A poem on Loss and Grief

Grief

His palette holds mostly black now,

With shades of grey

On the periphery;

The taste of dust in his mouth.

He sits quietly before a canvas

Bereft of colour,

It’s whiteness sour.

His eyes are marked with ash.

His memory silently denies him;

Belief peters out.

The candle gutters;

She was his blue red yellow flame.

Please leave a comment



For other poetry blogs click here

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.

The past is the ocean, a poem on memory and love

Erosion

No one had told her that hell

Could come before death:

The horizon you tire of reaching,

That thin line, a shell;

The sound of your own breathing

Like the incessant waves on the beach.

A hundred miles from the sea,

Mrs Smith stands adrift,

Feels the swell buoy her up,

Her stomach shift.

Coffee spills from her coffee cup;

The fall to the floor an eternity.

Abandoned now, and stranded

Amongst the dead husband’s chattels,

She shakes the small round pills

From the smoked-glass bottle

That comes with the strained

Smiles of her doctor.  They spill

Into the cracked vessel

Of her palm.  She licks

Them up like the cat

Lapping at its milk.

Her rooms float and fill

With fog and she feels

Her way through them,

Her vision dim.

Her cat mews, rubs her legs,

Calling her from shipwreck.

When the mist swirls,

She lies upon the sofa,

Under a thin checked picnic

Blanket, in a soft cloud of coma,

Staring at nothing, staring;

The cat pads and curls

At her feet, purring, purring.

Run aground.

There’s a line-up on the mantelpiece –

Strangers with Identikit features,

Assembled into a puzzle of faces,

Who seem shifty and restless,

Peering through the dirty windows

Of their unhappiness,

Though one photo on the shelf

Holds her life in its frame -

A memory and a mirror -

And the faces seem more the same:

Each day bringing them nearer,

Pushing her from the shore of herself.

She remembers the day

As if it were yesterday;

Though yesterday has gone,

Lost in days of repetition,

Hour stacked on stale hour,

Year after year turning sour,

Until far enough back

The clouds break,

And the minutes, fresh,

Sparkle so she can count each one.

She feels the press of his flesh

On her fingers,

Senses the urgent tone,

How the seconds linger,

How each and every stone

On the beach behind shines;

The breaking of the waves

Stalled.

She recalls:

The borrowed car,

The promising early sun,

The lack of traffic,

The walk along the prom,

Shivering under the picnic blanket,

Their limbs knotting them into one.

Then the seaweed smell of decay.

Beyond that moment

She can only stumble

And then fall

Into the jumbled present;

And the waves tumble,

And sprawl.

The past is the ocean

Coming in at hide tide,

Slowly stealing years –

Her island’s inevitable erosion:

Headlands crumble and slide,

Coastline disappears.

She lifts her eyes from the picture

To the horizon’s distant glow;

Ssh, ssh the waves whisper

As the water runs over her toes.

A poem for The Dead

Sorrows

He weighed six stone -

The size of my daughter, aged ten -

The skin baggy on the bone,

The meat of him gone.

Death reduces, like a good sauce.

A scrawny thing, a corpse -

Carries no weight, no remorse,

No apology, no applause.

And memory, eaten at by worms,

Claws at skeletons, at the marrow;

And grief struggles to find a form,

Scraping and picking and gnawing

At sorrows.

Welcoming the Slaughter, a poem on love and breakdown

Ben and Jane (an extract)

Jane has boxes for everything.

She keeps them under the bed,

In the bedroom of the house

In her head.

Her mother gave her the boxes;

Label them carefully, she said.

What kind of boxes? Egg boxes?

Tea chests?  Crates? 

She was anxious to get it right.

If you like. 

What kind of guidance was that?

Her first box was Anxiety:

A shoe box, big enough for boots;

They’d been in a sale;

They chafed her heels.

The lid didn’t fit.

 

She’d found the house in a memory,

Though she couldn’t remember it.

The front door,

Fanlighted, letter-boxed,

Its number an opaque code,

Leads to the stairs,

And off the landing is the bedroom,

Cluttered with boxes.

There is a window,

Its sill cluttered with boxes.

Light streams against the pane,

But the view is a blank,

As if the house were in a carwash.

 

The other rooms feel forbidding. 

She thinks there are lodgers,

Whom she may have met,

Or would have liked to.

Sometimes,

She hears their voices,

Soft, sociable noises,

The clink of glasses,

Murmured laughter;

 

Sometimes,

A nervous greeting:

The bleating of a small animal,

Welcoming the slaughter.

 

Other times,

When alone,

She sits on the bed

And imagines herself crying,

Wanting a mother for the daughter.

A four-letter word

Home

When they go out and slam the door,

The house remains faithful

To their absence.

Surfaces insidiously gather dust,

A secret accretion blocking pores,

A skin hardening to indifference.

The curtains, impartial, as usual,

Will not be drawn, so the windows

Are left to frown upon light and shadow.

A tap, its mouth loose, drips, spittle

Calcifying and spreading the tittle-tattle of rust.

The clock unwinds, ticks, tocks

A touch more slowly or quickly,

Adjusts as its mood thins or thickens.

The fridge hums and then forgets

The tune, falling into a frigid sulk

With a juddering shudder.

The milk feels left out and sour,

Its jagged lips pouting.

Toast crumbs, ignored, foretell

Fortunes that still no one is reading.

The iron flirts with the idea of being left on,

Of wrinkles smoothed, of creases gone.

The TV, blind-eyed, remains on standby,

Soap operas stored, ready for replay.

The mirrors doze in unlidded sleep,

Dreaming the empty rooms,

With unbelieving eyes.

The alarm clock, awakened from a snooze,

Petulant and querulous, repeatedly peeps.

The photographs, held on pause,

And having cause to believe in their own story,

Stare, without memory, into the cold light of day.

The washing machine, on a dark wash program,

Matinees intimacy - Boxer’s Tangle with Tights!

Lights! Camera! Action!

Pyjamas, discarded and spastic,

Savour the heat and aroma

Of armpit and crotch.

Fragrances linger, a snatch of voices,

Scenting the foul air, where smells and noises

Commingle – a his and hers, a redolence

Of the bitter perfume of spilt coffee

And shattered crockery.

And where the echo of sharp words

Clashed like cutlery in a kitchen drawer,

Slashed at history like swords drawn,

The walls ache with silence.

Thank you for reading. Please leave a comment.

Still Life

Ballast

First of all, the furniture is rearranged,

Shifted here and there: a blunt knife

To cut light and shadow;

As if the complex architecture of their life

Could so simply be changed:

A sofa, a chair, a table by the window.

Still, it remains more Hopper than IKEA.

Next, they redecorate; take paint and brush,

Overlay the cold, stark, strident white

Of wall, cornice and ceiling

With pastels, warm, soft, hushed,

To quieten the hue and cry -

A camouflage, a toning down of feelings.

As if colour could cover and dilute the fear.

They move house - a last resort - their baggage

Packed, but it’s a ballast too heavy

To save them from the wreckage of truth,

A listing and sinking beyond salvage,

The deceit a wave spilling over the levee.

And love is a compass pointed north and south,

So the geography is a map that shreds and tears ...

A topographical tale that ends in tears.

Thank you for reading. Please leave a comment.