The poetry is in the pity.
Wilfred Owen
The skies of your life are unerringly blue
and you have no plans to rearrange
your expectations; but when the licensed official
says the word, you, and those
closest to you, immediately shift
to another country. No matter that
you do not seem to move, and others
do not recognise your departure, you
are now in exile. The word
will be a visa, in your passport
an indelible stamp, and your passport
now full of pages that you will never use.
There are no tense allegations:
your arrival is an application
for permanent residence, approved
without question;
your questions do not matter.
The government of that country
is entirely different. We know
that we will all die
but here your friends live each day
in the expectation of life. Now
you will live each day, each hour, each
minute in the expectation of death.
In that country there is no capital planning,
no budgeting, no small talk, no migration queues,
no day to day distraction
from the dictatorship of death. Forget
the life of the mind, although the citizenry
is full of meaning. Where everyone is a refugee
the body asserts its supremacy, the economy
is measured out in medicines and pain.
You will wonder that there is no system of justice,
the only wars are within you,
the UN convention signatures are
all missing, yet ethics and care are everywhere.
There gravity pins you to the earth
more tightly; the very air can be exhausting.
Move slowly in this place
if you must move
where the noisiest sound is silence.
There is no resisting the journey
or putting it aside – later, later …
No use to declare
stark ignorance of the language.
He says the word, “cancer”,
and already you are there.
The Big C
is coming to visit you
and coming to visit me.
It’s not if but when
he’ll stiffen in the doorway
blocking out all the light.
Your lack of invitation
will not deter his right
never to go away:
once he’s here
he’s here to stay.
All other subjects will become him.
He will teach your only thought
is not your only speech.
The immensity of his smile
will command your every breath,
while his metallic taste
fills your mouth,
his demeanour, his nausea
coats your teeth.
No fibre of you will escape
his claustrophobic intensity.
The intense Greek derision
of lusting body by steady soul
will make more and more sense.
All Logic, Hope, Justice
he will condense, into Luck.
of your soul; his very howls
will ensure you are
a prisoner of your bowels.
You may become so attached
to him that life will prove
a poise of loneliness,
his speech a long silence
the true measure of noise,
with an idiotic,
metaphysical sense of glee.
The Big C will ask us
why are we in this carcass
whose acts prove so reckless,
that it can’t be who we are!
The Big C
is coming to visit you
and coming to visit me
eventually.
Your hair is falling like thin rain,
like mizzle, like long, silent,
lightening snow. An invisible waterfall,
your hair cascades
or lifts away from you
like gossamer, like an inkbrush
gifting new patterns to the floors,
furring our mouths, our thickening thoughts,
our almost-said words.
In each corner of each room,
swirled across the tiles,
I find them, these networks,
these fine cobwebs of you;
they’re flowering down your clothes:
every jumper, every skirt,
even your socks are
laced with these filaments,
hair like slender moths,
like will-o’-the-wisp,
these fine threads of you,
drifting away …
And our lives are fastened
by more shadows
than we cast.
Your hair
lisps like autumn blossom,
aspects of the you
on racks in the wardrobe,
alert in the trembling air.
Just outside the bedcovers,
the you you were, seeming intact
but in fact
we are as we are
together, alone, as you can see,
with elusive memories for company,
with your wisps of hair
disappearing as gently as breath.
I strike a match, bash
the light switch off
and, candle flickering,
drop into another century
when thought was slower:
I need its pace,
this slowing of the mind,
as another mug of tea
you’ve asked for
but been unable to drink
is swallowed by the sink
and I lean silently
over the benchtops
swallowing hard
while the tea
gurgles and gargles
in the sink’s
metallic throat.
Now you share your every action
with your insistent twin;
with a fraction of your effort
it tracks our whims and our griefs
though it is my shadow
only vicariously.
Whatever you do
it is unerringly you
but less than you;
so it and I have developed
a humbling relation
about what it will do
and it will do and it will do.
Your shadow
is your uncanny dancing partner,
wherever you lead it follows.
Whatever the time of day,
no matter that clouds sway
across the entire sky,
it concertinas the stairs,
slants over your chair:
its grimness is a kind of solace
that nothing else needs attention.
