They found you cold, fists jammed on each other,
Arctic on Antarctica. And between them,
paper, scrawl: a crumpled note signed and sealed.
To release it meant prising a wrist,
cheating the knot of rigor mortis.
Then a policeman picked it with a jemmy…
Just once, this once, make sense of me?
Her words, questing, tightened their wire
across my chest. The car where they found you,
shut windows weeping with monoxide,
was hauled away; sold off to strangers
Lies. All of it… a first, final readership,
hostaged to your death, in a coroner’s office.
You should have shared. You didn’t.
All this time… all that time, you knew.
Your parents bunched, stark as witnesses;
made for the door. You’d cut the ice.
Solstitial visitor, always the wasp
in your quick-fire combing along my shelves.
Were those books your pollen?
or the excuse for returning them
unread, spurning discussion
with a thrumming whisper, bed?
All reasons for talk squandered, unheard.
Only fear of love unsheathed your sting.
Ice. Our first winter: a glassy hive.
Honey in jars – bottles, sidelong,
whispered KILNER, KILN… KIL…
I dipped a spoon in the first of the year,
tugging the surface to a muscle of lava;
slipped it, neat, in your bowl of coffee.
Half-love, your love’s language:
you stirred its black spiral.
Snow. December; castanets of hail;
holly we brought in snared with hooks.
Taps betrayed us, a clanking mutiny
bursting a wall. We boiled snow:
snow on snow. Our windows, portholed
on a white atlantic, silently froze.
Bed, with the fire’s dying collusion,
gave up its gift as we crammed for warmth.
Leaving unspoken what the doctor told you,
the clack of your step said: Don’t, don’t,
don’t… I cut to the kitchen, jabbing
a kettle’s thick, cool waist for coffee.
London in March. A second opinion
grudged the first. Anything to be done?
Nothing between us the train couldn’t say,
hammering northward: too late too late.
Not now: your touchy, embattled cry
as I steered you from silence, hoping you’d walk
a little of the way. ‘The woods perhaps?
a tree-creeper’s nested.’ But: No – you
go. I’d veer out, make eighty yards
before I stopped, stranded with wonder:
your seeping, last hours (minute by minute)
creeping like a bird on shrivelled bark.
That silence. I tried it.
An anchor scudding the sea-floor,
you were snared on a weightless sand;
for days you couldn’t move or speak.
Then, a false spring:
you asked for food; for your bed
to be placed in the hall-way
as though you’d fledge.
Your silence was fear, furled like a sting.
Your dad called by to run you to hospital.
Wants me to go and get it over!
You swayed to the car where your father
sat smoking. Cunt – I’ll die
where I like
slamming to the bedroom,
They found you cold, the car’s drained engine
ticking to zero; you, flexed over yourself,
catapulted to that final wish: an Arctic quiet;
the sealight torching your eye like a mirror…
I came home to cupboards – their after-life, memory;
your clothes strewn-about, burgled from wardrobes.
And the garden: its hive, a Vesuvius of larvae,
fresh tenants of this frozen site.