with you beside me

Day 3 of my personal Poetry Week ...

... and here's a verse, as taken from Allan Crosbie's first collection, which was published in 2006:


The Osteopath

I drive stiffly through the rain to Auchterarder
with you beside me reading everything you can
about the First World War. Your right hand
rests on my left thigh, dips as I change gear
or leaves a sudden coolness there
on the muscle when you turn a page.
I wince and stick my belly out in pain.

The wipers sweep and click like metronomes
until I kill the engine and leave them frozen,
two blackened skulls of herons, or bayonets
fixed parallel in the middle of the glass.
You stay there reading as the windows mist
and the drips fall in bunches from the oak
I’ve parked under and I limp away

into a room where a skeleton hangs by the fire.
The doctor digs his fingers in my knotted flesh.
The sound of my joints popping is like distant gunfire
or splashes tapping on a metal roof.
Later, when I slide into the seat beside you,
I feel like a stone, coaxed across a frozen loch,
that shoulders through to kiss its lonely twin.

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Allan Crosbie

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