Myson Midas

At first it worked like a clock, the timer’s plastic
teeth gritted in the day’s hours to vent that puff of
steam each dawn: a gun to raise the drowned.

Then radiators ticking, water climbing the house,
a wash of heat that dried the air, warped window-
frames and kept us from the snow. One day it

stalled, monarchical and crazed, boiling paint-blisters
until the gas-man calmed it, his hands soothing it
the way a shepherd lambs a softly bleating ewe.

It sulked for weeks. The gas-man almost lodged with
us: checked resistances, changed sensors, untangled
wiring looms, fingered pipes to track a fading pulse.

Intermittent faults are hard to find. Too true. What he
couldn’t guess, his hands groped for in gloom lit by
rubies on the diode board. He felt a drip and

staunched it, clipped strands of copper, coaxed
gaskets, Morsed free a sticking valve, and with a fine-
haired brush did archaeology on seams of dust.

Dog-days of random heat ensued; we never knew what
happened when we left the house, if scalding plumes or
flutters of the pilot flame erupted there to flare and cool.

One day I found him, head-pressed to the boiler’s guts,
swearing in iambics at the bastard thing, his hands em-
bedded, coaxing hope. They came out carbon-stained

but cupped success: a ghost-flame lit his worn, angelic face.
He left for good; an absence; idling heat. Now, at two-am
a taxi tracks the street. Someone steps home alone to

bear their empty house. We lie awake, touch fingertips,
hear rooms exhale last whispers of the miracle his hands
have brailled here for our fumbling hands to read.

© Graham Mort

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