Alyson Miller

Oystered 

There’s an oyster shell in the compost. I can feel the ring on my finger, though I’ve not worn it in years. I remember the weather, I remember the salty licks of skin; it must be a decade. Your father was visiting and the seafood was supposed to be a sign of something. A kind of grandeur, a kind of living that never was, at least not then. You kept calling them huîtres, pouring champagne that was really cheap sparkling, talking about the good life. The word a weird collision of lips, teeth, and tongue. Asti Spumante and gobbets of ocean, six in the blue plastic tray from the supermarket deli. The bony shell is opalescent in vegetable rot, curled beside eggshells and avocado pips, the withered bodies of lost mice. Something close to beauty, like a gold-capped tooth, a crushed fly.
 
**
 
On Grief
 
When you found the little body on that road not ours, after the wedding on the island known to spit strangers and whale bones out from shore. A pademelon, scrunched still as though willing itself into dirt or stone or an already dead thing, a mound of wet fur forgotten in the rear-view. Its bauble-black stare locked onto a horizon lost in a darkness so complete all but our silhouettes in the headlights fell into emptiness, our bodies only a shadow of flesh that might have been real. Champagne-drunk, in a space only hands-wide and yet miles away from me, you apologised over and over to a creature that was not there when we looked again in the morning. And we said it must have recovered by the eucalypts, that our presence wasn’t help but the kind of fear that locks heartbeat to ground, joints to mud. And again you murmured sorry, sorry, sorry into the cold air of lung-ache and red ears and prickle-skin, hoping maybe that it might know, might pull something like love or kindness from the leaf-rustle wind, as in a birthday wish, or a benediction.
 
**
  
Alarm
 
That empty sky, a shocking blue. Weather for the end of days, for the burst of parachute clouds that leave only shadows behind. The air is thick with shopping lists and dial tones and prayers only half-remembered from some ritual at school. In a driveway, 150 gallons of water; in the street, a forgotten shoe. That curious silence of pulses thrashing like trapped fish inside wrists and foreheads and stomachs; the urge to abandon. Not a drill but the moment to hide, to muffle the bass boom roar that would creep deep inside ears and floorboards and the stories of trees. An overworked medulla oblongata, pulling tight at throats and sinews and battering hearts so hard against ribs that threaten to crack and pop with the heat of it all. Fingers reach to touch but the promise is only of a singular darkness, pulled east by trade winds, bad luck, and sub-orbital flight trajectories. At 8am, no one knew it wasn’t true; in Molokai, a man eats breakfast on the lanai, thinks of inverse square law, and it is a beautiful morning, anyway.
 
**
 
Saudade

The record ends, but it may not be love left behind. As it turns out. I can’t tell the difference between satellites and stars, the noise of highway traffic, the neighbour’s air conditioning. An ending is not always a window. Birds nesting on the flat roof might be hail or intruders of another kind. It is less a concern than it might have been. Light the candle, plant a tree. Why do small joys look so much like grief? It isn’t death but matters all the same. Skeletal cells take fifteen years to regenerate; the bones hold onto it all. I have aged so much in so little time. Don’t tell me to be grateful; those are bats hurtling across dusking skies, and the lintel is cracked. A psychic said there is hope of better things. Remember to hang bells on the door, bury amethyst at the threshold. Smoke the room. Remember, remember. Ears prick to bird cry and leaf fall, to car closes and letterboxes and the smack of night air. Even though I prepared, I will never answer the crisis call, speak at your funeral, send your mother flowers. How often we forget to breathe, until the stillness is too much like peace or anaesthesia, the moment before anything, the moment before nothing.
 
**

Döstädning (Swedish Death Cleaning)
​
Everyone one knows the hoarder. Small toys and stuffed things stapled around the doorway; a dollhouse in the garden, tinsel circling a small dead tree. During Easter, the one-eared bunny on the letterbox, streaked with cat piss and moss trails, a minor colony of ants. She is Junk Lady, like the film, all of childhood in a horror show of tutus and mice, feet nailed to the ground. Sometimes, it looks like comfort, so much home in one space. But full cupboards are abscesses; clutter makes for fever dreams, broken skies. You might die in the overcrowd, lost between the mixing bowls, the flannel sheets, the magazines. Clear the walls and floors, pick clean the bones like some burial rite, a body scoured by buzzard heat and hungry mouths. Suffocate the moths; no one must find the unsaid things, the peculiar stones, that one soft blanket, a knitted yellow bear. How important it is to disappear, as though nothing ever happened, as though there is nothing left to see. Exit wound clean; wash it out, wash it out, make it new.
 
**

Baba

A friend suggests a psychologist, but I am charmed by velvet and moonstone, sweet incense and sage. The lure of lunar dreams and old wives’ tales; my grandmother was a house witch, her mother the thirteenth child of the thirteenth child. Knock twice on the cards and blow. Imagine white light and draw the dirt ring; bury ashes under wet soil or clay. I cannot remember their faces but the feel of the tarot, bloated with handling and fear. For the new moon, stir your hope with milk, rice, and gold. Leave flowers by the threshold, a favourite charm. There are promises of skinny-legged men and dogs, dancing in kitchens, Peruvian skies. An ancestor named Percy, who took the toll for the stone bridge, urges trouble and flight; his sister warns to stay home, close the windows against north winds and strange eyes. Plant rosemary for protection, hang bells by the door. I sprinkle cinnamon for money and rose quartz for love; throw sea salt round the perimeter, in the corners of every room. A psychic tells me that it’s all in the ear—the good life, the heartbeat, the echoes of things gone.
 
**
 
Alyson Miller is a scholar and prose poet from Geelong, Australia.