Husband and Wife: Literary Life
Your Rain was tears on my window pane -
the first poem of yours I had seen -
pain-drops spattered a snow-blank expanse,
grief-blue with regret and what should have been.
I thought mediocre. Bad omen for you.
You who attempted to pour the blue,
to quench the amber arid air
and quell the mithering mistral.
I needed that oasis: sea spray words
to drown a desert of parched poetics.
Hints at a darkness beneath. Hieroglyphic glints.
A calligraphic trance-dance of pen.
I was struck by that and, later,
struck by so much more.
Black dagger words. Your chirography
slash-slanting, stabbing the page like little knives -
transfixing, somebody said. Trance-fixing.
I was entranced by you.
You gave me an art-effigy: your failed book
that bled its heart in pink and red and shed
the blood gobbets of brutalised childhood.
I saw: Pictures of Silence crying for blue,
weeping for water, and demanding more
water-pour from every pore.
Just months before, the future fanned out in mystical tarot
predicting long-distance love: the tower tumbling, and the chariot
hauling two hundred miles across country, coast to coast.
We were falling through a chasm of long-distance words,
falling in love, and both of us knew.
Passion so intense it made each finger a flame
as we sweated fever-beads in a burning bed
in a sizzle-tangle of gold thread bedspread
in a room that cracked like kindling.
I understood little of your Beds Are Burning
but heard its furnace-roar of trauma
as you recoiled from wound-raw red
and reached for Aquarian blue-cool,
the page giving voice to the child
who had no voice, no choice; words
bursting to blaze in our flamery.
Court Green evergreen
grieving under thatch,
and the slatted sun
warming moss-skin on old corpse walls;
the mouths of corpses suckling dark roots
in earth heavy and thick with omen.
You were away God-knew-where
while I sweltered in the burning bronze
of hot North Tawton sun, and sweated
over stagnant, stilted stanzas.
That end-of-summer was stagnant.
A thick silage pall shrouding land
and the spilled puce guts
of blackberries rotting sadly in hedgerows.
We floundered and foundered, deaf ears
tuned to your father's coffin-creak,
blind eyes turned to the gothic yew
rising and presiding, its spire stabbing sky.
Too many battles fought for too long -
both the blood-scrapping external ones
and the even bloodier internal ones.
Language shards lodged in shrapnel sentences
when words were all that remained
like blood spots on the floor: poetry's stigmata,
hot clots of our heated exchange,
gunshots in a word-war
where there could be no victor -
just us, together-apart
and alone with our heart-art.
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