Hardness Scale

Talc

As a boy, freshly washed,
I’d wrap myself in bath sheets —
right up to the underarms, like women do.

She told me decent towels
were the mark of a fully-grown man.

Next time she visited, stripped to the waist,
I offered a choice of bamboo or cotton
in a number of colours and sizes.

Gypsum

My father slammed the pub door,
clasping the car-keys he’d snatched
from a plastered hard man.

He’d helped bury the same man’s son
a month before.

I never saw him as soft.

Calcite

In Mitchelstown caves, hoping to impress you,
I told the guide my family owned
the mummified arm of a famous boxer.

There was someone in the town, she said,
who’d bought Joe Dolan’s hip at auction.

Fluorite

You paraglided conspiracies,
while I hoped my teeth stayed in my head.

Apatite

Apollo touches down on Selene against her will.
She’d be covered under a meter of water,
if we could strip mine her first.

Feldspar

We’d run at each other, drunk,
on the long lawn behind your house,
all mock threat — pretending to land punches
in the last-minute retraction of violence
from which friendship is beaten.

Quartz

The atmosphere cooled. You
fell through the bandgap. We
tried to rescue you; you would not
leave your crystal garden.

Topaz

There was a name for the shade of her eyes
as she stared just beyond me
with the sun flouncing down.

I found out far too late.
I sometimes think to tell her,
long past midnight.

Corundum

Red-eyed, jetlagged,
thinking of my friend’s daughter;
that famous jockey;
the price I paid for Israel.

Diamond

She loves things that she
cannot afford and makes a
wall about herself
out of them.

When her prospectors fall,
their blood in the air glints hope
and defeat all at once.