Mirror’s Apprentice
You never went to a ball, ever.
In all your years sweeping kitchens
No fairy godmother appeared, never.
Poor, poor sweetheart,
This rough white cloth, fresh from the hospital laundry,
Is the only theatre-gown you’ve ever worn.
No make-up. Hair matted with sweat.
The drip beside your bed discontinued.
Life was never a fairy-tale.
Cinders soon.
Long long ago
when everything I was told was believable
and the little I knew was less limited than now, I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond and to the far bank launched a child’s armada.
A broken fortress of twigs,
the paper-tissue sails of galleons, the waterlogged branches of submarines – all came to ruin and were on flame in that dusk-red pond. And you, mother, stood behind me, impatient to be going, old at twenty-three, alone, thin overcoat flapping.
How closely the past shadows us.
In a hospital a mile or so from that pond I kneel beside your bed and, closing my eyes, reach out across forty years to touch once more that pond’s cool surface, and it is your cool skin I’m touching; for as on a pond a child’s paper boat was blown out of reach by the smallest gust of wind, so too have you been blown out of reach by the smallest whisper of death, and a childhood memory is sharpened, and the heart bums as that armada burnt, long, long ago.
By the time I got to where I had no intention of going
Half a lifetime had passed.
I’d sleepwalked so long. While I dozed
Houses outside which gas-lamps had spluttered
Were pulled down and replaced,
And my background was wiped from the face of the earth.
There was so much I ought to have recorded.
So many lives that have vanished –
Families, neighbours; people whose pockets
Were worn thin by hope. They were
The loose change history spent without caring.
Now they have become the air I breathe,
Not to have marked their passing seems such a betrayal.
Other things caught my attention:
A caterpillar climbing a tree in a playground,
A butterfly resting on a doorknob.
And my grandmother’s hands!
Though I saw those poor, sleeping hands
Opening and closing like talons,
I did not see the grief they were grasping.
The seed of my long alienation from those I loved
Was wrapped in daydreams.
Something I’ve never been able to pinpoint
Led me away from the blood I ought to have recorded.
I search my history for reasons, for omens. But what use now
Zodiacs, or fabulous and complicated charts
Offered up by fly-brained astrologers?
What use now supplications?
In the clouds’ entrails I constantly failed
To read the true nature of my betrayal.
What those who shaped me could not articulate
Still howls for recognition as a century closes,
And their homes are pulled down and replaced,
And their backgrounds are wiped from the face of the earth.
From my vantage point on the top stair
of a house that no longer exists,
I