Your shadow
being cast from inside you
lies beside you
even in the night;
with a special darkness;
sometimes it is so strong
that I seem to cast it too.
Persistent as a god,
its natural state
is nothingness.
Your shadow
will concentrate our minds
until it stretches
in protracted stealth
and becomes more you
than you yourself.
I was so used to the nausea, the anguish,
the stomach pains, your stumbling,
arm aided walk, the diarrhoetic dashes, the slow
sleepless nights, your arms shuddering,
pinpricked like a junkie’s
that when the preoccupied secretary
hurried to us, split open the thin-lipped
envelope, and briskly explicated
the intricate scientific
phrases as “all clear”,
I wept, and couldn’t accept it,
and I wondered, as the two words sank in,
who or why or how or what
had catapulted our lives away
and just as blithely decided
to fling them back. So that now
everything could seem the same as it was
except that the waiting room, the chairs,
the sky outside, our hands, your
turbaned wisps of withered hair,
were all new, entirely.
My dearest darling Rhond, I write this to you, or me, or to space on the eve of yet another operation, but I need to write for the horrors and anxieties – probably paranoia – that overtake me in the long, dark reaches of the night – hours when every element of imagination is an ogre. I imagine having to ring our boys, your father, your sister, my mum, everyone, to say the operation has gone horribly wrong. I imagine the surgeon, someone with him to provide support – support him, not me – while he tells me the hardest part of his job is not slicing apart flesh – your flesh – or reaching and tearing out organs – but this impossible sitting down to say, unaccountably something went wrong, the risk was small, but there was a chance, a .5% chance of dying on the table. Unaccountably …
He is still wearing his gloves and gown, half-human – he will go away to be haunted by this forever, but not as much as me, as us. Then a moment of sense jumps up and says this is ridiculous! But immediately I am back in an alternative horror – you’ve lost too much blood, the anaesthetist has misjudged the dose, the cancer cells are everywhere like children in a playground, your body couldn’t take it. It’s five years of this battling disease, rising and sinking against its strength or temporary weakness, building and building – a tsunami that pushes aside or surges over the flimsy dykes of reason, and again I am, we are, swimming, floundering, drowning in a hysteria of worry so unlike the impassive, unthinking march of cancer and all the science the surgeon gets to fight it.
Tomorrow he will do the job, and both our lives hinge on the steadiness of his hands, and his impersonal skill. It is no match for our emotions. One day, we know, we will lose this battle – the body and all its absurdities always wins. Until then we struggle, and fight, and sinfully almost pray.
You never see him move
but now he sits silent
in the expectant corner
of every room you enter.
It is his appalling serenity
that hurtles you
into lip-bitten anger.
Though he stares ahead
as blank as eternity
his eyes never leave you,
toast your anger into melancholy,
melancholy into the concession,
the bathos of self-pity. Injustice
finds you everywhere. You can declare
that this is your room,
your house, trespassing
will not be tolerated
but he knows who is trespassing
on your useless proclamations
and will never forgive them.
His silence is the future of noise,
his poise the futile end
of restless striving. Arriving
in each room you
may close your eyes
and resolutely say you do
not believe in death.
will never
not believe in you.
We sat in the oncologist’s
neat, magazine-free room, where
sometimes I find myself
sitting still,
while he in his deadpan
manner – matter of fact voice
and no movement of hands –
offered mild chemo (mild
because the stronger had already
rotted your kidneys)
which might not work
or the delicately named
to hide its brutality
“palliative care”, and said
with an unexpected gentleness,
“Don’t decide now”. As I sat there
I knew you would choose
an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.
You would have no more
of the barely restrained
hair-desiccating, gut-shucking
horror of chemo.
You were calm
as if we were leaving you
yet I was fighting furies
I dare not show.
You said it was worse
for me than you:
I never believed it.
and said goodbye to family
one by one; you offered each woman
– your sister, my sister, my brothers’
partners, my mother – your few pieces
of jewellery, your worldly goods,
and spoke to each with a thud
of quiet finality
while I stood beside you
too terrified to open my mouth.
