Your exit corridor is a snow-white Carrara;
by the time you were walking it, our goodbyes
had already echoed themselves to silence.
Your feet on that floor must have lisped,
for all your faith, you would have had questions,
but who was to answer?
Outside, we watched and listened till you stopped;
suddenly there is just the body
and soon it too is a cold marble.
October leaves on the footpath
were galaxies; maple, star-shaped.
Colours of evening: russet, red,
yellow and brown; hearth colours;
colours of contentment, of retiring.
of a year whose duties are done.
In November they were rotting,
blackening in sodden heaps,
turning rapidly to humus.
My October stars,
in December they were gone
but had left hand-shaped traces
all over the path
like those prehistoric stencils
from Gargas and El Castillo caves ‒
were they waving to us?
(El Castillo Cave and elsewhere— contains hand stencils dated to over 35,000 years ago, among the oldest known anywhere. )
In memory of my mother
What to say,
as she breathes fitfully,
the last minutes of her life.
We struggle
to find the best way of saying
we love you,
be happy to be on your way
to the God of your life-long devotion,
to put love, comfort, encouragement
into our uncertain, dismayed voices;
words worthy of a lifetime
of love and care.
Her breathing weakens;
doubtful that anything
is penetrating the fog of her condition,
we must still try:
words to carry
as she steps off the ledge.
‘You’re still here’ said the wind to the tree;
‘And where else would I be, this is home’.
But the wind was already gone.
Some days later, ‘But don’t you get bored?’
‘Even the stirring of soil beneath my roots interests me’.
But the wind was already gone.
When passing again, the wind asked, ‘Don’t you long to travel?’
‘This place and I are as inseparable as lovers.’
But the wind was already gone.
The next time the tree asked, ‘Won’t you stop a moment?’
‘Oh, to have such freedom’ replied the wind
and it was gone.
Her fingers on the piano keys:,
nails red as rose-hips,
in net of cigarette smoke filled
with afternoon sunlight.
Notes like sequins
falling inside the canyon of childhood;
brass, silver and mahogany,
ashtrays and antimacassars,
Liszt her gold tooth, she smiles;
the music climbs jangly from the piano,
filling the room till the walls fall and she
dissipates in deforming contours of smoke.
I write to catch it,
but may as well be catching steam.
I am walking the canal
in the dim light of a December evening,
settling my mind to its flow.
Ghostly on winter glass, swans,
bright as lit matches, are gliding
over the oarweed of traffic lights,
towards Harold’s Cross Bridge.
Oblivious to rush-hour commotion,
and blind to their own beauty,
they pass silently along,
out-pacing me and leaving nothing,
but a set of low chevron-shaped ripples
in their wake; while above them
two lines of cars fulminate continuously
to the iodine-murky sky.
