Poem 93

I see this as a little film scene, a middle-aged couple – she in the bath, he in the bedroom – the watershed moment when unsaid truths about the past become irrelevant and silent agreement is made …

… I’d just turned 23 … what did I know, what had I experienced, what could I imagine? … quite a bit seemingly and quite well I think in re-looking at this from the elevated vantage point of my 60s …

Shoe In Hand

All these years gone
it's too late to chance the truth
he considers it less than a second
but she picks it up a room away
watching her cloudy limbs
under the skin of light the bath
the body she eyes disfavourably

she senses the altered resonance
the way his thoughts fly free of a sudden
and in the silence she is afraid
appalled at the familiar ground
falling beneath her
she turns back in a panic at the edge of change
and calls him
where he sits one shoe in hand

he lets all the small truths scatter and go
like old seed through his fingers
no longer the sense the need to grow
and as he kneels by the bath to hold her
she clings and his shirtsleeves are wet

time is taping down the corners
gently their lives are set