The life of our love is drawing to a close

With the very slightest of death rattles,

Affection, desire, companionship,

Disappointment, resentment, a few battles,

They are sailing over the horizon,

They are wandering in no man’s land.

A quiet, exhausting sorrow attends me;

Five years we walked hand in hand,

Full of words, stories, jokes, meals,

Favourite films and special places,

Love dies but leaves an estate

Of associations and vegistial traces.

We avoided the L word; at least, you did,

I spoke it sometimes, fyi,

Having nothing to lose by it,

Love being a condition, not a battle cry.

I used a metaphor of glass baubles,

Intense, luminous colour, so brittle

They can shatter at a touch;

Wrap them now in a white kittel,

Handling with tensed, careful fingers.

Put them away out of sight.

They were lovely in their season,

Inappropriate beyond twelfth night.

A person can learn how to forget,

And only then, select something to remember,

But the big ship has sailed on the alley alley-O

In the last days of December.

 

21 December 2017