Undying Page 5
expensive flavoured water, nuts.
But then, defences down, I’m
skewered in the guts.
There, on a tray, in a glassed-in display,
dolmades.
Vine leaves.
Dozens of them.
The real deal, plump and crudely-shapen,
sweating olive oil, lasciviously green.
Your eyes light up, I hear your voice,
excited, child-like, at this great surprise.
You want dolmades, you’d forgotten how
consumingly you loved them.
‘Oh, can we get some? Please?’
You did not speak, and I did not reply.
An hour remains until they let me fly.
You are here with me, silently
wanting, hoping, yearning, thirsting,
craving, lusting, pining, waiting.
I do not buy dolmades.
I do not buy
dolmades.
My First Date After You
(For Ann Patty)
In a restaurant, I wait
for a woman.
My first date
after you.
I know that she and I will kiss,
embrace, make approving noises
about the weather,
assess the damage to our faces,
the weight we’ve failed to lose
these ten years since
our previous get-together.
She arrives, slightly late,
and we do all of the above.
After lunch, we take a walk
in the sunshine without you,
enjoying New York.
I have no shame in my agenda:
to pump her for memories;
to talk about you.
That’s all I want from everyone,
everywhere I go:
to talk about you,
to venerate our love.
Now, reflecting on those hours I spent,
in the restaurant and in the park,
I draw a blank. What did she say?
Bless her, she forgave my scant attention
to her life, accepted that her job was just to mention
all she was able to retrieve about my wife.
She did her best, I’ve reason to believe –
but not a word has stuck.
The over-bright sun: I remember that.
Her devilish grin, undimmed by age.
Handing her the photo of you, in bed
with her dog. (That dog, she said, is still alive.)
Hard as I strive, I can’t remember more.
Holy fuck –
You died just eighty days before,
and I was in no state
for that first date.
You Chose So Well
I walk into the flat you chose for us,
and the way the sunlight falls
on the tangerine walls, the nooks and alcoves
and the uncollected mail,
makes me want to tell you,
You chose well.
The sixty-two stairs
were the sole drawback, a bridge
to be crossed when we were old.
The light and space up there
was worth the climb.
So, in the meantime:
Sold.
A few years in,
you had to stop halfway
to gather oxygen.
On those grey steps, you got stabbed
in the legs
by delinquent veins.
After your transplant, I placed
a chair on each landing, rungs on the ladder
up to the bedroom shadowed
by treetops, circled by seagulls.
Towards the end, your sojourns here grew
scarce; your blood preferred
the ground floor B&B, and later
the clinic with its elevator.
A tenant took the room where you once perched
contented at the window, looking down
on streetlife in the lamplit night.
And now, I enter our domain, unfazed
by those sixty-two steps, dazed by the colours.
You chose them and I painted them.
Our bed still overlooks the chimneytops.
The light still casts its spell.
My love, you chose so well.
Risotto
You bought too many wigs.
All that luxurious soft hair,
slightly second-hand,
in boxes.
Too sad to keep.
Too intimate to sell.
Too valuable to throw away.
What am I supposed to do?
You bought too many clothes.
So many multiples of the same
cancer-friendly tops,
oedema-friendly tights,
myopathy-friendly socks,
accident-friendly undies,
nighties you never even wore
and hated
in a range of colours.
You accumulated
too many phones too many pairs of glasses too many
emery boards too many nail clippers too many
lip salves too many battery chargers too many
toothpicks too many cameras too many
kohl sticks too many shoes mouthwashes razors
combs odd socks bottles of Boots No.7
unlabelled keys to God knows what locks
in what places I will never be again
if indeed I was ever there.
You always cooked too much food.
Loads of leftovers went into the freezer
for another day, except that on another day
you cooked afresh, and again too much.
Today I took out your last risotto
and savoured every swallow,
every grain of what was once
a storage problem,
and how I wish there was enough
for more.
Your Plants
Hey, listen:
can I let your plants die?
I never knew their names,
where they came from, or how high
they were supposed to grow,
how dry their veins could stand to go.
They’ve loitered in the bathroom like
shabby derelicts, unshiftable and frail,
waiting without hope for passersby
to take pity.
I am the water man.
I am the man with the water.
