The Orange Rug

By Julia Copus

A biogrpahy is here a the Royal Literary Fund

 

for Antony and David

Impossible to picture a time without it there
beneath the living room window, afloat in the shadows
of our father’s desk. Its flattened tassels were the rays of sun
in a child’s drawing; it was where we must gather,
three breathless children, our coats on for school,
or to show who was first to be ready for bed,
and if we’d a score to settle
this was where we must do it.

When was the last time we stood there,
myself and my two, fly brothers,
in the days before their bodies hardened and wives
and children hovered round them?
It is late, perhaps – a splash of moon at the window.
Outside, a row of curtained houses
looks blindly away from two small boys and their sister,
who have not even thought to arrange the order
of their going. Nonetheless there must be one
who steps off ahead of the others, as if at some whisper
from the wings, and does not think to look back.

Tonight, in the small hours, I stand there again
in the shadows that leaked from the oak-dark desk;
only this time I am stiller, keener, I’m
poised, like Cassandra – listening out
for those wily, soft-voiced exit cues,
with both knees locked, my fists and eyes
squeezed, clenched, so that nothing exists
but brothers and me and the orange rug,
round as a spotlight, round as a sun,
and the hum of its solar wind unspent inside it.