A Cage To Hold My Dreams
Part Of The Great Everythings
Four thousand days have come and gone,
four thousand nights
of broken dreams and sweet reminders.
And each night's end a cause for celebration.
A slow, indifferent sun creeps up the sheets,
Pictures yawn and stir to life, like men
in suits of armour.
Evicted from the sanctuary of sleep,
from the comfort of the absolute,
the realisation that
she has gone still knocks me cold.
This is not the face she said goodbye to.
It is different now, older, battle-scarred,
the smile is wafer-thin and partly real,
enough to make
my friends believe the pain has gone.
But the pain of loss is not so easily
thrown aside. It is not a kindly thing,
it does not behave like a favourite maiden
aunt. It is sly, it changes shape,
leaps forward, pulls back, grows horns,
sprouts wings, plays games.
Every day is full of cruel surprises.
And its travelling companion, grief,
is no less a bully,
ashamed to show its face, hiding in dark
alleys, jumping out and grabbing hold,
twisting arms, using our heads
as a dance-floor, putting a white flag
in our hands and thinking we'll give in.
Each day inside my head she dies
at least a dozen times,
the scene repeats itself, as if on a loop.
Yet this is no horror movie. I was there.
She died calmly, without complaint,
noble and fragile at the end,
the princess in a children's book who
ate the apple.
My first holiday without her was
a gamble which I couldn't win.
I rolled the dice and they fell through
a crack in the earth.
Later, when I chose somewhere
we hadn't been, every bookshop
every couple on the beach, each time
I heard Ray Charles or Roussos or
the Tijuana Brass, a spike went into
my body.
I fell into a black hole. Others leapt
around in a party mood,
wore funny hats, told stupid jokes,
rocked and rolled till the early, early
light, kept decent neighbours awake.
I was at war
with myself, and with anyone got within
two steps of me.
What should I do ? Am I being daft
or selfish, hoping that one day I might
feel normal again ?
I was always sure that she loved me
even when I made her angry,
when her eyes would narrow
to a hairline crack and her little foot
would shoot out like a cat's paw.
Love and beauty,
short bursts of temper and sweet
forgiveness--has all that gone forever ?
Perhaps so. My left-over days turn
over in nameless dread.
Of what I do not know.
A letter saying I must leave my house ?
Another crippling wave
of grief ? My fear of dying, perhaps ?
Earlier deaths, my father's for example,
served as warnings, that loss stalks us
like a constant shadow,
that happiness is a smattering of dust
at the mercy of the breeze. But who
would take notice ?
And even if they did, how could it
prepare them for losing a soulmate ?
In times of modest stress, something
stands beside us, a friendly power,
a force of some description, an unseen
guiding hand.
But on the day she went, help wasn't
listening, nothing wanted to be
in the same room as me.
When I held her in that last embrace,
while I drowned in misery, she seemed
to not comphrehend,
she smiled at something above my head,
something which I couldn't see but she
said dazzled her like the power of
a hundred suns.
Friends showered me with sympathy,
of course, but the cards, the flowers,
the treading on eggshells,
the unnerving solemnity of it all,
seemed an unfit way to remember a life
which had hauled in the sunshine
the way a trawlerman makes his catch.
I wanted to be alone. I wanted to die,
to blot out every conscious thought
except one. It came to me in a flash,
a moment of exquisite revelation.
I would rent a room. Someone would find
me, a week or two later,
curtains drawn, wardrobe empty,
nothing in my pockets to say who I was,
just a pile of cold flesh waiting
to be discovered.
All lovers must part sometime.
The gift of life must be wrapped up and
sent back, it says so in the small print.
Phone lines go down and are reconnected,
but she and I won't be.
Maybe thats no bad thing. Old photographs,
supposedly her, aren't her at all.
though some people might be fooled
by them.
A small girl holding hands with her father,
three friends thumbing rides across Europe,
a bride and goom
on the back seat of a shiny limousine.
These are glimpses of life's earlier half,
when men wore hats,
when housewives had the choice,
when good times bunched and swirled
around like leaves. I found it strange,
that not once did she hate or blame God
for all her lost tomorrows
and all the awful blanks He put my way.
So I hated Him for both of us.
I had enough hate to paralyse Asia.
When she died, I had a romantic notion,
crazier than my usual ones,
that she had become part of the great
everythings.
She was the art of Velazquez,
the music of Mahler, the voice of Callas
the words of O'Donohue.
Four thousand days have rattled past,
like empty carriages. How many more
will make the trip
before these bones rest easy ?
