A B-grade movie drumbeat of doors and panes,

all night the wind tackles this eyrie

where I will try to sleep on the sofa-bed that only I have mastered

beneath photos of great-great grandmothers in sheitels,

graduations, weddings, and someone who looks like me

leaning against my first car.

 

My hollow-eyed cave-wall reflection presides over

the empty intersection below. Streetlight touches

a bag of cherries growing pulpy,

a newspaper creased at the obituaries,

the Ezi-Read calendar floating in the darkened kitchen.

Dishes gleam where Dad sang as he did the washing up,

motes rising in staves of moonlight as if the melody lingered.

 

They waited hopefully all day

for one of my famous jokes.  But my humours

bubbled away in solicitude’s alembic,

all day my tempers hissed and leaked

like a geothermal zone, bubbles of impatience popping

as my dogged, dutiful performance was transformed

into fairy-tale kindness in chats with the neighbours.

 

Like albums and dictionaries losing pages as the spines break

silence laps at the edge of conversations:

what they mustn’t be told about family crises,

dispatches from distant wars

and what must be said, for what lies on the other side of telling:

the names of villages and cameo players

coming on like solitary lights across a lake.

 

A last look at my e-mails.  My wife has sent me

a picture of our olive tree. To her delight

it has flowered for the first time, nubs askew

like families holding hands in kindergarten paintings.

Perhaps after fruitless years pot-bound roots have found

a way through to the soil,

 

or perhaps some fabled bird,

down from circling time’s thermals,

is lifting its flamboyant white and green tail 

in momentary renown earned

by leaving the customary precincts

of the garden’s illuminated manuscript.

​

Stylus Lit, September 2023