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One Day, by Paul Waring

12/12/2017

2 Comments

 
Picture
Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth (USA). 1948.

One Day

Ours was the house ahead,
grey shell, shadow of itself
alone in a corner on the edge
of this jaundiced landscape. 

They say it’s terminal: it shows
in pain-etched face, eyes 
weary of light, spent lungs 
of rooms inside abandoned 

core of a body that once echoed
life into underground roots - 
until everything starved. 
Nobody knows what drained

colour and left so little; spring-
summer air empty of flower-scent
infusion and insect hum;
unexplained absence of people, 

pets, animals, trees - mystery
of where birds go to make
song. It draws me back to lie,
ear to the earth, and listen 

for heartbeat, sensing one day
I will witness you, weather-beaten, 
fall and break into crumbs, merge 
into the endless ordinary.

Paul Waring

Paul Waring is a retired clinical psychologist who once designed menswear and was a singer/songwriter in several Liverpool bands. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming at Clear Poetry, Prole, The Open Mouse, Amaryllis, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Eunoia Review, Anapest, Reach Poetry, Rat’s Ass Review, Foxglove Journal and many others.

His blog is https://waringwords.wordpress.com
2 Comments
garth
12/12/2017 09:55:27 am

Hi Paul,

Great poem, great image to attend and inspire it. Thought I'd leave you something that inspired me when I saw it after reading your piece.

Thanks,
Garth

according to the tenets of satanism, whenever you stop loving me, so i too must stop loving you

i don't know what she could have been thinking to move her through the world so that only months before you died you had admitted that yes, yes, if she could have, she would have slept with you...i didn't ask what that meant exactly, "slept with": was it sexual, or did she want to just lie next to you, breathe the same air as you, feel you next to her in a way that might've seemed familiar to her...it's too late for regrets like those now even though i think i already know and really wish i could forget you'd even said it...but i see this one crawling towards the house, the greyness of it, the abstraction it might seem from a few hundred feet away, but there it waits for her if she's even crawling back to it and isn't just on her hands and knees giving thanks that once, long ago, she'd had a place to lock you up tight when she was able to and when  you outgrew that, that she'd still had a place to guilt the hell out of you so you'd never leave her, which as irony and age does, only had the opposite effect...you are with me always, which is why i feel for you in death as i never had for you in life, for i've gotten a close up look at her, and in this i have allowed myself to become you or anyone else who had a mother like that, a mother who might have wanted her son so never leave her so badly, she might've even wanted him to crawl back inside her, but we both know she wasn't sick "like that," but was just someone who has been abandoned and alone her whole life till she had you...maybe she thought she had a captive audience in you or something, or maybe she was thinking that family never leaves family, but what were you supposed to do?...you needed your own life, your own space, and she shouldn't have suffocate you like that, though you would've called it something else, something less judgmental, less damning because you know she means well, that she doesn't want to such the life out of anyone...and yet, i've felt it too, in your absence i have felt the sudden rush of vacuum: where once you existed, you exist always encased in some messianic cloth she hugs to herself at all times...and when i am there, because i was there from the start of high school, i am the one who has seen the most, understands the most, i am the one she trusts the most, but i will never tell her what you've said to me, not the part about her wanting to sleep with you because, truly, i didn't drill down into the details because i don't think i wanted to know that you were confessing your heart and its fears to me...that's what she's reaching for, that's her wanting and wanting and never getting because even when she had you, she really didn't: you were always planning to leave, not to ditch her, but just to live your life...she wants still what she can  never have and it's better she doesn't have that knowledge she'd just effortlessly forget anyway, because you know how people are: they want what they want and it's all tunnel vision and manic slavering, if only in the heart, if only what they see in the mirror, especially when they know it will never be real...

Reply
Ion link
12/12/2017 02:16:15 pm

Wonderful poem, Paul. Great images and a strong feeling of sadness. Congratulations!

Reply



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