So much courage
as if you held a sheath
of repressed lightning
that ripped through me, through us,
while I stood
truly pathetic and dumb
and shook, ravished
from head to foot.
Your driver’s licence
renewal notice
arrives in the post
innocently enough
– after all, it’s just
a notice,
part of the trivial,
pay-attention-to-this,
administrative detail
of our lives.
You must choose:
one more year or five.
“Just one”,
you say, playing
the Scotsman’s daughter,
“I wouldn’t want
to waste the money”;
and something funny
folds up
inside me
and keeps trembling
its flimsy, papery breath.
Cabbage moths, white
like torn pieces of skin,
flit in and out of the garden beds
eating what vegetable
leaves they need.
Your skin, thinned out like paper,
itches constantly, and you scratch
like a dog with fleas.
It’s the medicines they say.
Medicines designed not to cure
but to endure, to keep
the cancer at bay
a little longer. For five years
our lives have orbited illness
and for six months now
have been sucked
into its light-defiant
vacuum.
Your skin slumps on
the mannequin framework of your bones.
On the few occasions I hug you
I have to do so oh so gently
it barely feels like touch.
Misery attends us. Our friends
are frightened to call,
understandably. I must remind myself
that silence is a form of consideration.
slats in the outdoor chairs;
from an angle of sunshine
they look more real
than the chairs themselves
(Plato got it wrong)
as real as skin
fluttering, peeling its way
out of our lives.
Outside, streetlights shine
like low slivers of moon
and people move
energetically about their lives.
For six years
we have slipped
into the black pit
of illness and death
again and again,
climbed out
with no suggestions of doubt
then slipped back
and climbed out
again and again.
You cry in the shower
at your wasted, hairless body,
your now small breasts
sagging like two
unanswerable questions,
and I listen, hidden beyond the door
helpless, useless.
It is exhausting.
Why you are tired
I know, poison
surging through your veins.
“Why am I so tired?”
then realise
always, coming and going
to doctors, chemists, hospitals,
arriving and leaving,
sifting through all the medicines to take,
all the things to do,
whatever I do, whatever I think,
the unstoppable core of me
is already grieving.
Walking near home I stop
at the old railway crossing
and stare down those
endless iron tracks,
their distances shining
even on a cloudy day.
Years ago I wrote a poem
that ended with railway tracks
as “the longest footprints in the snow”.
It was in America, Florida
– would you believe Melbourne Beach? –
in deep summer actually:
poetry’s world is separate
though deeply connected
to reality. I was thinking
of two girls who picked me up
and put me up, this odd
Australian hitchhiker. I remember
retying their bikini tops.
Later they dropped me at a college,
organised one student to take me in.
He thought I had fucked them both
and couldn’t believe my luck. I let him.
Actually they were more lovely than that
but this was 1971. The roads were free
and everybody was a hippy
or wanted to be
or was too frightened to be.
Now cancer has you in its grasp
again – by the lungs,
by the ovaries, by the spleen
– what in Christ’s name
does it matter where!
Soon you will be gone
and I know I will stare
down those endless tracks
that once seemed to lead somewhere,
that now lead nowhere,
and think it
a worthwhile place to go.
1.
The end, in the end, came quickly
and astonished us all. Now
it sits like a great, still
stone weighted inside
my pitiful heart. When I think
of it my breath whoops,
catches, every number adds
to zero, every thing
sinks inside my being.
2.
On Thursday you were ill
but not unusually so; you still
cooked dinner determinedly – elaborate
seafood crepes I thought delicious.
You didn’t; you ate a bit
determinedly, and shuffled to bed.
On Friday you were ill,
nothing new. At night
you would not eat, except
for some of an egg I boiled, and bread.
You could reach bed early,
but first I tried to ring
our younger son; it was
his birthday. Miraculously
he had just finished his shift
and was free. Your talk was good
It kept you up
a little while longer.
Coincidentally
our older son who never rings
on Friday night called from Taiwan
– business was slow.
And you talked.
I asked was it the best part
of the day, and you smiled
a huge, broad
words unnecessary smile.
