Where the Weight Catches by Claire Lynn
By Claire Lynn on July 12, 2018 in Poetry
Where the Weight Catches
In the Fat Giraffe shop
you find a wooden bucket
labelled South China, Antique
and you want to laugh: £45
for a night-soil bucket! But
you hook a finger into the notch
in the handle where the weight
catches, add a similar bucket,
hang them from either end of a split bamboo pole…
… for you know the man
whose bucket this is:
how he shrugs the pole
round the back of his neck
when one shoulder aches.
You know the broad, oiled douli
he wears against sun and rain,
the notch in his front tooth
where he cracks sunflower seeds.
At bedtime, you know
he washed his face and feet
in separate bowls, drying them
on the wrung-out washcloths.
In the morning, how his bristly
pig lumbers to the door
for breakfast. You’ve tasted
his oranges, eaten his rice, slept
behind the mosquitoed curtains
of his bed.
Set down his bucket
in the Fat Giraffe shop, the slosh
of disturbed memory lapping back
to a still round mirror. The ache
in your shoulder is the weight
of what’s lost.
–
Claire Lynn taught English with VSO in China from 1988-90. She now lives in Hexham, Northumberland and teaches English and Creative Writing around the county. Her poems have been published in the Bridport Prize anthology (1999), the Ver Prize anthology (2017), Virago anthology The Nerve, The Independent newspaper, and various magazines including Smiths Knoll, Writing Women, Other Poetry and Dream Catcher. Her reviews of Chinese literature have appeared in London Magazine. “Where the Weight Catches” was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2017.
