My Private Collection

A.C. CLARKE

(Glasgow)

 

Smells of stuffed birds moulting, mothballs, ether.

I walk the shiny linoleum between cases

where dogfish hang suspended like lifeboats,

enter one room through an aisle of whale-ribs,

a room of narwhal skulls, each rapiered jaw

fineboned as the brow of a unicorn.

 

Trays of pierced butterflies spread wings whose sheen

dulled long ago, here are corals and sponges

Brittling in the parched air, all colour leached,

sets of teeth on the grin, knucklebones, ox-horns,

tucked in a drawer wadded with packing, eggs

which will never hatch. A second drawer

 

holds beetles ranged by size, glazed over time

to monochrome brown. I am searching for something

not this timber wolf’s faked snarl, canines gleaming,

against a painted backdrop, nor that tattered bear

propped on hindlegs, claws impotently curved.

The exit, perhaps? It is arrowed in green neon.

 

Darkness is falling. Through tall windows

trees flail their branches, a strip of road

unwinds into the distance. Christmas lights

swing wildly, roped from gibbet to iron gibbet.

In here the temperature never varies,

nothing moves, or can move, unless in slow

 

degeneration. I am at home with that stasis,

the hush that coats the rooms thick as dust.

Once outside I might hear on the wind

the voices of rain which are also the voices

of children. I might remember

what I left to wait like clagged boots at the door.

 

 

‘My Private Collection’ won second prize in the TRYangle Project Poetry Competition 2012