Claire Crowther

from St Anne's Apocrypha

Here's what Joachim wanted
her to find: a bent black gas tap, unused
for years, on a ledge beside the door. An old plastic watering can,
nozzle arched and long as the stem of a flower. No plants.

A twenty-one inch screen presenting
a document titled The Wrong Sort of Electricity.
The frayed lip of a grey wool-covered seat.
Two mugs, rimed with coffee in one long lip round each brim.

One decorated with a sketch of Einstein.
Awards laid, stacked or propped in frames.
A blackboard: pairs of rectangles, a set of five points,
The World Watching underlined, a heading OLD TABLE,

crossings out, drips of chalk.
A keyboard alone on a shelf. One
white box with four black lids stored inside.
A grey safari jacket hanging on the door. One window blinded,

the other open to a view of roof tops.
The phone slipping off the end of the desk, its wire dangling
into a half-open drawer. Lever Arch files labelled
Strain Balance.


ii St Anne's Hard Hat

Maria put down her Dyson in the doorway. 'Enough
of this. You'll sack me if you get pregnant and by the way

you're only fifty-three. Here, put this on, it's cool.'
The scarf she handed her employer spread, a cloth

of morning glory; blackberry bramble. It covered the long
garden where Ornamental Crab, John Downie, fruited

red, yellow, along the post. Green dust had coated her
since morning. 'And put this on.' The new hard hat.

Anne strimmed along the chine. Finger bones of root
shook free from soil. 'Inside, I feel twenty

but what can I look at and not feel barren?
Even these bitter apples have come to good.'

A surface differs from its interior physics. Her broken
nails glittered under grey leaves of wave.


iii Joachim's Escape

The Astroturf was powdered with the trainer dust of physicists
who measure, under the Jura,

the half-life of elementary particles. 'Come on, Dark Matter.'
Joachim, their captain, used his head—

thck. 'Where are you, Exiles?' Thirty years since cold chambers
of liquid hydrogen warmed up

yet on came the Bubble Chamber teams, red-shirted Kaons and Pions,
still chasing protons

the millisecond before it boiled, smacking electrons into negative action,
recording the infinitesimal lives of goals.


Copyright © Claire Crowther, 2007.

Claire Crowther is working on a long poem project for a PhD at Kingston University. The poem explores the conflicts between the cultural expectations and real lives of twentieth-century grandmothers, and the work published here is drawn from it, as was the text published in issue 67/68. Shearsman Books published her first collection, Stretch of Closures, in 2007, and her second The Clockwork Gift in 2009.