IMOGENE’S NOTEBOOK
Letters from a Box
A Poem
Time is the trickster we think we know.
A gel that distorts
allowing bodies to move
without effort
back and forth;
in and out
of its warmth
before it cools,
sealing yesterday in.
Yet just when
we believe a day
is in amber,
it returns to the present,
as we sit side by side
single-spaced in the same room
and you’re
shouting into my ear
as if I’m deaf.
In our embryonic chamber
the walls are made of frosted glass
stamped with sentimental
bits ‘n pieces; captured
shapes floating, twisting on strings,
their shadow multitudes
silenced but for
the gust of your voice left behind
a high-speed train, storming
through stations, changing tracks
from Helga and her Pakistani husband to
the 40-degree heat in Luxor to
the yoga class starting the 16th.
You had seemingly been long-departed
until I said “Mom?” one day,
as if I were a medium
calling out to the spirit world while
clutching an item you gifted me;
to summon only you,
not your forgotten darkness,
leaving me to feel like a sentimental, superstitious fool
conjuring up their own restless soul in place
of another’s, as if holding
a negative up to the sun
and discovering more shade
than light.
Thwarting time
at its worn-out game of
what is then
was now, and
there never being any tomorrow
unless it’s created
in a garden of self-reproach;
tending weeds and lack of
trajectory or vision;
“Destiny” and “karma”
deluding like
a guru’s
spell.
Most enigmas are never solved.
Like never knowing what someone else
is feeling or thinking inside their sealed envelope.
Trying to thrash clues away from the
ornamental wheat fanning
their front yards, and getting little back
but cuts to the hands
from right angles until
one day you stumble across their letters
in a shoe
box and expel
a long-held
breath.
Reading my unsent letters back to myself
and sounding petty and neurotic though grateful
for the find, to remind myself
just how much I opine and how little I do,
unlike you,
still tricking Time into listening
about the cheap tickets bought to
see the Royal Birmingham Ballet
perform On the Road to Bagdad;
the money saved to move to Spain;
Judi Dench playing “Queen Bess” and
the lazy delivery guy dumping
packages in the elevator;
mistakes Tippex-ed out;
notes in margins and
peach-coloured wool sample
INTERROGATIONS!?
taped to the top right-hand corner
for the next
knitting assignment.
The canal hasn’t frozen over this year.
The geese can still sail their ships.
Author’s note: A tribute to my late larger-than-life, hyperactive mother.
