Submerged In Water

People take ‘pond life’ as an insult.  It shouldn’t be.

The tadpoles in our pond are all kings

of their own domain, and to them the world is empty and full at once –

empty of competition; they are all the greatest, the fattest, the fastest

boy-racers who own the road, like I drowned the Curry Mile in a kiddie pool

but like those stupid boys and their stupid noisy cars

where would the fun be

if they didn’t have each other?  I googled it;

when they bump into each other it’s a display of affection

like the rugby team that used to clot the playing fields on Sundays

slapping each other’s backs and punching shoulders and hurling dirty words.

Like a rugby team, they can be strangely beautiful in motion

sunk to different depths, the ones closest to the surface a bright speckled black

and you can see their tiny mouths; the ones furthest away moving silkily 

through the silt, a suggestion of a creature, tiny and dark and mighty

in its own way.  A pastel smudge on the page. 

Another google – tadpoles like boiled lettuce.  They sure do!  

Clustered around it, jostling like puppies, fascinating and warlike

in their determination, shoving their little heads forward and driving with their frilled tails

• at least, some of them have frilled tails; some smooth, some ragged-edged.  

I miss a hundred things:

coffee on campus, and heartsick nights alone, and singing with a sore throat

from the Freshers Flu I never managed to shake off.  I miss 

the overripe smell of the grass in Platt Fields Park and the 

noise of Wilmslow Road at 9am and mostly I miss my friends but

I could sit and watch the tadpoles for hours for absolutely no reason

in the sunshine and that’s 

alright.

Daisy Harris

Heaven/Hell

I was not promised

Heaven when I ran from the bones I was born in

remembered to me now only in songs, colder than the sea

older than the haunted woods.  And back, and back, and back

the lurch of the Ferryman’s boat, and the clouds rise

like they have years to wait.  A summer here lasts a second and an age

a winter passes in dark hushed breaths until

summer rises again and takes its time.  Me, held under

gasping my startled verses into 

the meltwater, a robin mounts a branch

and sings for days.  Chime!  And we swing into the enduring haze of

all our childhood Wonderlands, waiting for us 

there, there, if you can only run fast 

enough, if you can only love hard 

enough, if you can only remember where

you used to hide when the Sack-Man came stalking.

And then!  And then!  

When you are through with the trees, and the sky

and the way the Hare-Moon never sets

you can wait for mother; and she is never far, always

calling to you from over the fields –

are you quite sure it is her voice?  It would not

be the first time it has been borrowed by something hungry –

and you are home, and mother says

your face has changed because you’ve been away so long.

Why did you leave?  says the house, and you have 

forgotten the shape of its walls in the dusk and so

it doesn’t look like a house anymore.  And 

since when did it talk like that, like your mother but she’s hurting

like your father but he’s all alone

like you but not you? 

And I can’t help but think that Heaven, your bright Heaven

has been something else all along.

Daisy Harris

Parasitic

You weren’t born like 

she was.  You weren’t born 

loved, weren’t born held, weren’t born 

tied; docked like a yacht into a gilded graveyard where 

all the epitaphs read ‘cherished’.  Ain’t no ugliness you can’t

break if you start young enough.  Make them 

walk right, talk right, tap their shins with whips, kiss

their cheeks with cold lips, keep them cold.  Ice

doesn’t grow on trees.

Cuckoo.  

You weren’t made to fit silk

and the blue dress lies like a shed skin on the bathroom floor

and you are the ugly pollywog daddy chose as his wisest afterthought.

He never was as clever as I am.  You 

would have looked better in aqua

like the spilt water you are.  

Daisy Harris

Natural Light

It’s the ferocious pursuit of the young to make themselves fall in love 

with the shapes their hair makes on the pillow, the colours their legs make in the bath

abstract overpriced underwater never enough.

Now I’m home I’ve never hated anything less than the body that

this house made.  

I romance myself with hot showers and long walks

trace the lines of tattoo and chicken-pox scar on my skin;

plan for more.  A tree on my upper arm, a graze

on my ankle from a summer spent hiking in the 

Appalachian mountains, where I would love to go.

Wearing the clothes I left behind because they spoke of an old self –

maybe I want to remember her.  She liked flowers.

I’ve always liked the way I look in natural light.

If I start to wonder if someone else would – ah, that’s the danger.

I love my body like song – maybe beautiful like a really good bass-line.

You can feel it in your back teeth.  Harder to hate yourself

from miles away.  Love my body like the trees –

sunlit, quivering, tilting with the wind.

Daisy Harris

Hometown

At some point in fairly recent history, the tobacco merchants became tired

of their Glasgow streets being as smoky as their business.

They chose a new place for their sprawling houses

in an uncanny stretch of land bordered by water and sky

furred over with pine trees

where the children thought there might be fairies.

Some two centuries later

the place bustled with all the associated industries of war;

the government traded in unease, built walls around their ugliest dreams

and the people heard the silver Tridents humming in their sleep, quiet death, waiting.

But still

there was water, and still it ran, on and on, until the end of the world.

In the houses, children grew, and got ready to leave;

if you stayed, the three lochs closed in and the black Kelpie emerged

and took you away into the cold Argyll night.  They rode the rambling train-line

all the way to Glasgow; wondered at the hunger yawning where before

there had only been street-lights and quiet water, skimming stones at dusk.