I am the man who stands in the shower,
twenty inches from those plants,
weeping into the torrent,
all that liquid plenty down the plughole
while your plants, brown and stoic,
watch.
Hey, listen:
I never asked for them.
I never promised anything.
I made no pledge to nurse those leaves, those buds,
those mad green shoots on the parched stumps,
those silent thankyous for a cupful of attention
sloshed into their cobwebby soil
three weeks ago, or was it
five?
I never said I’d keep your plants alive.
The Tower
‘As far as the tower,’ you’d say
in those days when you could still walk
by my side, on the path to Balanroich.
The tower, a skeletal Eiffel, full of electricity,
marked the limit of your energy.
You’d set off from our house, rugged-up
against the elements. The breeze tugged at
your wig, your raincoat was too big,
your faithful sheepskin boots hugged
your poor unfeeling feet.
‘As far as the tower,’ you’d say.
It was, at most, three hundred yards away.
Once upon a time, you’d barely notice
such a distance, in your haste to move.
/> But in those last two years
you only wished to prove
the wheelchair was not always
necessary.
Today, alone, in spring, I take the air
that you no longer breathe.
Unfit, overweight, I’m still in better shape
than you were when you walked with me.
I pause beside the tower, gauge its height,
Squint against the morning light.
Birds flit around in pairs, the trees show off
their leaves, encouraged by the sun.
A plastic bag over my head, and half a dozen
morphine ampoules past their Use-By date
should be enough, I think.
I will not go as far
as chemotherapy, I swear.
No one can make me go there.
I have – you know damn well – my reasons.
I’ll be the master of my destiny.
Who knows? The cancer that’s reserved for me
may even be a kind that lets me climb
this tower, beyond the barbed wire,
beyond the highest branches
of the trees you loved to see.
Spring. Spring. Blur of green.
How you savoured all these birches.
You kept track of their progress through the seasons
and, latterly, they marked your waning power.
‘As far as that tree.’
‘As far as that bend in the path.’
‘As far as the tower.’
Do Not Launder Or Dry Clean, Do Not Use With Helpless Person, Infant Or Person Insensitive To Heat, No Serviceable Parts Inside
One of our electric blankets
has become passive-aggressive;
it threatens indolently
to kill me.
We kept them going 24/7, year in year out,
to give the cats a treat, or just
in case we felt like making love.
Now mine has had enough.
Most of it has stopped working; one corner
under my shoulder and another under my shin
are lightbulb-hot. Each morning, I wonder
if I’m imagining it. I stroke my palms
where I have lain, note the coolness
right next to the heat. Eventually
I lift the sheet, lift the suspect, and find
a faint scorch on the mattress,
an embryonic blush of burn
on the surface of a forty-kilo block
of flammable stuffing.
I do nothing.
I continue, nightly, to braise
my shoulder and my calf.
What sweet rescue if a stroke
of electricity dispatched me in my sleep.
What blessed relief if this whole room
were consumed in flames and smoke.
My very own, home-made
crematorium.
Weeks pass. I compromise.
I switch the blanket off when
I’m not lying on it; I concede
it would be a shame to stand outside and watch
our house burn down with all your things in it.
In fact, I grow a bit obsessive-compulsive:
Keys, wallet, have I switched off the blanket?
But still, each night, I lay me down to
tempt fate. In time, I can even feel
the hidden pattern of the wires.
At last, good sense prevails.
I pull the hazard off the mattress,
throw it in the trash, and, with my hands, admit
that you will not be coming back
to your side of this bed; I shift
your electric blanket an arm’s length to the right,
and for the first time since you went into the furnace
your space is cold at night.
My body lies safe now, with just a thin sheet
between me and the thing that kept you snug.
Just a thin sheet
between me and your menstrual blood,
me and the marks
we made together.
Proliferation
Your inbox is riddled with it.
Your system overrun
with matter that’s no use to anyone.
When you were alive, real humans
sometimes emailed you.
Those days are gone.
Your friends know better.
Now only algorithms chatter.
It’s been a long time, Eva, they remark.
I hesitate to call this spam.
Solicited, the bulk of it.
CancerCompass Newsletter.
Oncology Daily Digest.
Leukemia Alert.
You had so many hours of dark
to fill, while I retired to get my rest.