On Saturday you were ill.
I was to go out early
though I didn’t want it,
but you insisted,
strong enough
to firmly protest.
When I came home
you were asleep. I’d never known
this before. I wrote a note,
then went to the shops. I had a fantasy
about coming home to find you
had died in bed,
but I dismissed it as ridiculous,
as yet another
of the thousand fantasies I’ve had
over the last almost six years.
When I came home again,
you were still asleep.
I checked – nervously – but it was sleep.
I started housework, clumsily, noisily.
After an hour or so you stirred.
Then it began.
You were hot, you were restless,
you were tired,
you hadn’t swallowed
all your many pills. I got them,
then got you up. I had to lift you,
you were so weak;
there was too much pain
in your back,
the cancers were breeding like bees.
3.
But slowly, staggering,
one hand leaning
over the other, both hands leaning on
the bathroom bench top,
you found your way
to the toilet.
I ran the shower, naked
to wash you,
then tore off the sweat-laden sheets
and scrapped new ones hurriedly
on the bed’s corners.
You spent time on time
before you emerged,
hand over hand again, and made it
to the cleansing shower,
collapsed onto a stool.
You could soap your breasts
and I could your legs, but
on your back you had me just
squeeze soapy water –
all you could bear.
Out of the shower you shocked me:
I wanted to pat you dry
but you kept going
into freeze frame
and wouldn’t have me
touch you, hunched over
like a crooked
backed statue.
I kept pulling towels out
to keep you warm,
and eventually got you back
to bed, all of three metres away.
An hour and a half shower
and after it
you just wanted to sleep.
4.
It was ages
before you let me ring a nurse
who was “busy”, who promised
to come or ring, who in fact
and never come. I kept
checking on you,
restless,
not sleeping.
It was dark before
you would let me
harangue the doctor,
the doctor we had seen six days before
when he tried to talk you into
perhaps attending our son’s wedding
in Taipei. He was stunned
that I wanted you in hospital,
at first asking “Why?”
but conceded. At the bed I said
I thought I could get you there
but might need an ambulance.
Your head was nodding on the stalk
of your neck like a daffodil
as I struggled to get you,
flattened on the bed, unable
to move, to lift yourself,
onto a mobile chair, your
flip-flopping feet onto the frame
of the hospital-style table on castors.
5.
It took twenty minutes
to get you from bed to car;
you could take none of your slight weight
a fast bongo beat by the time
I got you to the seat.
You’ve long needed a pillow behind
for the cancers in your back
but now you had a pillow
between the seatbelt and your stomach;
you looked like a human sandwich
upright because strapped
in place. We drove,
as fast as I could, you starting
occasionally into uncertain speech
but few words came out:
Saturday night, everyone getting out
in their glad rags, smiles on their faces,
the noise of fun starting to roar.
Saturday night, the hospital subdued
in semi-darkness, when I left you
slumped in the car, in five-minute parking,
and rushed to ask for a wheelchair
and a strong male nurse.
A receptionist surprised me:
I had to park at the door
to the new wing.
We waited. Minutes seemed
an agony of hours.
You were silent.
Eventually a wheelchair appeared, pushed
by a diminutive female nurse.
We nursed you into it, gradually,
and you were able
to help a bit.
The nurse took off immediately.
6.
By the time I found you, small
suitcase in hand, with clothes,
cardigan, medicines thrown inside
you were already in a buzz
of scurrying nurses, your arms
drip-fed. I could tell them about medicines
you needed and hadn’t had. They
couldn’t get a blood pressure,
the young nurse thought she was doing
something wrong, thought the machine
was kaput, but new machines
brought no readings.
You were moving in the bed, crying out
“Oh Christ!”, “Oh Dennis!”, until
painkillers pumped into a vein
gripped the pain a little. We all waited
for the doctor on duty
but I don’t think you knew.
He came. He couldn’t get a pressure.
I stayed, sitting in a chair beside you
but you were hardly aware. By 10
you had calmed into sleep
and I left, needing rest and food, and
normal human things outside
whatever dimension you were in.
I thought you would sleep through the night.
