Marble

 

Michelangelo might have carved

the wrinkles on his forehead,

veins on the backs of his hands,

the fingers slender in death,

knuckles, fingernails,

lids shut over spiritless eyes.

The rosary trickling down from

his fingers is an intrusion;

no renaissance here,

Dad is a statue now.

She Swept into the Sky

That day Maggie Allen,

propped up in her bed,

was staring at the bedspread.

Snow, melting in her eyes,

fell, tiny bells,

into the valley far below.

Suddenly, arms spread wide,

a blizzard of hair,

she swept outward

off her ledge,

into the sky

across the room.

We stared at her

nonplussed face,

the four pillows tucked behind her.

Take it easy

i

To think of you in that bed,

twenty years on,

going the same way he did,

but without hope.

How do you close your eyes

to catch a night’s sleep?

ii

Struggling for each breath,

(mouthfuls of air, for god’s sake!),

I said ‘Mam, stop working so hard’

Dying, and still forced to work.

‘Take it easy,

 take it easy.’

Her hold on my hand slackened,

her eyes fell to the side,

she took it easy,

That memory forces itself on me; even now, I sometimes wonder, did I speed her on her way?

Door hanging from its hinges,

breakfast things on the table,

newspapers neat in a corner,

armchair facing the television.

In the bedroom, make-up bottles,

4711, dresses in the wardrobe,
night-gown thrown onto the bed.

.  

Calendar stopped: July 1984,

a pair of slippers still awaiting her feet;

feet  silent as air.

A poem with a Mantegna painting

The Lamentation over the Dead Chris

Mantegna, in his lifetime, was criticised for imitating sculpture: the loss of warmth that could be achieved in painting from real life. In the case of the dead Christ, however,  it is the marble of  the dead body that makes it perfect. The perspective draws more of your attention; then the suffering, fixed  stone-like in the image, fixes it in a similar way in your mind, and  it remains there: indestructible marble.

I am fascinated by the cold solidness of corpses; always drawn to run my fingertips down the cheek of a dead friend or loved one. The memory stays in my fingertips, and, somehow, it helps to know that the person is now changed to stone.

  

The Viewing.

Dead: the colour of old cream,

his eyes shuttered shut;

so neat, besuited and slim,

weight he lost dying.

They made a basket of his fingers

with a rosary spilling down;

everyone said he looked lovely

but then I touched his face

and it wasn’t him at all.