Deceit
I talk to you now more than I ever did;
long chats about zen, or work, or music
while I walk the dog around Torside.
Pausing we watch a deceit of lapwings,
newly arrived from France or Spain,
as they plummet towards unsteady
lambs, then wheel away laughing.
Hard to believe this time last year
we were barrelling down the M1
to King’s Mill Hospital only to find you
quite happily ensconced in your bed
reading a book on mindfulness
through fingerprint-smeared glasses,
your wild eyebrows raised in surprise.
If we’d spoken more on the phone,
made more of an effort to cope
with the frustration of our deafness,
would your voice have betrayed
the secret you had kept from me –
feigning a cold when we tried to visit,
leaving me floored by guilt even now.
All this time, in the emails we batted
back and forth across the country,
I’d been asking you about your trips
to the library and Costa, about the tea
roses whose spiky tendrils you hooked
with your cane over low garden walls
to bury your nose in their scent.
When I should have been asking
What’s that about your heart?
How often do you fall?
How long have we got?
Wisdom
I wear you in a ring shaped
like a half-open lotus flower.
With two drops of clear nail polish
I sealed you in your micro tomb
as per the instructions.
You were such a free spirit in life
I wondered if you’d haunt me
for trapping you for eternity
like a disenchanted genie.
Though I try to take the ring off
to shower and do the dishes
I sometimes, no often, forget
and worry I have sluiced you away.
To stop fretting I remind myself
that no matter how hard
my mother wishes otherwise
you are 50% of me, or rather
suspended in and throughout
the whole of me.
You are the reason for
my rusty clarinet playing,
my kitchen renditions of Verdi’s Requiem,
my ability to tell a blue tit from a coal tit
and why both have a choice of feeders
in the wilderness I call a garden.
Without your love of poetry
I would never have understood
how words can conjure up
the whole of a person,
who isn’t contained in a ring,
nor in fingerprint-smudged photos,
but continues, suspended
in and throughout us all.