Thursday 31 May 2012

The Yearning Garden: Part Eight of Rebegot

GARDEN
 every garden is a restoration.....

Now look at this, it’s got shrill:
I unpack my heart with words,
I fall a-cursing, like a very drab,
I knew you wouldn’t like to hear it,
Woe is Me-Me-Me:
another f******* memoir
about bereavement and bullying,
rites of passage only losers don’t get through,
nullified entities, evolution's casualties.
This graceless blogging I abhorred to do,
tweeting to the world how I feel.
Why bother to Know Thyself?
Broadcast Thyself instead.
No danger I’ll be heard here,
I - ironic English over-compensating i -
my own ghost, pretending to be me,
waste the present moaning about the past.

Yet more bitter aloes
smell of treachery to me.
Where is the honour I wanted to do you
both?

    Loved and remembered,
   
- Help me, help me -

    loved and remembered,
    insensible of me you made
    and left.
The zero of their disappointed hopes,
the best of me is gone,
hollow except for a scream,

a haunted house,
I carry on to tidy up,
not procreate.
 

          I know my grief must not be hurried,
          while foothold on being slips.
         
I loved her more than I love my life;

          I feel this and someone says “Move on”.
          They do not see the ledge I'm on.
Experts tell us to relinquish
our attachment to the dead.
Griefwork to reconcile
loving memory with pain of loss
that only ends with forgetting.
Friend sees a blessing, I do not:
“You’ve not got your mother
to worry about anymore”
- Help me, help me -
as if wires of affinity are not
still live after death's cutting.
 

Lifelong love is not a mortgage term
paid off after forty years
of sharing confidence
and never trespassing
on things hidden and forgiven
noone has a right to know.
    To love someone completely,
    we do not have to know
    everything about them.
Two people, a single purpose,
    imaginations
more kin than blood,
    disguising poverty,
    masking grief,
laughing at bad luck
- sisters, friends, mother, daughter
    interchanged.
A broken clasp left behind,
I cannot make-believe alone.

Remember the beloved as they lived
not re-sampled to fit a frame
of sentimentality she despised,
still the owner of their self
not distorted by disease
or dissolved in other people's self-flattering lies.
Last warning for mortality:
are you sure you want to permanently delete
this person?
Death is not the leveller: we are.
      
 

     (Split screen four hundred years old:
            in orbit with a blighted child, a man
            reels between two women,
            two worlds,
            no earthly tool to fathom the space between.      
      Rolling towards him, a waxy alien thing,       
            the colour of the moon,
            corpse borne on volcanic ash pillows,
            while, in a corner he cannot reach,
            the dark-haired wife he loved -
            elegant, reserved,
            black ribbons on her dress
            and round her slender arm - sits,
            in contemplation
            of world without end
            or hope,
            not looking at him.
            In mourning for them all all,
            lit only by the lustre of her pearls,           
            her abstraction is unbridgeable;
 .          he knows he will never catch her
            as she shrinks to a tiny dot
            in memory.)

    This - you -
    I will not relinquish
    until I have refound you.


                              Let me plant my garden -

                              jewel-bright flesh-soft
                              on dusty city ledge over alien city,
                              or crumbling half-moon of paving
                              that is mine on the edge of the world -
                              every garden is a restoration,
                              our answer to nature's randomness,
                              a crafted substitute for natural happiness,
                              our rafts to get to a haven, the gentlest way to act like gods.
                              Each pot of breathing colours
                              a tiny world made for her,
                              not in dried remembrance, but, child's magic,
                              waiting for her to walk across the grass
                              and enter now.

Last vocation, childless vigil over flowering
resurrections
in search of luminosity that has left my life.

Even in the eye of the storm,
now the raging, splitting, griping is past,
the light has not come back.
Only in memory,
the rose petals gleam like a waterfall.

In the garden of how I feel,
the rippling sheen has gone;
    what’s left
    of scorched earth
    is hard and opaque,
    like a stone. 

Strong, blossom-bearing branch
should have brave new shoots,
but in dark, dank corner
of unloved world,
the cry she never uttered
carried in my blood,
I am a canker, not a rose. 

Image: Martin Huebscher Photography


© Pippa Rathborne 2012