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Round about the time he would lie on his back, legs swung
tucked to his tummy, the crack that grins from testicle base
to lower spine on show, his father caught his ankles in a pair
and bound them together with rope, padded only by the fat
sponge of the very young. He soon grew to know no other
and so improvised on hands and knees, the plates at each
patella baring the odd calcium crazing, until his ankles began
to swell, blood queuing at the bound cord, and his feet were
lumbering stumps. Oedema his father said, as the boy bobbed
chimp-like on knuckles and kneecaps No good can come of you.  
 
A child like a chimp with a limp is rid of easily. His father finds
a couple, barren, needy, who follow the moon to make love like
they make the tea, for its own mechanical purpose, and the first
and grateful thing the couple do is to untie him, placing the soles
of his feet on dawn grass, letting the dew seep between his toes
so he drinks a little, then bone by bone they unbend him, aligning
the laddered vertebrae, smoothing flat his brown paper skin, until
he can throw his head back, from under a long fringe, to look at
the stars, the twinkle in their Daddy eyes, blood from fat ankles,
swollen stumps, coursing fast round his evolutionary head to toe.
 
He grows to love his new mother, her furniture qualities,
permanent, soft, dependable as tables; he could eat off
her words, plump the pillow of her good humour and just
chuckle there. She teaches him how good, bad and ugly
and trains his need for food, sleep and the toilet where,
at the top of the strain, he will always cry I love you, Mother.
He wants her for his wife until, teenage and sullied by this,
he must demonstrate how much he hates her, answering no
to every yes she suggests then not answering but returning
his knuckles to the floor, his voice falling to call Uuuunnnggh!
 
When he has grunted himself empty of mother-insults, he runs
off with a sphinx who riddles him this way, riddles him that,
like a goddess or not. Love me most when I deserve it least she says
That’s when I need it most. He feels it least but she won’t let him
leave without a fight: Who goes on four legs in the morning, two at noon
and three by night? With freedom just the other side of her wiles,
he cannot believe his luck; years of tethered legs make sense
in an instant for young Oedema: It was me in the morning but I’m
a man by day and later on, may need a stick to see where I’m heading.
The sphinx, rattled, dies by the lie of a bumper sticker: Live hard…
 
All this thought of death – the meat of life – curbs his hunger
for the horses charging towards him, whipped to their frenzy
by a grey charioteer enraged at this swell-headed young thing
assuming right of way. Oedema has no choice but to fight this
aging crazy, with whom he feels somehow tethered; strength
of youth beats memory of the same and – knock, knock, knock -
rock blunts scissors even though a thought pierces, right back to
his blueprint. The one witness comes from a caravan of slaves,
too chained to find death of note, who sees how their features
mirror: one a swollen version of the other, one half of the oracle.
 
They say we fall in love with ourselves, girl-you or boy-you,
with the same degree of symmetry, evenly beautiful or faces
similarly on the shonk. She was in his likeness but with skin
that had seen more ocean and took a little longer to spring
back. They enjoy a month’s happiness before the whispers
chase a hushed sibilance up, down, back and round; before
he takes the short stick that pins her hair from falling across
his chest to prick his eyes from their sockets. Before all this,
they lie beneath the stars, whose eyes still twinkle, and he tells
her the fate he wishes to make: Know good will come of this.

SARAH ROBY lives in Norwich with her school-age son and a lot of 1930s furniture, sourced on e-Bay. She writes late at night and is a fan of CD Wright. Sarah was winner of our 2009 competition, and a runner-up in 2008 with her first ever published poem. She has recently been awarded an Arts Council England grant to work on a first collection.

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