Catherine Byron

Poems by Catherine

THE GETTING OF VELLUM
(opening section)

Have you ever scribbled a telephone number
or a name on the handy back of your hand?
Written something there on your own soft skin,
pressed and tickled across the grain of you
with the fine running point of a ballpoint pen?
It has the right ink that’ll slide on
oily and easy, and stay there for hours.
Even a soapy scrub of your hand
won’t shift it altogether.
It’s perfect for jotting something down
in a hurry, something you need to hold onto
oh, for less than a day, maybe,
but vital for that day.
Paper is flighty, easy to lose,
and it isn’t always to hand.
You’ll not, after all, mislay
your own skin - will you?

Unlike the animal - lamb, or kid, or calf -
whose skin has been stripped off,
scraped clean of life’s paraphernalia,
- flesh - fat - hair -
and transformed, even transfigured
into parchment
or - in the case of the calf - vellum
for the writing of the Word.

CRYPT
iii

When I bought the cleaver
at the butcher’s suppliers
in the cold hinterland of East Kilbride
the man behind the counter
asked me quite straight
did I get on, like,
with my old man?
Fine.
Oh I knew then fine
what cleaving was:
to split with a blow
or to hold on tight.