Category: Death

Memory could never recapture the tone
exhilaration, permissiveness, steel, neutrality?
Response so desperate not to drop the ball
what came before lost to the sky.
The morning after the night before clouds thrilling
shapes formed and separated. That floating sensation.
Eternity. Everything is possible.

She said she’d had her first man
listening to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’
it was newly hot then
as were we now.

A song about clouds. Lying on her back
she addressed them. “ Last night.”
Rented propriety braces for an outline of circumstances
exceptional, out of character, not before or again. Surprise.
Her life is complicated
job, part-time study, mortgage
a soon to be ex husband pleading for another chance
she wanted sex only. Nothing else. Deal?

Eyes turn seeking contact – a covenant.
We were both in exile
her from marriage …. me….  life as it had been.
For the rest of winter. Every second weekend.

Early spring an unavoidable change of schedule
the children
she said it didn’t matter.
Her boy is the age when beginning to know
begins
to know some visitors don’t sleep in the spare room.
In the morning he is sullen. I never went back.

For the back story click Backstage
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Memories, often perpendicular to intimacy
those with whom time was patient
or circumstances liberal
decompose to unimportant
consigned to off-site lock-up
tombstones promised faithfully
visited aftermath fleetingly . . . then not at all.
Or placed in the spare room
walked by each day without reaction
and others not really known
loiter in the foyer of consciousness
leaping into being at the flimsiest of coincidence.

In five years less than 10 hours
would have been spent alone with her
perhaps as much again in group company.
Mid 1960’s cool granny spectacles
and bobbed auburn fringe
pungent tongued
dangling earrings swinging in laughter
or flicked with contempt
keeping time with anecdotes unfurled in the Midwest drawl.

She was 34 on introduction
six years older
difference serrated by divorce
and fluency in worldspeak
scaled age beyond appearance.
When cancer won hand-to-hand combat with chemotherapy
42 thought 48, young, brutally young.

Stories, there were so many
in response to the inevitable question upon meeting
she replied, “ a painter
but support myself as a goldsmith
just as surgeons have gynaecology for a hobby
and make their money from obstetrics.”
Quite.

When I heard she had died
the one about her mother came to mind
it lingered, unwilling to leave.
Her mother she told us at coffee
once threatened to commit suicide
“so I went to the kitchen
got the sharpest knife
and said there, do it.”
An epitaph mocking death
she would like that.

For the back story click Backstage
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In any other situation it would attract ridicule
be labelled delusional
self aggrandising
boastful
or more prosaically, “bullshit.”
At recruitment it’s called self belief.

Then, it is permissible to promise magic
to possess secret knowledge
to halve costs
double output
make water flow uphill.

The question was not unexpected
a request for self-description as an employee.
I said my work was characterised by the absence of mistakes
rather than the presence of brilliance.
Two contemptuous faces turn  face to face
and then to face … loser.

For the back story click Backstage
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