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Description
Four thirty AM
I am standing in my kitchen
wearing my dark blue dressing gown
building a time machine
from assorted cutlery
and a broken microwave.

I am visiting you
three years ago.

I have calendars for you
with notes written each day:
some are highlighted orange
to show you when to ignore
the things I say.
Others are circled blue,
and on these occasions
I meant every word.

I am smiling at you,
already knowing the day you leave
I will understand
in time, despite what I say.
You look at me quizzically:
bemused by this odd smiling.

It’s four years later:
upsetting things we said
seem like empty noise,
instinctive animal-thrashings
against the inevitable.

Clockhands and calendars are arbitrary.
It’s now fourteen years later:
you are fond memories,
all golden, sepia-toned,
like a creature held in amber.

Then it’s last year again,
it’s spring and also autumn
and I’m sleeping off my bruises,
and waltzing round the cherry-trees
that grow in groves at Cornwall park.

—I am now here, nowhere
in time, I am external,
I can see our whole lives
stretched out like mountain ranges,
I can see our whole lives
were never single incidences
but are serried lines of pattern
in places closer and apart,
and everything in relation
to each other at some point,
and there is never any real
coming or going.

Nor one isolated event.