Two Poems by Phillip Crymble

Heirloom

Alone among the gold-tone alloy Pulsars
and the novelty Nelsonics on the top rack
of the glass display, a Synchrotimer Seiko

with a bracelet like a classic Rolex Oyster
in a textured leather case. How the K-Mart
in our little Podunk town came to acquire it

must have been by sheer mistake. My father
matched the money that it took me months
to save delivering papers. Companion, prize

and talisman — it’s travelled with me thirty
years. I wear it to this day. The inner bezel
indices occluded now, the sub-dials stuck

unzeroed on its face. As if it had forgot how
I adored it. As if it understood it lost its way.

Schnitzer

Apple season now here in the valley and your parents
back to visit for a month before the snows begin. Intent

as New Deal muralists on scaffolds with their trowels
and paints, we perch on tapered ladders at the U-Pick —

lean in against the gnarled boughs and branches — hold
on like winded heavyweights entangled in a late-round

clinch. Our little rusted hand-cart heaped with Ginger
Golds and Spartans, we labour up the sloping path —

make our way towards the store beside the farmhouse —
load the apples that we’ve gathered on an antiquated

scale. As if asking for the time of day, or bringing up
the weather, your mother talks offhandedly of schnitzers —

pulls a Russet from her basket — holds it steady — makes
a cranking gesture. Like Levi-Strauss in Triste Tropique,

the teenager who operates the till seems oddly lost —
her stare so blank and dispossessed it makes me think

of Meryl Streep — those scenes in Sophie’s Choice — the ones
where she’s beside herself — bereft and sick with grief. 

(Schnitzer: Yiddish term for a tool used to carve and core apples)

Phillip Crymble is a physically disabled poet from Belfast. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Magma, The Irish Times, Oxford Poetry, The London Magazine, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, and elsewhere.