Three, four, five.  Swallowed by the silent Clyde.

But somehow they will not forget that

you don’t cross the pier carpark after dark. Some will never find 

cause to go back, and spend their days in endless streets where 

Scots pine never grew.  

Some will hold the glens like a lover

in their mind, and years spent chasing love or money will find them

skimming down the Rest and Be Thankful back to what the merchants bought into;

sky, and air, and woods

where they remembered there were fairies.  

Daisy Harris

Chemical Reaction

I wanted pink hair as soon as I saw it;

dry and dusk-rose in the cold northern sun.

A girl breaking in a pair of fat shoes, her hair faded and face unmade

kicking at the muddy path and staring disdainfully at the ducks.

Why pink? said my friend.

Pink like my dad’s face when he was drowsy with beer

pink like my sunburned shoulders in Spain 

pink like that girl over there

who looks like she doesn’t care that her hair’s been bleached to shit.

I imagined a messy evening spent over my sink

the struggle to wring the smell of cheap dye out of my curtains

my ancient Pavement shirt sprouting a messy rose-garden around the shoulders

my hair making its dehydrated pleas for salvation as I slathered on another coat of bleach.

Or blue, deep sky reflected in the oil-slicked river

the light from my phone-screen that kept me up and killed my brain cells

the frumpy school skirt I wore every weekday for years.

Stains your hair, said my friend.  Makes it green.

Purple, then; lavender, like the fields in France

my granny’s ancient glass perfume bottles

the rumpled cord shirt I blew half my week’s grocery money on –

Purple does the same.  Won’t wash out.

Fucking pink, then, I said.  

Do you actually want pink hair?  she said.  Or do you want something different?

Here was the heart of it.  

Does it matter? I said, because I didn’t want to answer.

Daisy Harris

Obsession

Heaven isn’t the word for it, really.  It isn’t big enough for that

but it bursts from my body like agate from a rock

splits me into simmering shards, hands, lips, ribs;

still too big for these bones to hold

too wild for these human lungs to release.

Sacred, somehow, tied to the stars, all

harnessed energy, a holy bottle-rocket.

I am bigger than Jupiter

humming with her storms.

Was this all I was 

born for?  I think that I could see a way to believing

that I was designed for love.

Daisy Harris

The View From Up Here

Freer than sound, freer than light, freer than ghosts

deep in the brown hills, the rain a silver threat strung on the wind

‘Gone hiking,’ I say, but I’m really just gone. 

It’s the privilege of the sheep

and the wind-tussled pines to see

the world like this, like a child rummaging a rock-pool, the stirring streets

fade into ragged fields, into rumpled hills, into faded sky

turned once too often in the spring storm’s washing-machine.

I was sold a dream, and a train ticket, and a view of houses;

Just you wait, and we will sell you the sky, if you want it hard enough

if you want to see things that the people who live in those houses

don’t see.  But 

the promise was so fragile, it was shattered in a week.

Some things are bigger than these hills, but don’t have half the bedrock;

the staying power to withstand ice ages and industrialisation and still

see the sun.  I want to change

not to end.  The sky is untouchable but

 up here I am half a mile closer.  

Daisy Harris

Earthly Pleasures!

Can’t stop thinking about your mouth

creepy like a Sunday evening behind the pub where they keep the bins

standing too close among the bubbled heaps of rubbish, frissons of breath run 

faster than the fraudulent sweetness from the weekend’s beer, heaped in shining glass coffins

is this going to begin with the smell of sour hops and 

then it doesn’t start, be still my stupid speeding heart, watch you walk away once

and again, you text me at an unwise hour, are you thinking about doing something dumb?

I hope you don’t know how easily you could convince me to dump my brain in that back alley

love’s lemming, must this end one way or another or could I keep

the fierce sherbet crush hopping on my tongue?  Put it down, that’s dirty

your pockets are full of sticks and stones, kiss me now or end it

(please don’t end it.)  

Smile at me in the street and we start again.

Daisy Harris

Is Anyone Listening?

The house gets smaller at night.

He exists only in surfaces – the oven door, the smokescreen of a curtained window – and only next-door’s cat remembers him.

She cooked fish on Fridays, the kitchen full of the claggy stink, and he never liked fish anyway;

the cat remembers a bowl after dark, first pickings before the rats came.  But 

they always came after, and she screamed at him

that it was his fault.  If he had only kept the back door shut –

In summer the window in the garage lets too much light in

rusts the bike he swore never to ride when his father left it on the curb that spring.

He only broke his word once –

up the canal path, where he knew she wouldn’t follow him

because she was scared of muggers.  His breath was hot and caged in his chest, sharper by the minute, and he pretended he wasn’t crying until he got home.  A bike isn’t a way to tell me he loves me, he said, and she stroked his face and said, Wow, you’re really sweaty.  And they both knew it wasn’t sweat like

she knew it wasn’t oil on the floor that morning.  Thick and cooling into patterns

on the tile, and he was in the sink and the mirror watching her call the police.  The street

gets brighter at night, and he thinks about taking a walk between lit windows

but he doesn’t want to startle the children.  

Daisy Harris