The Weight of Immortalisation
A poem
(1) [dream interlude] — (audible crackling, light switch click, lit-up museum display unfolds, unveiling flower-heart enshrined in translucent cage)
the flower of your heart was built only for display:
encased in a glass bottle, the stem ruptures through the bottom
earthy roots lightly grazing your small intestines
while the petals are ridiculous dog ears flapping in the wind
unfurling and closing in on themselves in alternating chorus.
(2) [smash cut to reality / waking nightmare]
I have seen the work of precise hands,
careful incisions, flesh torn and reattached.
I know the feeling which stirs and swells
like boiling water’s last hiss into steam,
that sets my heart ablaze when I picture you as you were
on the hospital bed, while I attended to my work
and went on dreaming that so long as I believed,
the glass bottle in your heart would not break
for the flower would surely die
and your soft petal lips would wilt and discolour.
(3) [sometimes I joke about you to prove I can still be funny]
I’m so committed to my job I can’t eat ribs
without thinking of my patients
of flesh pried apart by incisors and scalpels.
(Let us not even speak of pulled pork.)
But my empathy is only boundless when I remember
the face of your fragile hands, little tendrils
grasping at the sun. Forever mobile, functional, adult,
I can’t pick up my car keys or rush down the stairs
without betraying my indecency, awkwardness, impurity.
But I saw how awful it was to be delicate. I could even glimpse
the invisible weight pushing you downward, suppressing
your appetite, weakening all attempts at a smile,
as your cracked lips glinted in blood drops.
I dream of tight grasps and interlocking hands
but even the memory of your spirit
is too frail to be squeezed.
(4) [time’s swift and helpless arrow]
My faults are ridges on an infinite mountain / waves of molten anger churn beneath the surface / threatening to erupt the moment we immortalise you. / When I pass by that hospital bed I still picture you curled inward / away from life / when I gripped tight onto my great delusion / that only my helpless rage could shield you from the bruise of time.
(5) [where poetry ends and life begins]
I thought I had reached foregone conclusions about your life
when I came to the end, when I could finally map out the story’s form.
Like all moments, it was just an end before an end, bookended
by a hundred experiences begging to be lived, thousands
of doors shutting swiftly in my face.
I suppose for a time I mimicked your symptoms and responses
1980–82: bedridden, back always exposed to the lingering present.
Grant me one moment of the past, permit a lone snapshot of the future,
I begged to no one and myself. I thought if I just had that I would be bigger,
so tall that my thoughts would float up
and brush against my memories of you
as the cold air turned my body to marble, leaving
only dead weight to fall back to Earth.
When The Smiths released their self-titled album
I had successfully vanquished all thoughts of you.
Only when I was exhausted did blurry images from the past
reach the murky pool of thoughts my mind couldn’t clarify.
By the time the group disbanded, I cursed the years
of absent-mindedness wasted on not giving you my full attention.
They would never reunite or be whole again.
Before that, some time after your death,
I wandered the halls of the children’s ward
like a reanimated corpse, vaguely ethereal,
inattentive in conversation, wild-eyed, my hair like a horse’s mane.
I thought I could just be an animal, that my formless chirping and buzzing
would suffice. Colleagues stared and whispered
but never asked any questions, which was worthy of concern;
people always ask questions. I never joked,
couldn’t laugh. Even now, how could I tell them that I married
and had children of my own, but that you were the centre of my world?
Was that an awful thought? So often I forget that you existed beyond
your sickness, that you were more than my life’s purpose.
Decades passed, and time so often found me sitting on a park bench,
listless, alive only in the barest sense.
You see the the same reflections of a wasted life a thousand times over
and find that your eyes glaze over it.
But that morning I noticed the sunlight winking at me
through the gaps in tree branches.
A toddler held the lid of his yoghurt cup to the sun as an offering,
and a long-dormant voice told me to smile. It took on my cadence
to bolster the illusion, but I knew that this was your signal.
Did you see yourself in him, in the way his pudgy legs didn’t quite
support him, or in his lumbering stance, like a shrunken silverback gorilla?
Did you envy his pockets of fat, when you had been so frail in the end?
But there is no end, and I will always forget that,
even after you spoke it into being all those years ago
and I could have felt it if I had just listened
if I had only let you guide my thoughts, my ego, my life’s arc
as you always should have done.
So I shut our eyes and let us breath in unison
as you usher forth little portholes of wind
to stir the leaves and flowers around me.
I glimpse you in the face of a muddy, oak-brown leaf,
and in the wild Cheshire Cat grin of the sun.
You are the particle of dust on my jumper, just below my collarbone,
reminding me that I have a body to care for.
Life is one step ad infinitum, and you assure me of them all
you tell me with everything you are
that wherever I land, I will not fall through
