Claire Askew

Caul

A hard night clung over the fell when she came. A slice
of moon sang in the air, a blue ghost,
and a skin of frost sucked at the windowpane.
Inside your terrible baby was being born. You can still see
the slick mask, the dish of her skull, a small melon —
the way her first cry shook the foundations like a tornado.

Those same high, thin cries made a tornado
of your life — the way they pitched and sliced
through the house. Her mouth wet and red as a watermelon,
silence and sleep unlikely as ghosts.
The sound was angry and wide as the sea —
hot and electric, rigid as pain.

What was the ancient need that stirred her? What pain
pulled screams from her belly, flung tornados
through her dreams? What was it she could see?
It looked like nothing more than a gauzy slice
of skin, saucer-sized, the scalp of a tiny ghost.
You held it in your hands, this heft of melancholy,

after the doctor peeled it from her head’s pale melon.
More brittle than you expected, it was a pane
of swirled glass, a lens to photograph ghosts,
the only treasure left in the wake of a tornado.
The neighbours thronged to see it, suggested you slice
it up and send its blessing out to sea,

according to tradition. But you were not ready to see
this eerie birthmark leave, loosened into pieces like a melon.
You clung fast to logic, every slice
of resolve, and drove them off like rats. Then the pain
of loneliness, surviving the living tornado —
sitting beside her all night as she slept with ghosts.

The caul breathed quietly in a drawer, a ghost
itself, projecting the dreadful truth it made her see.
You’d heard of caul children, how they predict tornados,
speak in tongues — how one cured a tumour the size of a melon.
But all your child seemed to know was pain:
a veil of wordless fear. And still you kept the slice

of skin — its ghost heavy in your head like pain.
You’d hold it to the light, lost like Merlin in the Lake —
your nerves in slices, trying to see the tornado.