Counting the Pennies

Summary

How quickly the pennies tarnish

rubbed together in the penny barrel

like grain, not the silken rush

over the plunged-in hand but

the grit-feel of necessity, the stink

of it as it gilds the skin. Dad's pennies

on the shelf above the bed

pilfered for sweets, the gut-sing

of guilt, jangle, jangle,

his hand a fat-knuckled mammal

jumping in his trouser pocket.

Now though, enough to make

a scratch meal or the bus to town.

This broken-eyed penny pot is sour

as an unbleached bin,

your fingers as you count and bag

rusty with tannin, familiar as that

tang in the mouth when you have

run hard and far and for too long

or in the stream when you reach

between the rocks where the water

runs brown from bracken. Pennies,

pennies, for the eyes of the dead one –

don't look – he comes in the night

with his smell of cigarettes, ravelings

of smoke, the path unrolling

a sheet in the sun where you might

make passage; pennies for the dead

stacked like chimneys in a toy

mill town, rained-on black blocks.

Here: the portcullis; here: the head.