The coat an uncle bought you as a girl -
tweed by the look of it, in a fifties style,
your blonde hair unfinicky and natural
lying in short waves round the hidden ears.
You’re prematurely wise for eighteen years:
that level gaze, and that reserved smile!
A young idealist, your head in the wind,
before travel, sophistication and party time,
you’re still living at home in Portballintrae
with its long winter nights and an extreme
cold that can do strange things to the mind,
reading the Brontës and Daphne du Maurier.
Soon enough you’ll be in another town
picking out poets from the library shelves,
speaking in tongues, sporting a black gown
and spending your leisure hours with privileged
young gentlemen far too fond of themselves
where I first met you in another age.
Gowned like Czarinas, twirling parasols, you
and Sibyl stood at a roadside in Boulogne
hitching a lift to Greece; later you shone
on your own local afternoon talk show.
Too long a time in London, then the last
years spent on an obscure Indian quest.
Adored as a student, you never quite got
over the shock and glamour of your first lover.
Enamoured of high style, wounded by each
new manifestation of commercial kitsch,
you boggled at the crude, the daft, the naff
promoted by the genius of modern life ...
This isn’t good enough. I should make a list
of what you fancied: islands, freesia, fresh
strawberries, broderie anglaise, Schubert, snow;
the people, Maurice and Sandra, you liked best
and favourite phrases, “kiddiewinks”, “cut a dash”,
“a bit of zing”, “knee-trembler”, “the goat’s toe”.
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The cloudy backdrop gives you a period air
and sure enough you loved the cloudy past
so hard to revisit: how they really were,
the things they valued, obstacles we faced.
I can only half imagine how it was
to be a girl like you in the early days.
Pillow talk covered most of that I know
but in this monochrome, with little art,
the photographer in his Coleraine studio
caught the young woman I would know and love:
no speech, no fondly interrupted narrative
but the true nature and the secret heart -
as it I knew it, though you were my wife.
I walked on air but was too often drunk
till shouting started and we came undone
in a foreshadowing of the present grief.
When the crab grabbed and spread within
the chance had long gone to make up and thank
you for your forbearance, your anarchic laugh
and the grey gaze there in the photograph,
grey-blue in real life as it opened up
to wit and gaiety, to undying hope.
Dear ghost, remember me without ill will
as I remember your lost mystery still.
But don’t mind me, for the important fact
is this, that you were once uniquely here,
a brief exposure, an exceptional act
performed once only in our slower lives
with your blue gaze and your longer hair
now ash for ever in the long sea waves. |