Small Female Skull by Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy

Small Female Skull by Carol Ann Duffy

T.

My dirty fingerprints are all over my bookshelf. I didn’t know what I was doing. Maybe delirious again, looking for my life in poems, chanting,

save me save me save me save me save me dammit

, then falling back to bed, clutching a book to my chest.

Small Female Skull

Carol Ann Duffy

With some surprise, I balance my small female skull in my hands.

What is it like?  An ocarina?  Blow in its eye.

It cannot cry, holds its breath only as long as I exhale,

mildly alarmed now, into the hole where the nose was,

press my ear to its grin.  A vanishing sigh.

For some time, I sit on the lavatory seat with my head

in my hands, appalled.  It feels much lighter than I’d thought;

the weight of a deck of cards, a slim volume of verse,

but with something else, as though it could levitate.  Disturbing.

So why do I kiss it on the brow, my warm lips to its papery bone,

and take it to the mirror to ask for a gottle of geer?

I rinse it under the tap, watch dust run away, like sand

from a swimming cap, then dry it – firstborn – gently

with a towel.  I see the scar where I fell for sheer love

down treacherous stairs, and read that shattering day like braille.

Love

, I murmur to my skull, then, louder, other grand words,

shouting the hollow nouns in a white-tiled room.

Downstairs they will think I have lost my mind.  No.  I only weep

into these two holes here, or I’m grinning back at the joke, this is

a friend of mine.  See, I hold her face in trembling, passionate hands.

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