The bitter and the sweet

I had to stop my bank card last night; from the unauthorised payments showing up on my bank statement, someone has been using my account to pay some sort of financial agency ("debt collection" said the lady at my bank) and to do some major shopping at Sainsbury's online. How tedious is that? ("Exceedingly," says desperance, who feels that if you're going to have your identity pinched, and your bank card too, you'd want it for something more exciting than shopping at Sainsbury's. International assassins at the very least, he reckons...). Tedious, and odd, too, since surely these are payments whioch pay into someone's account or deliver to someone's address, but in either case making the someone easy to identify.

But that's enough about that: let's have a poem. I first came across Catherine Graham's poems because Ellen Phethean, of Diamond Twig, has chosen several of them as her 'poem of the month'. I was particularly taken with Making Clogs at Gallowgate. her vivid description of her mother's first job. When we met at someone else's poetry reading I told her so, and she very kindly sent me a copy of her chapbook Signs, (published by ID on Tyne). This poem struck me as fitting some of the recurring themes of this blog, and Catherine has given me permission ro reproduce it here:

Making Marmalade with Marc Bolan
Riding a white swan
cannot compare with the joy of
making marmalade with Marc Bolan.
His hands, so skillful
he could peel an orange in his back pocket.
Peeling ojranges
as if undressing a princess,
a diva, a whore,
before bringing the fruit gently to the boil:
Simmering
like a secret; biting her tongue,
bittersweet.

Delicious, irresistible: spread generously
at breakfast, like glittering gold leaf.

Catherine says "I often introduce it at readings with a brief explanation about going to school in the days when girls did cookery while the lads did woodwork and how, in my boredom, I would drift off into 'Catherine world'. Aaah, Marc Bolan"