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Lonesome and blue
Monday, September 20, 2004
My youngest daughter has gone to uni. So that's that with the motherhood thing - or that kind of motherhood stuff, meal cooking, clothes washing, taxi driving motherhood. There'll be other kinds - cash sending, phone call making, letter writing, looking forward to your visit mom. I miss her bigtime. She is so class. Her fish died the day after she left. I wrote a poem:

Moving Swiftly On

After you’d gone, the silence in the house
Changed to a lower key
The tingle of expectancy collapsed around me
Like the cover on a budgie’s cage
Bringing sudden darkness.

The fish died, went belly up
Checking out to avoid the days
Without you, your soft voice
Beguiling as a siren
Offering a reason to circumnavigate the globe.

I listen to my breath, in and out,
Move from room to room
Just checking.
There’s not even a smell of you,
Not even a hair in the sink
No knickers on the bathroom floor
No glass beside the sofa.

This place is clean as a whistle.
Wearing rubber gloves, you have
folded yourself into a suitcase
posted yourself to a new address
kicked over the traces
leaving me with a chill in my left side
as if I am half undressed.

It's all a matter of time, I suppose - it's all a matter of adjustment. Making myself understand that this is good, that she's doing what she wants to do and facing up to my old avoidance tactics - no more excuses for not writing, not socialising - it's all down to me now. Nobody but myself to blame.


9:28 AM  

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