness.

  Goose Barnacle

  An enamelled flower bud, a locket

  made of shell, a lacquered fingernail

  treehoused upon a wormy stalk

  that wags as though to say

  not quite or not exactly so

  and this is only one of what’s a fishy copse

  undulating back and forth as in a gale

  and asked what land they grow upon

  they’d likely say no land, and asked

  whose hand they reach like fingers from

  they’d likely say the hand of some stray branch

  that, dipping in and out of water,

  persuades their beaks to open,

  their feeding limbs to royally wave.

  Say Heart

  They say it’s because I’m afraid to be alone.

  What good is saying heart,

  when you can say heart like a little wine barrel,

  or heart like a red squirrel.

  I am most like myself when likened.

  He, for example, has made me realise

  I can climb, jump between trees.

  True Animal

  On a dozy summer’s day, a donkey magpied a lion’s skin that the hunters had left to dry in the sun. What else had the donkey to do, but chameleon himself inside it? As he swanned across the paddock in his new ferocious fur, the horse began to mouse, the hare grew chicken-hearted, and the chicken hared away. How good it felt to shark among the shrimp, he thought, and let out a proud hee-haw… The daisies widened their eyes. Mid-run, the chicken stopped. The hare, and then the mouse, dared themselves to look. Finding not claws but hooves, each turned upon him and, as any true animal would, parroted a short teaching on natures true and fox.

  Seahorse

  Isn’t it shocking how he speaks for her?

  His thin voice wavering across the restaurant –

  she’ll have the cod artichoke bake.

  A giggle of bubbles comes from behind them:

  a fish tank curtained with seagrass

  where a seahorse is tying itself

  to one of these slim, tweedy forms

  like a hand shaping itself inside another’s

  the way my hand tucks into his

  like a difference pretending it’s not.

  Together

  the heart aflame no longer

  shines any light on love

  because they are always together –

  because they are always together

  it’s hard to see them apart

  like the blade in the blade of grass –

  two lovers grew so close they became

  too fluently familiar

  having lost what makes fire fire.

  Day

  Having lived this long with one another,

  we know day’s ‘face’, day’s ‘hands’ so very well;

  the way it touches and likes to be touched;

  can, in the most part, read its ‘mind’,

  so when we hear that day is only playing along

  that day has a plan to abandon us

  we brush it off as gossip. After all,

  the orange juice carton pours out orange,

  birds gently carry on birdsplaining themselves,

  under the trees of our tree-lined streets

  a few of us gather without exception,

  our talk of the weather still small.

  At First

  The seasons grew untidy;

  the months filled up with rain.

  At first it came soft as a sheep.

  Inside the sheep a wolf, of course

  inside the wolf a man intent

  on acting out his tale.

  No Inclination

  It came to light that mountains were some

  of the least despondent land formations,

  that a surprising number of gales

  didn’t know what it was to howl.

  The woebegone voice of the willow

  confirmed it had no reason to weep.

  Accordingly, schoolchildren were instructed

  to rip up their books, releasing

  alligators from their anger,

  bees from their busyness,

  cats from their curiosity…

  while one neighbourhood didn’t see any harm

  pulling the sun closer to inspect.

  It couldn’t be denied: that fiery mass

  possessed no inclination to smile.

  Household after household poured

  whiskey-cokes to toast the news,

  the ice melting fast in their drinks.

  Limpet & Drill-Tongued Whelk

  Across the rockpool floor, a limpet grazes –

  a stray magician’s cup,

  moon-textured, the shape of light

  pointing through frosted glass.

  It is a modest party hat

  in which something like a head resides

  oblivious of this dog whelk

  that pads against the thick, still brine

  and climbs upon the limpet –

  an ornate seat upon an elephant.

  Carnivorous mollusc, tiny fracking rig

  clocking in with its drill-tongue, clutching

  as the limpet rises from the stone,

  to become half-mushroom, half bucking bronco.

  Difficult Cup

  after Wu Hao’s ‘Duke Cups’

  The china cup is frilled at the rim

  like tired lace and all over it

  ceramic tentacles extend

  to whisper if you drink me that way

  I’ll poke your eye out, you

  can’t quite press your fingers here

  your lips – like walking a mountain ridge

  at night with some romantic

  ideal ahead, you are not

  not figuring each step among

  the rocks –

  there’s want and caution

  caught in you and a new

  vocabulary of pouting to be learnt.

  Spirit Human

  Let’s do it like they do on the discovery

  channel the prowess of the lion, the deer’s

  intuition tells us animals don’t like to be shoes

  because animals love to be shoes

  gummy sweets, similes, like people

  they long to be airlifted from being themselves

  amongst candles, cheap incense, the hum

  of a fridge and the chatter of next door’s

  animals, even when dog-tired, will pay

  attention and skill are needed in modelling

  themselves after retail assistants and chefs

  after penniless artists and presidents, after

  all animals need to discover themselves

  The Scrotum Frog

  The day is unendangeredly bright

  when you kiss your lover in the hope

  he’ll turn into a frog. All the windows

  are open and it’s still
too hot in the house.

  The lake? you ask your loose-skinned one,

  pink-grey as that old part of himself.

  Somewhere you’ve read, like many others,

  that the best love is the unattainable kind:

  a dreamy stranger with a wordless mouth

  sits among the reeds and crisp packets.

  For weeks, you meet by the shoreline

  when it’s cool, when the sun is a come-to-bed eye.

  Then he’s gone. One and then another

  speedboat snore across the dirty water.

  You close the windows, draw the curtains.

  You fall asleep and dream of him

  with his brothers in the lake like men

  in a changing room; sweaty, doling out nicknames –

  Sac Magique, Sir Chicken Skin.

  I Keep You

  at a difference:

  a thought I won’t allow myself

  to think for thinking

  it’s a matter of time

  till you, a cargo

  ship of foreign goods,

  cross my kitchen table

  like a butter dish.

  Nectaries