By day, we talked of literature and cats;
by night, you crunched the stats.
The march of science goes on.
CancerNetwork has a slideshow.
eChemist has a sale that ends at five.
Take action Eva, make your choice.
LAST CHANCE, EVA, for free delivery.
This Week In Oncology is pleased to announce
a brand new paper on tumour metastasis.
Dial-in at 5pm Eastern Time to ask a question LIVE
about high-risk myeloma and its prognosis.
So many words I didn’t know were even words,
like ‘apoptosis’, ‘atresia’, ‘intravasation’ . . .
Your inbox pullulates with this stuff.
The senders have no way of knowing
you have had enough.
Barley Fields, Fearn, 16 August, 8 O’Clock
The light is how you like it:
stealthy in its beauty.
Dusk is scheduled in ten minutes;
shadows queue to do their duty.
Our window view is dulling down
with nothing special in it.
But no: beyond the house, beyond the trees,
beyond the shadows’ limits,
the fields are joyous and absurdly bold,
each bale of straw a block of gold,
the mile-high stubble drenched in dayglow,
the sun imbued in everything.
This was the yellow that you flew
ten thousand miles to stalk.
This was the yellow that you captured
on your tripod-laden walks so many years ago,
in prints of Cibachrome;
this landscape with light to burn,
this place you vowed would be your home.
And now they’re here again.
See! In plain view and illicit
as always, for ten minutes only.
Slip some shoes on and run!
Let’s go see the show.
Let’s photograph the sun.
Blink and you’ll miss it.
Put your shoes on.
Put your shoes on.
The light is how you like it.
Where on earth are you? I have gathered
all your shoes together, and the night
must fall
on time.
Kodachrome (b. 1935 – d. 2009)
The borrowed slide projector comes
with a screen bigger than me,
heavy, rolled up in itself, a monster,
like my sorrow.
I decide to let it lie
untouched. I wait for night
and activate the clump of Bakelite
(it works! it whirrs! it groans with age!)
and shine a square of pallid light
straight from the ancient lens
onto the couch, the wall, a sketchbook page,
and finally, the best solution:
a canvas of pure, woven white,
a painting that you never made.
Here, on that blankness that you meant to fill,
I see your adolescent self, frozen, still.
In the
backyard where your dolls were burned,
behind the house where your mum was bashed,
and holes were kicked in plasterboard
and prayers were offered to the Lord
(none of which these slides archive),
you stand, unknowable, alive.
Here’s you with cat held to your chest
(the breasts I loved are yet to sprout).
Here’s you with husband number one
when you were courting, goofy, blessed
by the Jehovah’s Witnesses,
snapped outside the Kingdom Hall.
How big his teeth, how small his eyes!
How thick your glasses, and how ill-advised
your hairstyle, tweedy jacket, dress.
The time since then has showed he would remain
himself, but older and more beetle-browed.
You, at first so plain, grew gorgeous with the years
and, by the time we met, attained your best.
We flourished after Kodachrome.
No slides preserve our happiness.
It ought to be enough, this glimpse,
on empty canvas in this empty home.
This gadget can be borrowed more than once,
and I can see again your foreign face,
your awkward, unfamiliar grin.
The slide itself takes up no space.
And yet, I feel this image is on loan;
I want to own, to access, to possess.
I get you focused on the canvas plane
and, with my camera, click you through
onto the memory card within.
I shut the old projector down.
Its motor lapses, comatose.
I coil the cords, I cap the lens,
I stow the plastic carousels
and sheathe in styrene moulds the ends
of this unwieldy piece of kit.
Fit it back into its box.
No closure, and that cat you cuddled?
Gone, the canvas white and pure,
poised on the sofa where you do not sit
in the house where you no longer live
in a world where you are nothing more
than an exposure, bits
of pixel and emulsion,
invisible and safely stored.
Your lost past.
My forlorn compulsion.
Trying It On
I have this fantasy.
It has the flimsy, dreamy logic
of a porn flick.
An unknown woman turns up at my house,
knocks on the door. She needs
no explanation. I lead her
straight into the bedroom.
She unzips her coat. Another knock.
Another woman. And another.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
With the merest nod, they enter.
A dozen women, all not unlike you.
Your height, your build. Your waist,