The Diary
I never read your diary
but I held it,
as a Doughboy would a psalm,
in the galvanic softness
of your room.
I held you there, bound,
in the theatre of my fist,
swiping softly
at the whispers to my ear.
Speak up! Are you Ophelia
tripping loosely
‘tween the margins of the days?
Or Beatrice, entrenched in kind
rolling words,
rose-cheeked and fine legs
of swoop-tailed y’s. I never
read your diary,
this I swear. But I stood,
like a leper in a linedance,
back arched,
eyes catching squinted mentions
of blindness still to come. I caught
my shape in
the mirror on your wall;
I looked twisted as a question
mark; venal, venial,
apologetic, will-o’-the-wisp
dancing through thick red
wine air, not
a decent lie between us ,
even then. I heard your mother
flapping wildly –
a flying visit with poison parcels
wrapped white-knuckled just for me.
And can she see
I am carving you to myth, stood
a trembling spiral, a child
auditioning for
an adults only part. You knew this,
easel at an angle that made the
most of light.
I remember it was Christmas and
you told me that you only painted
ghosts with faces
of the living, and that we live
inside an echo. What did you make of me –
my lopsided grin,
tin-hat philosophy, my heavy heartbeat.
If I could have been a ghost
about those pages
I would have haunted all your past,
I would have wandered through
each days’ wall
and found an answer to my sad
curiosities, last offered to my own
ghosts on that day
I sat with them ‘midst stale ashtrays
on platform two of that station
somewhere, grey,
at the edge of our senses. What
would your pen have made, if true,
of that afternoon
had you been there? How I wish
I could paint every hour in the
way I know
you do; submitting each sigh
to that choral blue that bleaches
breath and turns
miasma at your reach. It was
the anniversary of Huxley’s death
when we met,
a quiet day, the engine of your
car, even, seemed wrapped in red.
Our town was
all hay and summer welcomes,
birdsong and long yellow grass.
It was, I know,
how we both would have liked it left.
And now, frozen upon my plinth,
I could not see
the hatch that lets the air free,
could not feel those feather-capped
spectres that stalk
these icy boards. I never read
your diary but I was a patient
within the wards.