Poem 292

Dumped! … and deserved it … but still … this is about the particular torture of not being able to talk it out with the departed one …

… written in 1982, more than a year after the event, during the phase of sixty one-a-day poems I was shaping up to plunge into at the time of Poem 285 … I had a couple of modes at my disposal by this time but some poems still came to me in metre and rhyme – the challenges and satisfactions, the crossword puzzle nature of writing in that form retained a grip on me, perhaps I really should have been half of a songwriting duo … recently hearing Marianne Faithfull’s reading of Thomas Hood’s The Bridge of Sighs reminded me though of how powerful and masterly rhyme can be, like watching a tightrope walker who if they get it right stirs the soul …

( I like the structure here, how the second, fourth and sixth verses repeat but in different ways … )

Desert Of Words

The wave went back and back
and never came again
she telephoned for a taxi
and took her suitcases to a friend

now you walk inside your house
going over and over what she said
in the long and lean desert of words
she has chosen and gone on ahead

the sun falls down inside your house
lighting the towers of dust
you tell yourself how it should have been
should have been and not been this

and you wander from room to room
going over and over what she said
in the long and lean desert of words
the springs of silence flow instead

and when you find the voice to answer
to explain to her simple and clear
the futile voice you think will make it right
you can't use it there is no one there

so you pace inside your house
trailing lines that are left unsaid
in the long and lean desert of words
she has robbed and left you for dead