Saturday 25 January 2020

Phantom limn: Amputation a poem









Amputation

The sky is bright and clear
And very pale.
A winter sun is coming up,
Blazing in the trees behind me.
There’s light but no real heat,
And my coffee’s rapidly cooling.
Nevertheless, the temperature’s up;
There’s water in the air
And the whispered trickling
Of snow dissolving,
As though something secret,
Something slow and discreet
Were at work.
And last year’s grass shows through,
Like rucks in a threadbare carpet.

Over the dividing wall,
I can see into the neighbour’s kitchen.
The wife comes in and sees me staring,
Though my thoughts are elsewhere.
She looks back at me,
And while we’re too far away for detail,
I sense the frown on her face.
We have never spoken;
Our lives run on separate tracks,
Blurred with the motion of a moving train.
I look away and then back again.
I raise my hand, as though to wave,
And she turns aside,
Busies herself with something.
                                                                  
There was tree, I remember,
Which blocked our view of their house.
One day, in summer,
From the same window
I had watched my wife carry her case to the car,
I noticed that they had cut it down.
What was left was a staggering V-sign,
With its playful ambiguity,
The bole bifurcating about a yard from the ground,
And the two trunks rising and separating
For another yard or so.
(Should I have taken offence
At something unintended, apposite,
When simply more light was allowed
To spill on our side?)
The ends blazed white, raw,
Yet seemed a soft wound, benign.
They took the axe to them too.

I tried to run a film backwards in my head,
The tree being cut together,
As if I could have recalled its solidity,
Its stature,
The elusive music of its leaves,
But I couldn’t even remember
What type of tree it was,
Or how it had looked when whole.

With its constituent parts
Laid out on the lawn –
Branches of varying thickness
Grouped in separate piles:
Logs for sawing and burning –
It looked like a self-assembly kit
Sorted from its packaging;
A tree from IKEA -
As if happiness were a lifestyle
So easily constructed -
Though finally a puzzle with too many bits,
For all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

The snow has melted,
Has slowly unfixed its pieces
And put itself away,
And given me back the dead grass.

The wall remains, its grouting solid,
And behind it, the stump is still deeply rooted
In the damp, dark earth, still scratching
At its amputee’s itch of spring.

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