Fourth on your list is a mid-price, brick mid-terrace
... what a surprise. The agent lets you in.
The first thing you see is a vase of wilted flowers
on a pot-stand, then the Stannah stairlift paused,
eternally it seems, up the narrow steps.

The bathroom tour confirms it. One surgical glove
lies stranded, grasping, by a beige commode.
Did the old and - ha ha ha - possibly ill
owner ... move somewhere bigger then? you squeak.
You bolt back out to the brittle, too-bright street.

The scores on the lino, the boot-print on the door.
You thought of the ancient filth of student flats,
and of their sad and subtle narratives:
the balled-up tights retrieved from a sofa back,
the mattress flipped to show its chalky stain.

The watermarks and coffee-rings on worktops;
the wine spilled by the sofa; the low beam
where someone thought to fix a rope once; notches
on bedposts then on doorposts; errant Post-its
under old doormats, knick-knacks left in drawers.

Each loving grubby mark made by the people
over the years since one stood here, like you
and felt, with a swoop, their future being born
- as though some mythic beast in a distant land
had turned and begun its trek towards their life.

When the gowned technician
with the ectoplasm
offers us a glimpse of the beyond
the shadows squirm.
Is it The Turin Shroud?

Then as we lean in closer
to adjust the set
The Ghost Of All Our Christmasses to Come
appears
live! Via satellite!

A surveillance chart,
a CAT scan -
CCTV imagery? - a skull?
Or, as the dust settles, nothing.
Nothing at all.

Since her name dropped like a stone in the women’s talk
I am haunted by the ghost of my mother’s sister.
She comes to me out of 1939
in a little white dress and pristine Mary-Janes
clutching the gloves she’ll drop on the Donegall Road.

She stoops from the kerb. The Donegall Road, the West,
is a disused room in my family’s House of History:
the distaff wing, the city’s sealed-off place.
She steps from the kerb to the not-quite-lorry-free roads
of 1940. Next year my mother is born.

Next year to the day. My mother’s birthday cake
is iced in black and sweetened with black ashes;
the candle-flames are little points of dark
as dim as her dead sister’s eyes that day
on the Donegall Road. The name they sang: her name.

Colette, Colette. My grandmother’s atonement
for being so provocatively bereaved
is to lay her womb, like a flower, on heaven’s altar.
The Virgin smiles and leans to soothe her brow.
After my mother, she begets seven sons.

Colette, Colette: your name is a hiccup of grief,
and the hollow knock inside an empty closet.
A seed of loss, it sprouts beyond the day
we tuck your little shoes, now yellow with age,
like a breech birth in the soil of granny’s grave.