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23rd May, 2025

Friday Poem – ‘Minutiae’ by Rosalind Hudis

Photo of an old greenhouse with faded paint and smudged windows.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Minutiae’ by Rosalind Hudis from her collection Restorations.

Minutiae Emptying this last room, I catch myself at the spot where my father watched the garden lose its grip as he did. Outside, the greenhouse grimed with old breath, a place of husks, blurred webs, the stink of geraniums past. Labels remain, obsessively cursive, their season blotted over. But still, in packets, a smattering of seeds holed up in themselves and scentless which changes the view; less skeleton than something latent – unfulfilled borders except in his inner mind where schemes of yellow and rose out-shone the loss. If I conjure him, it’s not a white pandemic of endings, but the detail of micro life: he’s in the vaults of a seedbank, opens stacked drawers where bag nestles on bag labelled. He reaches to feel each one, how each husk names itself, muscular, fretted, black phosphoric, ferrous, grey, rose creped or smooth, uterine, fractal, whorled, crumbled as cinders yet not soft. Like children, he wants them not to break too soon. Seed can be forced if you storm it gnaw at fault-lines, fake an immobile daylight lock in a room of winter, add salt or sugar hood, let water engulf and drain or simply narrow time.The greenhouse hordes its time in faith, is my father bent to press a soil surface, lining up seeds like moments, each one a shade unlike another, living the preparation. its length and minutiae, his dark blue ink.

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Related Books

Restorations

Rosalind Hudis

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