Author: Cat By Herself

Blogger, poet, thinker, dreamer, living by the sea.

January Morning

Stumbling out of darkness
I come into the morning
carrying my grief and fears
like a demon on my back.

The gulls call me
to open my door,
and breathe in the air
of my shabby garden,
looking beyond,
where they criss-cross the sky
telling their stories.

The trees tremble
with anticipation
as the wind comes grumbling
from over the sea.

A magpie screeches,
a siren whines,
through sea-soaked city air,
and behind me,
my coffee pot hisses a promise.

Another morning,
and spring will come.

Linda Rushby 29 January 2021

The Invisible Woman

The other day I switched on my old faulty laptop looking for two poems I remember writing but couldn’t find anywhere. I didn’t find either of them, but I did find this one, which I don’t remember writing, though I can make a fair guess at which cafe is referred to in it.

It will be a happy day when I can return there. And I now have a nice new lightweight, fully functioning laptop (not so new – I’ve had it for a year, but not had much opportunity to take it out in that time).

The Invisible Woman

I am invisible.
I creep into the cafe and hide in the corner
scoping out the tables near the wall sockets.
Because my laptop powerpack is buggered
since I knocked my coffee over it
and I have to remember which keys don’t work.

The upper shift and return are the worst,
I always forget about them.
But otherwise it works okay,
just a bit slow at times,
like me
for the same reasons:
too much coffee and getting old.

The words that churn around my head
don’t always make it down my arms
and out through my fingers.
Who cares? I’m sure
they’re no great loss to literature.
And when I settle down in here and open up
what then?
What comes will come.
If you never start, you never reach the place
where the journey settles into rhythm.
You never catch the flow.
but it’s so much easier,
not to start.

So I come here,
and leave the house, the cats,
the dirty pots, the dusty furniture, the grubby floors,
escape them all, evade responsibility.
Displacement, of myself and of my thoughts.
Here I will coax the words out.
Any words will do,
the words I lost, the words I chased
to the bottom of a cup of coffee
and then what?

I probably should order another
but who cares, when I’m invisible?

Linda Rushby, Wednesday, 13 September 2017

A Discovery

‘So, what did it look like?’ 

‘Like some sort of exotic sea creature.  It had fine tendrils coming out of one side, and a long, thin papery tube coming out of the other.  Amazing.’ 

‘How big?’ 

‘About like a golf ball, that was the main bit, the tendrils and the tube were sticking out from either side, it was more or less a ball, but it was flatter where the tendrils were and pointed towards the tube.’ 

‘Well, what colour was it?’ 

‘White, I suppose, well, sort of off-white, like I said, like a golf ball.  With brown powdery lumps stuck to the edges, which came off when you rubbed them.’ 

‘Sounds like dried-on mud to me.’ 

‘Hmm, yes, you could be right.  That was on the swollen bit, the bit between the tendrils and the tube.’ 

‘So it had probably been buried in the ground?’ 

‘Could be’. 

‘And what about these tendrils?’ 

‘Brown, tangled, brittle, a bit thicker than a hair.’ 

‘How long?’ 

‘A couple of inches.’ 

‘And the tube?’ 

‘Oh, that was long, really long, a couple of feet – well, eighteen inches – but narrow, maybe a quarter of an inch across, and made up of overlapping sheets like fine paper.  At the end, the sheets came apart and were greeny-brown and shrivelled.  In fact, the whole thing was covered in this fine white papery skin that came off really easily.’ 

‘So what happened when you pulled it off?’ 

‘Oh, amazing.  You see, it wasn’t really a ball, when you looked at it closely; it had ridges going up the side from the tendrils to the tube.  In fact, when I turned it over with the tendrils towards me, it was this beautiful shape, not a perfect circle, but with a scalloped edge.  And when I stuck my thumb nails in between the ridges, it pulled apart into little segments, shaped like crescent moons, tapering at the tube end and slightly thicker at the tendril end, covered in another layer of skin, pale red this time.  Behind the first one, there was another layer of these segments, they all fitted together perfectly into the overall shape.’ 

‘And what was inside the segments?’ 

‘The skin was much harder to pull off than the outside stuff had been, but I broke the segment apart with my nails.  Inside it was white and solid, a perfect oval in cross-section, and if you looked carefully you could just see a much smaller oval right in the middle, a slightly darker, creamy colour.  But I’ll tell you one thing.’ 

‘What’s that?’ 

‘It stank.  I still can’t get the smell off my thumbnail.’