TURBINE | KAPOHAU

LILLY KELLEHER

 

Sestina #1

 

The mid-morning sun hangs heavy in the sky, like a ripened orange.
In the front door, the small window-glass is frosted white, like fresh milk,
and my mother has left a key out for me, in the pewter bowl.
A black and white cat stretches languidly across the garden path.
Something about the cat recalls a forgotten memory:
A brown paper parcel, sat by the bowl, tied with a thin blue ribbon

Remember a little girl, performing with a pink and red ribbon.
A wicker basket: empty, but for cake crumbs, and a lonely orange.
The tails of the ribbon flicker and flash through the warm air in this memory:
My mother is younger, but still takes her coffee without milk.
I still know how it feels to run barefoot on a hot asphalt path,
I can still hear the ringing of keys dropping in the bowl.

It was always overflowing with found objects, that bowl.
My mother ran around the house a hundred times with an impossible length of ribbon,
Her bare feet smacked and scorched on the concrete path.
I sweated alone inside the house, squeezing out orange after orange,
My fingertips stuck and burned; the acid in the juice curdled the milk,
The acid in the juice spoiled the memory.

It looped itself around everything like a constrictor, the memory:
Hundreds of meters of its serpentine body coiled up tight inside the bowl.
Seven glass bottles sat stinking on the counter, full of old milk;
The snake spilled out all over the floor, like a dropped spool of ribbon,
Its body all in tangles, the round whorls in the wood like rotted, fallen oranges.
Every day, I forget where I’m supposed to be going, and I mark out the path.

The crystallised sheen over the path,
The milky veil over the memory
Evaporates away, like a velvet cover whisked from a glass cloche, and sticky rivulets of orange
Drip and pool, reducing into a stagnant syrup, a well of amber at the bottom of the bowl.
From the gluey floor, I rip length upon length of stuck and withered ribbon,
As if it were a disintegrated old carpet. I fling open the door and toss out the milk.

The bottles crack open neatly like eggs, leaking out the tepid milk;
It trickles pleasantly and quietly down the path.
Submerging it into a milky puddle, crouching amongst the tall grass, I smooth the ribbon,
Soaping and wringing it tenderly, as if it were a baby’s clothing, the memory
I spot finally in a patch of shade, and scoop into the bowl,
Now clean and shining. The memory, like a waning ember, glows gently orange.

I take the ribbon, soft, dried by the breeze, and tie it neatly around the memory.
Casting out buckets of fresh water, I rinse the path, and the thirsty soil drinks up the milk.
I set the bowl beside the memory, the sun breaks over the hill, and the room fills with orange.