Linda Rose Parkes was born in the Channel Islands and studied at the University of East Anglia where she did an M.A in Creative Writing with Malcolm Bradbury. She has been published widely in the national poetry magazines and anthologies and won various prizes, including Blue Nose Poet of the Year, 2001 and joint second in the Keats/Shelley Memorial Prize, 2003. Her full length collection, the usher's torch published by Hearing Eye, was launched in June 2005. Her work has appeared in Reactions 4, Pen@Inc, As Girls Could Boast, Virago New Poets, Dybbuk of Delight, In The Company Of Poets and is due to appear in an anthology ed. Andy Brown and published by Stride, titled The Allotment.

Quelle: poetry p f

The Muses Of The Shower Room


They’re there behind the shower curtain,
giving off headiness of rose, the calm of geranium
mingled with salt of a fresh swim.

Snuck under the bra of a tankini is a seaweed flower.
What more to be said? Yet still they shadow
the quiet of distance: when I’m changing a bulb

or in need of the bathroom on waking in the night,
they insist on holding to the subject of how the tide
has reached the shingle line, evening breezing

into the bay, asking only that the waves break at the edge
of consonance, that vowels be bestowed
with the soughing quality of the near-drowned,

who with their lives unspooling near the end,
hear the manatee give one last call.
Of syntax they desire an expansiveness, a oneness

between body of text and their own fluent strokes.
What if I can’t convey the rocky escarpments,
shifting light and breaking surfaces? Or if I fail

in the sludge between words, to suggest the power
of the submerged narrative of love’s losses
and growing old? Will they pursue me until the work

is done? Until they, untouched by winter coming on,
bask in the shored up waters of the page?
But I hear them now - emerging from the sea

and heading for the shower room … trailing their towels
along the sand-swilled floor! Yes, I can feel the pummeling
all down their spines, taste the fragrance lapping their silhouettes.