Misconduct

Eleanor Hooker

Decoded, the message etches itself in acid 
        so every syllable becomes a sore. 
            – Ruth Stone (The Wound)

 

An endless after-dinner speech
and I wait for a pause before returning to my seat.
A porcelain doll waits too. 
Her rusty-blue eyes fix on me. 
She smiles an immaculate sort of malice.
I don’t know her, but wonder how she died.
“I know your sister,” she says. “I worked with her …
professionally.” I name my sisters, but no and no 
and no. She grows impatient, snaps her name.
She leans close. I smell starvation on her breath, 
hear a mechanism, no-one could call a heart, thud.
“You see,” she says “I was her therapist.” 

A trap – steel crushes my ankles.
I know this race of people, I withdraw into history 
to find my sister, take her by the hand and run. 

We escape through tall grass in the back meadow,
through a field of dandelion clocks tick-tocking
beside the railway track. Down at the river
we hunker beneath the bridge,
laugh at this bold new adventure.
Too young to own a lexicon for our future,
we speak nursery rhymes half learned –
Needles and pins, 
needles and pins. 
When a doll comes to life,
your trouble begins!
She says she wants to go home
and I return to myself.

The speeches continue
but I have retreated so far 
I hear only faint resounds.
The living doll cannot reach me,                                                                                                                                                       though her silence says, don’t get drunk
on any assumption you are accepted here. 

And I return to myself.
My sister says she wants to go home.
Your trouble begins
when a doll comes to life.
Needles and pins, 
needles and pins. 
We speak nursery rhymes half learned –
too young to own a lexicon for our future
we laugh at this bold new adventure.
We hunker beneath the bridge
beside the railway track. Down at the river
we run through a field of dandelion clocks tick-tocking,
to escape through tall grass in the back meadow.