From Circling The Core (Enitharmon Press 2008) for Erwin and in memory of Paula Schneider, my mother-in-law The higgle of packets, purple-lidded canisters of pasta,
pumpkin seeds, oatcakes and the tiger-faced biscuit tin
on our larder’ s lowest shelf are queened by the large bowl Paula made. With its not quite symmetric sides, a patterning
of leafiness on earthbrown and bright yellow trunks it’ s cousin
to bowls in Matisse paintings, carries the kiss of Picasso and our daily bread. If Paula had seen the muddle
around it – she who brought imagination and practicality
to every shelf, wall and cranny of her house in Stamford Hill – she’ d have bubbled with ideas for transforming the larder
and our home, built the extension we’ d half-envisaged
but shied away from. What she couldn’ t mould was her own life. The bowl goes deep but not deep enough to hold everything
she lost: her art school place under Kokoshka – in 1919
life in Vienna was as insecure as skating on thin ice; the portfolio of paintings she once showed to her children –
orange women with arms flung out, meadows glorious
with flowers and grasses; her home; her parents and sister when she fled from Hitler to England. The spacious bowl,
its mazurka leaves, insect-dot blossom, tell the joy she felt
as a potter but as I gaze at the cool of the varnished interior it remains silent as sealed lips, doesn’ t whisper a word
of her sharp disappointment that little of her work sold.
In our house terracotta children in bell skirts are dancing round a maypole. Blue florets speckle the long white dress
of a figure sitting on the ground, candleholders flower
on her head, hands, outstretched feet. A finger-thin dog sniffs at a mottled triangular plate. Here, she’ s still alive
but every time I take bread from her bowl I remember
what was given, what was snatched out of her reach.