Glenisla Gardens
It signs its name in rust
on the tall stone wall
(the street a scythelike sweep
from the staid old road,
each house down
a deeper dwelling in the earth)
as flyleaf in a third-hand book
might read for Christine, December ’74.
Each house harled and painted,
lichened, fairytailed, stained
with strange salts – the poisons
of a heedless century, now
a listed sequence of approved shades.
Each pane looks on where
the seasons are collected,
gills frill in the damp, and Jaguars
line their dust and shine along
the narrowed road, its curving kerb.
To sit on a cushion of moss, to want for nothing,
and be strange for something to do –
it’s fierce, the desire to join them,
as every other Tuesday
the man from the last house
in faded moleskin trousers
treads the careful half-mile
to open his antique shop,
gas fire by his knees
the only light inside.
There are a few things left to sell:
the ullage of each empty bedroom,
her name in an old book
that can write itself now anywhere.
Rebecca O’Hagan is a writer and artist from Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in the Dark Poets’ Club, and she is the author of zines Spa Pool, The Best Supermarket in Edinburgh, and Cherry Print.