The Don't Touch Garden

Kate Foley

• Publisher: Arachne Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781913665067
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Don't Touch Garden explores what it is to be adopted, both for the child and the adoptive parents, through a wide range of poetic styles and complex emotions.
An absorbing account of the legacy of being an adopted child. Forthright and tender, this moving sequence reflects Foley's unflinching gaze into the mirror in a sometimes excoriating attempt to discern traces of her belonging, and to make peace with the past.
Joy Howard, Poet, publisher and former Fostering Services Manager

The Don’t Touch Garden

‘Mum, why don’t I look like you?’

An age before freezers but my cucumber

and tinned salmon tinkle with ice.

Fresh from the bagwash, our Sunday cloth

becomes Siberian.

My father coughs the cough that kills

thirty years later. ‘Not at the table, Jim...

And you eat up... good food... not for wasting...’

‘But it’s got bones, Mum.’ Soft little blue-white

spicules, tasting of chalk. ‘Eat.’ Safe, familiar

battleground, colluded victory. I eat,

we both pretend I’m filled.

Good food, a story hinted at, not told

for her. Bread and marge dipped in her Dad’s

rich gravy. A gobstopper fluffed with lint,

scrumped apples, and once a pickled herring

up her drawers, nicked from the corner shop.

Later, she laid places,

footmen, garden boys, housemaids – and like

a massive liner coming over the rim

of daylight, Cook, for whom the bacon

must be shaven pink and curly, the egg’s

golden eye shaded with a Gloire de Dijon lid.

Horn of plenty, blown for two and six

a month and one half day on which you went

to see your Mum, took her such leavings – jellied

dripping, windfalls, blown plums – as Cook

benignly sent ‘...all those children ... mouths to feed...

such a respectable woman, your mother...’

Panis angelicus. Is this the food of angels

or something else you’ve got to swallow down

and not get stuck or else you go to hell?

I’m s’posed to feel Him here. Welcome Jesus,

Sacred Heart, sorry for my sins...what else?

How long before He goes away?

The altar looks like meat, brown with yellow

curls. Don’t think of liver, or you’ll sick Him

up. The happiest day, they say

but I feel like a maypole with this soppy veil,

older than all the other waist-high kids, I had

to tell real sins to Father... Don’t think about it

now with Jesus here, He’ll listen in. O Mother

of the Word Incarnate, graciously

hear and answer me.

Not enough colour in her own red hair,

hips and haws, golden freckled chestnut leaves,

crimsons, gilded greens, the stained glass colours

of pantry, church and lane. Not hers to make

and touch, but lent, made-over, handed-down,

until my father came, his snappy trilby brim

forever cocked, always about to join his

raffish shadow to his own quiet soul.

Jews Harp, mouth organ, tapping foot,

beery voice of the pub, but Monday mornings

cancelled Saturday nights.

He’d give her a bit of life,

a place to call her own, a name,

he’d give her children.

Seven stains or clots.

The seventh breathed

awhile. The eighth,

a piece of paper.

Mum and Dad get happy-ever-after,

‘a dear little Catholic baby girl’.

‘She never sent her clothes – not

that I’d want them, hand-me-downs.

I threw out what she came in – shabby!

Navy blue eyes and scurf, she had

and crusts all round her eyes.

My sister Margaret said “God, Else!

You don’t want that. Take it back.”

How she cried. Her mouth

grazed past the rubber teat.

I tried to hold her close.

She snapped back like electric,

like I smelt all wrong.’

‘Skinny, shrieking like a rabbit

snared. My hands so big. Nowhere to go

except for down the pub. Why did

she want one? Mine I’d understand

but this from nowhere. Blood will out,

they say. O...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Blue Glass Empty Pram
• Lost Property
• Well, Daughter...
• The French For Midwife
• Adoption
• The Don’t Touch Garden
• Milk
• Elephant Aunts
• The Man on a Bike
• Mothers and Fathers
• The Cot of my Bones our Bed
• Corchipoo
• Thyrotoxicosis
• My Father, Counting Sheep
• Sometimes I Feel Another Face
• Making the Days
• The End of a Long Conversation has Come
• Oral History
• On Growing a Face
• The Right Bones
• Oma
• Bison
• Paradox
• Copyright