I’d been up since 5am
and my mind was sharply divided
between exhaustion and sharp,
shocked awareness, absolutely alert.
Back home I’d just finished
tasteless take-away pizza
when the phone rang – the nurse,
you were asking for me.
I threw pizza scraps and cardboard
aside, and rushed to the car
and the phone rang again,
the doctor this time. He wanted to know
if you should be kept alive
at any cost: I knew
this answer,
your emphatic “No!”
But he was just taking precautions,
considering just in case scenarios
as doctors must, almost
ultimate judges, on the brink
where few of us must ever go.
7.
Saturday night now in full swing.
When I reached the hospital
the doctor was already there,
asking you questions, and even
with eyes dumbly closed
He asked if you’d had the pain
all day, and you said “Pretty much”,
sounding almost like you.
He and I looked at each other;
I could tell him about the day,
and he started to go through
possibilities: he was trying
to work out
what the hell had happened,
possibility one – No –
and then
it clicked: he knew
and I could tell that he knew.
You had slumped
into sleep but just then, with eyes
closed, called out weakly, “Dennis”.
And he and I immediately stopped.
I think now
he moved back. I moved
to the head of the bed, and bent down
to you, said “Yes, My Love”
or some such, and you said, softly,
in drawn out, grasping, slow syllables,
“I need … to … go … home …
in … an ambulance”.
I replied “Of course”.
They were the last words you ever said.
to that nether world I could not enter.
I moved away,
asked him if we could
speak in the corridor:
“She’s not going to go home,
is she?”
He said simply “No”:
that blunt, final
wall of a syllable.
He explained
that your heart had bled
into the pericardial sac
around your heart. It was totally
unexpected. From there the heart
can’t find the blood to pump
around your body:
that simple plumbing
we live by,
and you died by the heart
while I expected a race
between your lungs and your bowels.
Cancer had ambushed us yet again,
always a step ahead
of expectations, that bastard
of a disease. I was I think
in shock but strangely calm. Perhaps
I was so deep in sorrow
I could not tell what it was.
I asked him, “How long?”
but he wouldn’t
“perhaps three days”
jumped into my head –
the period Christ took to rise
ingrained in Sunday School?
8.
I sent text messages, spoke a few times
to our older son, then settled
again beside your bed, a blanket
the nurses gave over me and the chair
and watched you breathing.
You slept calmly now.
9.
At 3am, a text in reply, and I spoke
to our younger son, who headed
for a plane. At 3.30 I thought
you would sleep through what was left
of the night, and so staggered home.
I did sleep, for perhaps an hour,
before the phone, that ominous instrument,
rang. I jerked upright,
looked at the clock – 5.40 – then
picked it up to a nurse’s voice,
the voice who had rung hours before:
“I came into the room five minutes ago
and Rhonda stopped breathing”. Shocked,
I said “Thank you”. What do you say?
But I did mean it in some way
before I screamed at the empty,
empty house, let loose
a senseless burst of tears,
then shakily started the phone calls
to Sydney, three hours ahead,
the agonizing soft drama
of sending the unanswerable message of death.
I got to the hospital before
my cousin, and had these ten
precious minutes alone with you
in that peaceful room,
all tubes and machines gone, all nurses;
I was surrounded by silence
as I kissed you and told you
I loved you,
and always had
uselessly, as if that counted now
or you could hear.
You received me palely
and silently but looked
the most peaceful in years.
We sat with you for hours
until I let my cousin go. Each time
I thought to go
something pulled me down again.
We were both out of this world,
and yet when I looked
I saw the sheets move
below your increasingly ivory face:
above you the air conditioning
was breathing as if it were you.
and then somehow funny, as if
all the world’s ironies had gathered
to this place
and these moments.
The blood draining
from your body, your lips purpling,
the longer I stayed
the less you looked like you.
10.
And so, eventually
I had to leave
and wandered out, drove out
into the aimless morning
in a mysterious world
but with the nurse’s questions
about undertakers haggling
in my ears. I wondered
where to go
and all these months later
I still do.
The funeral service is over, the flowers have died
and the last, generous family visitors
have flown far away.
