Night Drive

I remember the nights we spent up on the barn roof:

late July, combines out in the valley to the south,

horizon green as an aquarium along its western edge.

I lay on my back and dipped my fingers into the blue air

while he sat throwing stones down into the empty cowsheds.

That was enough for me— to feel the corrugated roof

shudder under each throw, taking the sound into itself,

coming back into silence again. I had the whole valley,

the white arm of The Milky Way stretched overhead,

the stones he threw ringing inside me one-by-one.

Years later, I drive home under skies rinsed clean by rain,

the wet air cools, gives itself back to the sky as clouds

but I can’t tell if those are stars coming out now

or just lights from airplanes descending into Heathrow.

October

After exhausting the timber-framed houses

the wildfire reaches the vineyard.

In my garden an October bee

enters and re-enters honeysuckle.

I wear short sleeves and bring home tubs

of cheap yellow ice cream—

it’s a thrill to watch the world burn up

field by American field on my TV

far off and inevitable, to let the ice cream

sit out all afternoon and spoil

because I want it to spoil, a relief

to know finally this is who I am—

who you are too, under the good people

we pretended to be.

Tulips

On my TV a woman

with square white teeth

says it takes three years

for skin to regenerate totally.

I think about my tulips, how

they’ve pushed new heads

up and out of the same bulbs

last spring and this spring, too.

What a joy it is to know

that next year you will never

have touched me.

______

Mariah is a poet and teacher from Oxford. Her novel-in-sonnets the love i do to you won the AM Heath Prize and was an Oxford Poetry Library Book of the Month. Her pamphlet Michael, a book-length poem that takes the form of a playscript, was published by Broken Sleep in 2022. She is a co-founder and co-editor of bath magg.