Clare - 4th March 2008

I don't miss anything as much
as I miss you.
In your fractured shadow
of softened and forgotten
dust I trace with my fingers
around the seams of your
world.
I hear your thoughts in the
silence of the kitchen and
your stride in my step
from the old blue door into
the cold air of the winter garden.
Time does stand still here....
it's a place of memories
of scented roses sat in copper
jars on waiting tables.
Tables whose legs curve in
paws against carpets,
frozen with the unspoken songs
if someone else's past.

In war time slippers with someone's
cold and discarded cup of tea
I wander between the walls and
bones of the past peeling your
ochre coloured photos from
the wall and building them
against myself in a new skin.

To the eye I at times
look like you but it's a
double fake
conundrum;
a multi exposure situation
of the faintly autistic....
you look and see....
but something doesn't settle.

When the sky came in
and pressed it's mouth
firm against your grave,
the earth responded
grew with love and
grass as green as
the prettiest grazing cow
would nestle it's warm
muzzle upon
and roses as red and
full of the blood no longer
kissing the soft contours
of your heart and lungs,
they sprang up
looking with unblinking certainty
at the quiet rural
air.
The world breathes she said,
it is one lung living,
one eye seeing.

If I put my 8 fingers and
two thumbs down into
the earth like fresh cuttings
and I deftly and gracefully
flip myself into a headstand
upon your resting bed,
I may sit quiet forever
like the willows so tall
and downcast of eye,
What's left of you fallen
from or through your home
will work as fertilizer
and I will grow into
a tree
that resembles
you closely.