Only two cards today:
they’re petering out.
Three weeks since you’ve gone
and I can barely believe it.
Time shrinks, evaporates like steam
or expands, yeast-like, and
I cannot take its measure. The calendar
is meaningless. You died yesterday
or ages ago, to me; sometimes
both, bizarrely, simultaneously.
It’s not long since you bought oranges.
You thought in the haywire
system of your intestines
they would prevent “blockages”.
Your doctor laughed.
The morning of your funeral
I washed my hair
with the last of your shampoo
as if to get part of you,
the smell of you, on me;
and now I toss the empty container
into the bin’s mouth.
who are kind
but getting on with their lives,
as they must. They don’t see
a planet that
has stopped spinning
or me merely spectating,
adrift on a distant star.
It is finished.
All the suffering done, the long years of pain.
Yet the unsatisfiable monster of grief
heaves itself like a tortured animal.
What can I more honestly do
but take up an orange and bite?
We have sent you to the great conflagration,
converted your unbelieving tongue to ashes.
We have incinerated your once lovely lips
and once strong bones, all your
once beautiful body
now compressed into a box.
I have a letter to prove it: your ashes
“can be collected anytime”
like some clipboard I’ve ordered.
Though you once
half-agreed to the fire,
guilt strokes my skin,
guilt fingers my mind,
guilt scorches my tongue.
I cleaned your brushes and was surprised
to find trapped in their snail-horn
knobbly feelers, scratchings
of your thin, grey,
once thick, brown hair,
that gathered into a small tuft.
Wills, certificates, accounts, cancellations
– there is so much to do
after a death,
some with things,
some inside the head.
I handle all
the bureaucracy and business
half-imagine you here.
Bright photo frames have you smile b.c.
– before cancer – as I clean through the house.
Cancer implores you to win
skirmishes but not the war.
I did try to care, and I failed.
You have gone to a better place some friends say,
there is a God, there is a Paradise, and you are there.
But nightly, as if to prove that you have died,
and what it means, you walk towards me
weirdly, made of ash, cinders
falling from your breasts, your eyebrows
and I am standing there, holding
thin scrags of your hair
like a talisman, terrified.
Through the thudding underground
and its crouched, dusty stations, forty years on
I didn’t really remember
the platform, or how you climb to the street
from the dark, and the name
“Holland Park Avenue” I had wrong
in my head, though you walked down it
so often, and I walked with you so often
all those years ago. The street I’m pretty sure
has changed completely, now more swish,
more flash, more contemporary
so, going solely on memory, no map
in my hand, I thought I must
have got it wrong, when suddenly
there was the name,
“Princedale Rd”. Childishly thrilled,
I turned and walked along
towards the flat you once had,
my own Castle Boterel,
my step and heart quickening
until I reached 64a. I have a photo
of you seated in its window
and somehow, of all the photos
over all the years, it’s these,
of you in London, young, full of hope,
full of adventure, the future
piling up in your pretty smile,
Somehow I can’t credit
that it has all gone,
is sealed over now
in death, in all time’s mystery
and menace, and I stood opposite the door
a pathetic figure in an ordinary street
on an ordinary day, if a sunny day
in London can be thought
ordinary, and tried to hold it all
in to me
uncontrollably.
There were few of us left
when the long overnight train
trekked at last into Narvik.
Above the Arctic Circle, I
stepped out into fragile,
delicate sunshine, the only one
not hunchbacked under a pack.
Forty-one years ago
we both humped one
and no-one else stepped down
into dark, furious blasts, the
winter air that seemed to gulp you in
and freeze your lungs.
Our journey had been fjords,
solid lakes, waterfalls
stopped in mid-sentence,
pines in snow overcoats
and ice sculpture birches
with sleet for leaves.
A customs officer – they had
such creatures then – rescued us,
drove to the youth hostel:
closed. Then to a guest house
warming to the only tourists in town.
The station is just the same,
I’m pretty sure, just as small
and inconsequential, with a walk up the hill
I’ve come back alone.
Narvik is bigger no doubt
but still just a town:
there’s nothing here
beyond memories
that make me
what I am. Some of them
I’m discovering again.
