GARDEN
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| Photo by Martin Huebscher Photography |
every garden is a restoration.....
Now look at this, it’s got shrill:
I unpack my heart with words,
I fall a-cursing, like a very drab,
I knew you wouldn’t like to hear it,
Woe is Me-Me-Me:
another f******* memoir
about bereavement and bullying,
rites of passage only losers don’t get through,
nullified entities, evolution's casualties.
This graceless blogging I abhorred to do,
tweeting to the world how I feel.
Why bother to Know Thyself?
Broadcast Thyself instead.
No danger I’ll be heard here,
I - ironic English over-compensating i -
my own ghost, pretending to be me,
waste the present moaning about the past.
Yet more bitter aloes
smell of treachery to me.
Where is the honour I wanted to do you
both?
Loved and remembered,
- Help me, help me -
loved and remembered,
insensible of me you made
and left.
The zero of their disappointed hopes,
the best of me is gone,
hollow except for a scream,
a haunted house,
I carry on to tidy up,
not procreate.
I carry on to tidy up,
not procreate.
while foothold on being slips.
I loved her more than I love my life;
I feel this and someone says “Move on”.
They do not see the ledge I'm on.
Experts tell us to relinquish
our attachment to the dead.
Griefwork to reconcile
loving memory with pain of loss
that only ends with forgetting.
Friend sees a blessing, I do not:
“You’ve not got your mother
to worry about anymore”
- Help me, help me -
as if wires of affinity are not
still live after death's cutting.
Lifelong love is not a mortgage term
paid off after forty years
of sharing confidence
and never trespassing
on things hidden and forgiven
noone has a right to know.
To love someone completely,
we do not have to know
everything about them.
Two people, a single purpose,
imaginations
more kin than blood,
disguising poverty,
masking grief,
laughing at bad luck
- sisters, friends, mother, daughter
interchanged.
A broken clasp left behind,
I cannot make-believe alone.
Remember the beloved as they lived
not re-sampled to fit a frame
of sentimentality she despised,
still the owner of their self
not distorted by disease
or dissolved in other people's self-flattering lies.
Last warning for mortality:
are you sure you want to permanently delete
this person?
Death is not the leveller: we are.
(Split screen four hundred years old:
our attachment to the dead.
Griefwork to reconcile
loving memory with pain of loss
that only ends with forgetting.
Friend sees a blessing, I do not:
“You’ve not got your mother
to worry about anymore”
- Help me, help me -
as if wires of affinity are not
still live after death's cutting.
Lifelong love is not a mortgage term
paid off after forty years
of sharing confidence
and never trespassing
on things hidden and forgiven
noone has a right to know.
To love someone completely,
we do not have to know
everything about them.
Two people, a single purpose,
imaginations
more kin than blood,
disguising poverty,
masking grief,
laughing at bad luck
- sisters, friends, mother, daughter
interchanged.
A broken clasp left behind,
I cannot make-believe alone.
Remember the beloved as they lived
not re-sampled to fit a frame
of sentimentality she despised,
still the owner of their self
not distorted by disease
or dissolved in other people's self-flattering lies.
Last warning for mortality:
are you sure you want to permanently delete
this person?
Death is not the leveller: we are.
(Split screen four hundred years old:
in orbit with a blighted child, a man
reels between two women,
two worlds,
no earthly tool to fathom the space between. Rolling towards him, a waxy alien thing,
corpse borne on volcanic ash pillows,
while, in a corner he
cannot reach,
the dark-haired
wife he loved -
elegant, reserved,
black
ribbons on her dress
and round her slender arm - sits,
in contemplation
and round her slender arm - sits,
in contemplation
of world without
end
or hope,
not looking at him.
not looking at him.
In
mourning for them all all,
lit only by the lustre of her pearls,
her abstraction
is unbridgeable;
. he knows he will never
catch her
as she shrinks to a
tiny dot
in memory.)
This - you -
I will not relinquish
until I have refound you.
Let me plant my garden -
jewel-bright flesh-soft
on dusty city ledge over alien city,
or crumbling half-moon of paving
that is mine on the edge of the world -
every garden is a restoration,
our answer to nature's randomness,
a crafted substitute for natural happiness,
our rafts to get to a haven, the gentlest way to act like gods.
Each pot of breathing colours
a tiny world made for her,
not in dried remembrance, but, child's magic,
waiting for her to walk across the grass
and enter now.
Last vocation, childless vigil over flowering
resurrections
in search of luminosity that has left my life.
Even in the eye of the storm,
now the raging, splitting, griping is past,
the light has not come back.
Only in memory,
the rose petals gleam like a waterfall.
In the garden of how I feel,
the rippling sheen has gone;
what’s left
of scorched earth
is hard and opaque,
like a stone.
Strong, blossom-bearing branch
should have brave new shoots,
but in dark, dank corner
of unloved world,
the cry she never uttered
carried in my blood,
I am a canker, not a rose.
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| Image: Martin Huebscher Photography © Pippa Rathborne 2012 |
