To clarify, this poem refers to a long-lost daughter, not wife, lover or whatever.
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This battered packet, dusty now, of sage
And onion stuffing which these twenty years
With other household goods has joined me on
My long-haul journeyings to earn a wage
Between London and Penzance. Old eyes and ears
Now force a halt, a change from verb to noun,
And I and this packet slump in Penzance town.
Long past its freshness date, it stands for she
Whose loss is like an ill-set bone which aches,
Making the body hobble, and those times
Bright and enthusing as the Penwith sea
When all was fair, and love like fresh-baked cakes:
And once, I cooked the Christmas lunch but – crimes! –
Forgot the stuffing, which in this drab box
Has trailed me since, and comforts though it mocks.
Heart’s closeness did not last, love twisted loose,
And like a ziggurat which seemed immense
Was crushed to stones and dust; it thereby taught
Life’s hardest lesson: all’s a torn-knot truce;
Nor love, achievement, health, can prop their fence
When fate’s ill-voiced contemptuous winds make snort
And like a big-sticked boy with a crotchet wish
Stir up the fishpond and send mad the fish.
Such wrenchings of wellbeing, deserved or not,
Nurture thorned thickets of heartache and of loss
Through which men struggle with a blinded hope
Seeking some clearing like a sun-warmed spot
Made sweet by morning and the downy moss
Where, bloodied, they might nurse their runtling hope,
That piecemeal happiness grubbed up like roots
Which this life offers as the sole of fruits.
At rest, there sometimes knocks like wind in leaves
The knowledge that a half-cock world is known
In journeying, though journey’s end is death,
And that dark portal like a tunnel’s eaves
Is arbiter of what was gift or loan,
Fixing the import of your passing breath.
At death, a chastened man though gashed with scars
Knows all – time, consequence, the stones, the stars.
That vision, from the basalt roots of ranges
To spheres where inter-stellar gas clouds weave,
Finds all is poise, proportion, hence is good;
Then soul melds with the source of being’s changes,
That sui generis which must retrieve
Its own, this universe of would and should,
Even the atoms of this travelled box,
That all be all, the shepherd and his flocks.
Come closure, prayer for her who these long years
Has bent to life’s persuasions, being now
A stranger of an unlike tribe and clime,
Must wish her joy, however damped with tears,
And one-flesh fruiting which glows a woman’s brow,
Fulfilled at death, replacing fact for mime –
That ever present present which was limned
In wounded love on Penzance beach, and hymned.
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© May/June 2017
