Death steals a person away,
but leaves feelings intact.
Now, grief, like my rogue wisteria,
takes over my life.
I need to create a daily ritual,
write my grief with bird song,
with dappled light and shadow.
I need to weave it with honour
into the fabric of my days,
Time is so variable:
take this exact moment,
it's gone almost before I've noticed it;
in the blink of an eye,
tomorrow has become yesterday.
Time as a succession of pixels.
The wise tell us to concentrate
on the moment but that's like trying
to keep hold of one drop
in a rapidly moving stream.
Anyway we need time:
sentences are temporal.
Without time, we can neither think, talk,
understand, read nor write.
To communicate we need
words or images in a sequence.
So I have grave doubts
about eternity.
It lacks pixellation,
it lacks communication.
I don't think I am ready for it;
I need more time.
i
I am an image junkie,
always on the prowl
for metaphors
ii
If I'm to write poetry,
I need the nourishment of time.
But my illness is bulimic,
devours time and spews it out
undigested. Where's sustenance
in gobbets of time
mixed with stomach acid?
iii
I always thought my final
resting place would be the quiet earth.
So great literature tells us;
never mind moths and harebells,
I wanted a small piece of ground
where I could slumber peacefully.
But that is not to be. My grave
is situated plumb above
an active fault line.
My skeleton, together
with my neighbour's bones,
will rattle and clonk
percussively until the end of time.
This is threshold music.
After his wife's death,
Bach wove chorale melodies
into his solo violin works,
mostly Cantata number 4,
Christ Lag in Todesbanden,
Christ lay in death dark prison,
with its ringing Allelujah
at the end of every section.
But with voices and violin
matched together,
the Allelujahs take on
a more sombre form:
not the hubris of certainty,
but a human hesitation
and self doubt, good listening
when a loved one has died.
Bach's wife and my friend and brother
deserve the wistfulness of hope,
Allelujah.
Nouns are deserting her.
Last week we had a long
conversation about “clutter”,
a catch-all phrase;
we agreed clutter needed
to be reduced, set in order.
I didn't know whether to call in
a gardener, housekeeper, doctor or priest.
There are other nouns;
but mostly it's a code I cannot break.
Would you expect the bonanza
of the royal wedding to become
“the folks up north”?
I try to think myself into her mind
but without success.
Does she recognise me?
Does she see clearly a world
she can no longer describe?
She is left, a solitary survivor,
struggling to hold on to
the remnants of a language
only she can remember.
i
Imagine a celebration party,
a ceremony of blessing
for my walnut tree, planted
a tree-ling of four, now turned sixty.
I would have a circle of women
in dark hoods, dancing in the moonlight
to a ripple and swoosh of my wind harp
invoking the strength of the tree,
invoking its magic.
Once, just before midnight,
snow began to fall;
as the flakes drifted down
they woke the harp
which sang into the silence.
ii
A bone carver chooses to live
on an estuary, awash
with moon-tugged tides,
a meeting place for earth, air and water.
I have no estuary.
But the morning after the snow,
my tree was shrouded in white;
garden and sky mirrored one another
so exactly, there was no horizon line.
I could have walked across my lawn,
climbed the rungs of my tree
up into the heavens,
leaving my harp to sing
a solitary requiem.
I have no estuary;
only a thrush's song
filled with moonlight.
A four year old question:
“How do you become a poet?”
A poet must stalk like a cat,
dive deep like a fish, soar upwards
like a bird. She must love words,
their movement and sound,
making them dance and sing, tip-toe
and whisper, galumph and shout.
Like the wind, she must ripple across
her garden, dappling
light and shade, turning leaves
inside-out to shine against the sky.
All this, with only words.
