Shearsman 51 C P Crowther Two Poems Uphill and Tired    All in our apartments    The world untended, unwatched          George Oppen (Myself I Sing)   A plasticised fabric cover on a motorbike, petrol blue and green of peeling eucalyptus trunk, the still water in a granite bowl in a calmly horizontal driveway: all hang with shine. Imagine its subtlety, even inside my muscle where streams of glycogen gleam as climbing dams them for sugar. The words metallic, pearly give the sun some mirrors back. You like my solar coping – we play shine – we swap glazed posters of Culture Clash and Rawson Democrat, wheelie bins for calla lilies. Now our shine, like lesser stars has darkened, we can identify better, things that shine, vitreous, resinous, splendent, anything adamantine - cars like water droplets splashed on the hot bypass, boats like tiny stones skimming the marina, spots of tarmac lustre. Think of us next to these images, all retinues of the sun, as salts of silver, bromide or chloride, blackening in light. Rose Steps steepens. We pause, absorbed by garden rooms, their retinas.     FENNEL Zesting all over my front garden, how her fennel clings to the removal men. As if it is interested in boxes. In my leaving today. I haven't trimmed it. It fixes on my shoulder. Neither have I named the house, this semi, as my daughter begged me, Fennel Cottage. Pretentious. The new owners may scrape the taste of my house off its surface. But her fennel seeds cranny in fissures and plan a dynasty of yellow tang. Root is a fruit.     copyright © C P Crowther, 2002 Claire Crowther has been writing poetry for three years and has been published in a variety of British and North American magazines. She is halfway through an MPhil in Writing (Poetry) at the University of Glamorgan and researching Selima Hill's use of metaphor.