Christopher Horton
Newly Arrived
The neighbours each ask us why we left London.
What they really want to know is why we chose to settle here
of all places. First off, we have nothing much to tell them.
Given more time, we might mumble something
about commuting schedules and our passion for the last red phone box
which we saw online or, more romantically, in a dusty book
bought second-hand from a wise sage of Kentish lineage
as if this was all predestined and, along those lines, I might recall
that I came here once, years ago, in an ecstatic daze, a state
of otherworldliness, then drifted to the edge of the Great Stour
and cupping my hands, lent down and took the water.
The neighbours wouldn’t buy it. No doubt, they’ve all conferred.
The house is still musty with the scent of the previous owner
as if she never left. Has she left? We never saw her leave.
Her mail still arrives with no forwarding address.
She has left marks and holes in the walls that appear like scars
on a user’s arms. Her left post-it notes are highly cryptic.
On the second day, we dared each other
to go further into the storage spaces beneath the stairs.
The attic was left without a ladder. On our third day,
two giant buzzing beasts urgently flew out through its hatch.
They buzzed mechanically, moved with precision,
seeming to carry some unknown inheritance,
or disinheritance, or somehow existing between two entrances.
They did not appear again. We are in the fifth day now.
I really did see them, I say, when you pull that face you pull.
Christopher Horton has been published in The North, Poetry London, Ambit and Magma. His pamphlet Perfect Timing, is published by tall-lighthouse.
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