POINT OF VIEW
Pause on hearing my voice,
dry throat punching the air
for words to fill the space,
gives away
she was expecting another answering tone.
The phone passed over to the interesting party,
her polite fumblings in my ears,
I resume my repose on my ruffled settee.
The four walls I sit in
refocus my importance.
THE MODERN WORLD
I watch a film from
the decade I joined the world,
jolt at vehicles’ askew angles and shapes,
words and noises’ curious jar.
Acknowledge an age passed into quaintness.
In its streets and houses,
its moving parts, its brooding background,
recognize this was where modernity began.
Awkward forms the age’s technological know-how
welded things into,
are the precursor of what I observe now.
The link is not missing.
In those neanderthal images, clumsy and funny,
I have a vague recollection of me moving
among them. A life in me stirs. An old photo
makes me remember me in one like it.
Blurry, grey, primitive. A familiarity I sense.
I feel an approximation to. Where it all started.
The modern world I was shaped in. That led to me now.
I see the life here and now, in my veins,
in the grainy pictures I don’t laugh at all.
At my birth, the modern world began.
The world that's mine.
The world that will stay modern as long as
I live.
LATER
In the freezing cold we walked from lane to road
to countryside to town. We entered shops, bought an item.
Or two. Went for a walk through the museum’s rooms.
Spoke of times past when we looked out
from that balcony on to the row of houses opposite.
Strode about the large room overlooking the main road.
We lingered, snatched more and more
snippets of time, not to return home.
We dreaded what we might find opening that door.
Outside in the cold we could keep away from the phantoms
in our heads that we glimpsed moved like shadows,
ill-defined, hastily scrawled, barely recalled, in the rooms
we would step into. Later.
We glanced down at the watercress beds,
held in winter’s dull clamminess, pressed
on along the winding path leading us around the lake,
around the house we would return to. Later.
The cold entered our bones, gusts slapped our faces.
Almost gently. We could only delay so long.
Spoke about many things, walked by where we had walked
before. We strolled down the road, hands tightening scarves
around our necks, leading us home.
We opened the door. We could relax.
There would be phantoms. Later.
CHILDHOOD
At ease, cheeky, happy, she’d love to go back to that time,
her arm around the old man, hand on his shoulder, facing
the camera with a big smile, reassured, protected, ignorant
of anything to come. Immersed in that eternal present.
Summer holidays with the grandparents on their farm.
Picking fruit from the garden’s abundant trees.
The old man at her side, seated.
Childhood entices her into its unquestioning, easy warmth.
Childhood is a siren, calling her back. Telling tales.
How things were on sunny days running through fields,
in the evening sitting outside watching the sun go down,
arm around an old man.
Childhood doesn’t let her go. It holds her back
with powerful claws, ominously right behind, paralysing
each step, each glance.
Shaking herself free would be turning her life into a lie.
As if the old man her arm is around, could die.
As if it couldn’t go on like this forever.
Horrifying phantoms worm through her,
slither into every part of her body, every thought.
She grows into a monster, a tiny mind in a steadily enlarging body.
A grotesque mismatch. A hybrid with mad, scary stares.
Long bony fingers look for eyes to gouge out.
THE WAY
I was looking forward to the stroll home,
slightly chilly, the path winding its early evening gloom,
walking by her side, ready to share with her everything
I would try to express. Remember. Vague recollections mumbled.
Just by curving snugly into the lane’s hold, trees on each side,
land shaped like countryside a few metres beyond,
the muggy air was drawing us further and further in to
something that had time enough to materialise.
I wasn’t sure what it would be. Just the thing it would become.
In the misty evening. It was nicely set up.
The mobile rang. He chatted to me the length of the journey.
Petty things. Idle nonsense. Memories. Bits of information.
She listened in. Suggested, mouthing words, lines of enquiry.
Things she wanted to know. Joined in silently. Made me relax into
embracing the conversation as I walked along the way.
I enjoyed it. So did she. It gave shape to our stroll. Took it over.
It filled the void with something. We no longer had to look.
Maybe not find our way.
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