I walked the streets, and ate,
so little else to do.
For no-one there did I
have any meaning, nor they for me.
The next day summer was over,
the streets feted with rain.
You are dead. Why have I come?
A need to tell myself
that it is over, to seal
closed our love, our marriage
and all that it meant?
Sometimes now I reel
like a ghost in my own life.
I stood on Narvik’s streets
with that increasingly familiar
concoction of satisfaction and pain,
adrift in Norway’s drizzling rain.
We found it so bizarre, but still
loved it, as the brave photo I free
and hold and stare at proves:
Gustavo and Sheila, Rhonda and me
in overcoats, neck-scarved, upraised
gelati coloured in twos or threes, strolling
along the beach in our mid-winter
Rimini and Riccione trip. Something
in Italian life encourages the bizarre.
Today down Via dei Chiari I walked
past your old door, number 5: beside
the bell still sit your names, uncorked
from you: “Downing/Riboldi”. My finger
lingered in the air, as if to stem the
uncertainty, ring and make you appear,
yet I realise your names condemn me
as the only one of us alive, solo io.
C’è la vita, what could be more clear?
But what of what we are could be
sadder, more shaking, and more bizarre?
Like a whale
with an arbitrary tale
grief can have you
tossed off the sea
in an instant of wild spray
as salt-drenched as tears.
Like a cat with a ball
of string, grief
can string you along
and just when you think
you’re all right
show you you’re wrong.
Like a coin tossed
into the sun
grief can have you spin
not knowing which side
you’ll land, head
or tail
but inevitably
on edge.
“Death shall have no dominion”
one poet wrote,
and another,
“Death, thou shalt die!”
Grief will tell you
one was a joke
and the other a lie:
your emotions, your rationality, your ideas,
all are flimsy
faced with its seriousness, its
unimpeachable dramatic whimsy.
The dead have nothing to do with us.
It is only the living who inhabit
any dimension we can begin
to understand. Why then
do the dead determinedly
step through our sleep,
persistent zombies? Each night
I go to bed exhausted, and exhaustion
has me tossed for hours
in a roiling,
tumultuous sea; until blissfully
I sail into sleep –
then each dark
4am
you silently summon me;
telling me
that I understand nothing.
It is you.
But it is not you, and never will be.
Out on some broken reef of reality
waves rise, bank and crash,
each one an image of you,
all cancer gone,
thick, long hair and vivid smile,
your voice
voicelessly saying
you will not sleep.
I have so many promises to keep
and the horizonless sea
thrashes on forever,
your silent voice insisting:
You will
not sink. You will
not float. You will not sleep!
“Widower”. It’s such an odd word
like something to do with threshing
or soaring: I caught this morning
morning’s widower, stumbling down
wasted streets. It’s against the odds:
women live longer than men,
wives than husbands. Everything about it
is wrong. Time with his clichéd scythe
has cut a vicious way.
And the words it sits with
have an odd ring, like
strangers in the house of our lives:
“ashes”, “funeral”, “loss”, “death”, “fire”.
Can they ever exhaust their meanings,
tire of us and relax
their knuckle-laden fingers?
“Widower”: this pathetic run
of weak, short syllables
says nothing about me
or everything, catching on
my every breath
the low, dark aftermath of death.
Meditation was a constant companion
when the roads led me down to
Margaret River’s grape-swollen sunshine
for our son’s birthday. I took with me
what I could tell him was
on the one hand just a shabby,
broken piece of plastic
and on the other was
the most important present
I would ever bring him:
the small, grubby wrist band
he had worn in hospital
when he was born
and that I found in his mother’s purse
when emptying it out,
when I dared to clean out
all the sagging, split-seamed compartments
where she had nursed it
from the day she left hospital
carrying him, after he had lain
on each breast
and made his first grabs
at her fingers, her attention,
thirty-seven years before.
He was working thirteen hours a day
on vintage, and I marvelled
that his strong, young man’s wrist
could have grown
from something so small
and that the miracle
of a mother’s love
could outlive her
and all her treasured possessions.