CATHERINE NORRIS
Strings 2
‘about lighthouses not having to move to save a ship’
September 2024
From home
A friend told me she had always used handwashing
as ritual, something about standing at the sink
and, like throwing confetti at her own bridled feet,
binding all the words that went before
into that moment of movement, and that, in doing so,
she offered something to the water, something so
far unconfessed, strewn and patterned like Emoto's
happy structure
which reminds me of Zanussi’s film and how we saw
ourselves there, content, until someone dragged
the city’s heavy suitcase in with them, piled-paving,
flattening maps of where we used to live
like pressed flowers, pretty but holding dust
static, the half-colour of things we put away
in drawers and cupboards
and the half-remembered uses for them.
Bath
There is a light that only comes on midwinter afternoons
reflected off the apartment block opposite,
as if it were the moon,
and gentle shadows gather
to pay homage in the bathroom,
every line of the basket-blind, an echo of its own transparency,
the way my shape must stretch and move in silhouette,
a shadow show for neighbours, asking them to remember
the size of us all in our pale illumination.
In the scoop, I lie back, trace each bare branch printed,
post-post-chestnut, readying for its specific verdancy,
for another breath out.
And in.
Until I pull the plug on it all,
sit until it’s drained
recall the emptiness of anything,
cracks in the pavement
which I still jump over
to avoid bad luck.
Rising sign
I liked that bathing in the morning was a thing
and I could whisper something unintelligible
and you’d still want to try and understand it
like plates shifting; but we weren’t an island
splitting, we were making something complete,
which is why when you made my memory
concrete, I considered building a land
where our shores meet and waters merge,
like an estuary to begin, and then a sea
to swim in. A friend said something
about lighthouses not having to move
to save a ship. So, I’m standing still now,
preparing for some kind of illumination.
CATHERINE NORRIS is a practice-based PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, exploring domesticity, desire and deception, her poetry has been published in the Four Way Review, Inter-View, Sad Girl Diaries and Lucy Writers, as well as being commended by Andrew McMillan in the Magma Poetry Competition. She has recorded experimental spoken word for Err Records, France and Miracle Pond Records and Spirit Duplicator, UK, under the name Plastic Moonrise.
