loss

hovering, waiting, writing

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I’m here but not quite there. I can feel the jumble of myself, from working working working. The truths have got entangled. What I know I believe I can’t quite remember, can’t retrieve.

Yesterday an old thought stole into my pondering, as if it had dug its way out of the weary piles of tasks, remnants of the last months, and as if entered by another door, catching me off guard: ‘What if I lived as if the central truth of my romantic life is that I am living an epic love story? Preposterous, if the evidence is assessed, past disappointments lined up, absences annotated.

We are all living an exhaustion it seems, one we didn’t entirely see coming, because even the pessimists did not really predict it.

What if a greater beauty was still left? What if it was our choice of position that will unleash new hope. What if the story was wilder?

The thought had already made itself at home with startling nonchalance. Did I let it stay, or barricade it back out? If it stayed, it was going to require some rearrangements to the inner terrain, the inner furniture.

Do I let myself be vulnerable to hope (again)?

Suddenly, certain glimmering memories, surfaced, becoming fuel for dreaming.

And if I allow the preposterous to become the obvious, how do I then live?

creaking

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Am I trying to 
inhabit a life
that no longer fits

Why do I creak?
Why do I fail to find the once familiar groove,
the seam in which all things
cohere?

I am displaced,
scattered and my senses
fail me.

Where am I trying to come home to?

I creak and hear my own 
groans escaping.
wild sounds that alarm
my younger self.

Am I becoming that?
Am I she who will
fail to meet imagination
with dignity?

I creak and now it is
a home-coming of sorts,

To my bones,
To parts of me long abandoned.

Have mercy.

deaths for you

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I have died a hundred deaths for you.
Since we met…
Since we kissed, that first time.

And you talked about our daughter
Perilously.

The cherry blossoms were not out
but sunlight glimmered cooly
over the spring air
over my red date shoes tucked under the café table.

You disappeared.
Something you would do again and again and again.

So I died that death then,
Cried the tears out in the middle of a business trip.
Discovered peace.
‘Extraordinary grace’ a voice declared,
And I believed it.

I was staying in your city.
You were seeing someone else, and yet
there was power, was there not, in that air?
You could not stay away; yet honour prevailed.

I died that death then,
cried the tears out in my new friend’s country house garden.
Her father made waffles with cloudberry jam.
How could such sweetness exist?
With pain?

I lived in your absence.
You never wrote or called.
You policed yourself so well.
One day you introduced me.
Possibly naive.

There was no death there.
I’d died beforehand,
in fire and wonder
of my own making.

And then you came to find me, again
we kissed, under the Red Moon sky,
in the midsummer night of a picnic,
a bracing swim,
tender conversations,
delight in your eyes.

In a blink you had vanished.
You were ‘afraid’.
You were ‘running away’.

You met someone else.

I died such a death,
the like of which I’d never seen before.
Wild trust, goodness and silence,
knowing, fury
Pain, fire, tears and painting
My dreams caught alight.

I have died a hundred deaths for you, yes
And I am more alive than I have ever been.

sand dunes, gone

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There were sand dunes there once.
I slid down them,
jumped, laughing.

There was a green field there once,
I looked right across,
to trees, to sky.

There was an old hotel there once.
I took tea, cosy
with my friends’ secrets.

There was honour here once.
The airwaves
tremble with bitterness today.

We had conversations here once.
Now, cables and ear-plugs.

I was at home here once.
I’m lost.

last pelargonium

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It was really quite white
when I found it,
the last pelargonium,
but I was on a budget
and it was reduced
so I bought it
although really I wanted a pink one.

It’s a ‘mårbacke’, said the florist.
It’s a traditional kind.
But it was white
so I doubted.
Do you know the place?
I didn’t.
It is the home of a famous writer,
Selma Lagerlöf.
A current barely stirred.

And anyway,
I was on a budget
so I bought it
although it wasn’t pink,
but white.

I stood my white pelargonium
in a mixing bowl.
I didn’t own a plant pot
and was on a budget.
A mixing bowl was all I had.

It stood, a little self-conscious
on my step.  Two flowers giving me
joy, but white, and no others
arrived to join them.

I looked up Lagerlöf:
A woman writer
native to this land,
winning prizes,
when women didn’t.

I wished my plant was pink.

I went away for work,
asked an almost-neighbour
to water my pelargonium.
She took it in its mixing bowl,
didn’t comment.

A while later I returned,
settled in and eventually went
to retrieve the last pelargonium.
It has probably died, I told myself
to preempt disappointment.
The neighbour may not have been there
all the time.  It’s been hot.

I wandered up the path,
curved around the corner.
I spied the last pelargonium
covered in flowers.

They were pink.