Grief erects an ugly tenement in the landscape of my mind

Blocking from view those beloved little lanes

Whose ends I thought I knew,

My well-rehearsed rationality regresses into childlike petulance,

In shaky hands, trying to awaken supine bodies

in their irreversible peace, still so warm.

My disconsolate face is pressed into perfumed bosoms

Trying to soothe the pangs of human bondage,

Schooling me about the immortal cycles of Life,

Historicity swiftly enshrouds the days I'd never dreamed would be the last

Now I must acquaint myself with speech and thought and writing in past tense

That I'd never known quite so well in idle imaginations

Than in the one month I was tied to a chair and taught to spell L-O-S-S.

 

I'm splayed across my grandmothers’ knees,

Cut open on this double-edged sword of love and longing

As grandfathers depart worlds of their own making,

Hiding my face in skirts – the littlest member of the lachrymose chorus

We compose as the women they leave behind.

The jingle of bangles quietens by subtraction,

Vermilion haunts parted grey hair- an absent presence,

For eleven days, humbled by mortality,

Everyone gushes on the true essence of life,

How empty-handed, we return to dust,

Crowing about the ripeness of age, some nonsense

About the clock running out or the cup running over,

Debating if it was a life well lived,

Before they wilfully forget-

returning to their tidy accumulations on the twelfth,

Leaving us be- like soiled children, sitting in our private puddles.

 

I run, not knowing if I'm chasing ghosts or being chased by them

On the shores, as the coastal granddaughter they raised,

I watch crows- silent, detached witnesses

to the farce justified as Memento Mori,

And the pyres that had been

These hands, carrying me around zoos and parks,

Bringing in crabs and clips and chicks as fealty in my momentary fairytale,

These shoulders that had raised me to show God in driftwood

These feet that anchored mine on sand slipping ‘neath the tricky waves,

These jaws that moved funnily like a ruminant's,

These eyes with their looks of love and smiles of fond indulgence

at a girl who grew up too like her grandmother.

 

I wish I were naive enough to believe stories

Of stellar fabrication of souls

Being parroted to younger children for this

Grief sometimes shapeshifts from a throbbing flail

To a ravenous raptor pecking at my heart-

Immediate absence tries to gloss over diurnal hurt,

I must have somehow scrapbooked their fragments

Onto my soul-

some days, it feels like they're right here,

and I just have to pop into a room to see

Faces and not frames,

That I haven't really laid to rest questions

Of How's school? What will you eat? Where's the cake?

Their benedictions and their bones.

 

Now I write into being an aperture to the golden world

That once was mine,

The crows caw lessons in ars moriendi I refuse to heed,

What use is it to me now- their trudging along the Golden Mean

When I wander in exile from

Those old places of magic, untouched by understanding?

With grandfathers gone to unknowable reaches of ‘better places’,

I float with them in luminous, idyllic spaces-

The dethroned princess of a belle epoque well and truly over,

Caged in a bubble over a cliff’s edge

In the beautiful curse, it is to still remain and remember.