Rosemary

Yesterday I made a mistake. I thought you could cross the roundabout and get across the road that way, but you can't. But on my way to my mistake I passed a rosemary bush and I brushed it with my hand. It was a misty day and I was wearing a fur jacket and a pink scarf and a short black dress and looked dishevelled and mistaken as if I had wandered out of a Brassai photograph and onto a roundabout in south-east London. The smell of the rosemary also seemed like a mistake, like it and I and the road could not all exist in the same place. Is it rosemary for regret or for remembrance?


Today my tooth aches with all the mistaken brushings of the past. I believe there is a hole in it that if I could stuff with a bunch of rosemary (which is sausage stew and gas fires and dumplings and crisp walks in brown woods) would be wholesome again.