Ann Pilling

Next Monday night Simon Armitage, who is walking the Pennine Way, is giving a poetry reading in my sitting room. Our house is actually ON the Pennine Way so he would have been walking past in any case. It was not always on this popular walkers’ route, that went slightly east of us, but somebody bought the house in the 1970’s and turned it into a ( very) small hotel. The story goes that he changed the route slightly, I hope legally, so that walkers passed his very door, scope for cream teas, beds for the night, a Full English breakfast…

Anyhow, I have to fit 44 people into my sitting room. I keep measuring the church chairs which a kind neighbour is going to bring up the night before in his tractor trailer. My main concern is the carpet, an old, thick  rug which sits on top of another carpet. This rug has a life of its own and has always been subject to carpet creep. However often we pull it straight (it is a two if not three man job) it eventually sets off across the room to go somewhere else. At the moment it is making a serious bid to get up the chimney. The long edge furthest away from the door is already lapping at the hearth.

The Life of Objects

This carpet
is determined to get into the next room.
We straighten it most weeks and line it up with the fireplace
taking a corner each; it’s like making a bed.
It’s happy for about a day then it starts creeping
towards the bookcase making rich waves,
ink blue, the red of ox blood specked with white
where weavers cut their threads. It must know
that freedom’s on the other side of the wall
and sunshine, it was made
in a hot room overlooking a baked street
heavy with spice smells.

Ann Pilling
(first published in Smiths Knoll)