Not quite secured inside the wardrobe door
by tape that flakes like old skin at the touch,
policy numbers, bank accounts: her life.
We tread like chapel’s muted steps,
perplexed by our reverence
for a red rafia lampshade; button-hooks in a toffee-tin;
the rim of a brandy flask cherry-kissed stark as tulips;
the unrocking chair.
In the hems of curtains she’s sewn half-crowns
to weigh them straight. Drawers
spill her Kodak slides, blazing, a blare
of hats, maiden smiles and Ena Harkness.
Her kitchen smells of memory: gas, tin,
carbolic, fat burned off the grill. There
cowled under a tea-towel, we lift the plate
thrust up like a prize by a Sheffield steel
1920s deco dancer: ta daa!
just as she once had thought she might have been.
She’d marked each climax of our childhood years:
drifted with icing, brandy, candied peel,
her marzipan sweet as sucking your thumb,
crushed into cake-flesh. Around this cold chimney
we’ve picked over sacrificial crumbs:
a family altar by a twilight fire.
Untouched in the pantry,
December sunlight steps on golden bottles,
sculpting dust to dance like the exhaling of a bag of flour.
Words with music 
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