I
Last night I heard on Radio 4
The man who’s won the Booker Prize
Be asked a questioned which contained
The phrase “you lost your mother...”
I didn’t lose mine. She lost me,
Left me for someone else to find
Then moved away. My next mother
Lost me as well, repeatedly.
Or more exactly, she’d flaneur
With us in front, to keep an eye
On us until a shop window
Caught it instead, while on we walked
And then once more I’d find myself
In a kind policeman’s arms
Him laughing and her cross, exposed,
I now suppose, as careless.
My father lost things all the time.
I’d help find them. He never lost
His wife and natural child: they died.
We knew precisely where they were.
In morgues. Then coffined. Then in flames.
Then in the ground. And if you like
I can pinpoint the exact spot
They share now with my father.
II
Yet in that expanding lexicon
Of words we need to leave unsaid,
We seem to think, to mutter “die”
Somehow invokes and summons Death
And so instead, we’re lost or pass,
Like umbrellas or passing thoughts,
Or, for that matter, water (though
In this case what we mean is piss)
Because we’re all so childish
A harsh word might scare us to death.
Or to pass. Better, get lost,
Just loose change dropped in the settee.
III
Then I remembered I’d forgot
To wheel the bins out in the street.
The instant I stepped through the door
November enveloped me
Its coldness grabbing down my throat,
Its dampness oozing like a sponge
Its perfumes rich, redemptive death
In leaf mould, coal smoke, burning wood
The evening was a slap of joy,
The kind that makes you gulp first breaths
And breathe and breathe until you’re done
The senseless scents of Rex Mundi.
The whole Autumn accreted fresh
Layers onto Death’s millefeuille
Each death podsolled and swaddling
The next arriving layer of Life.
So maybe we can’t say the name
The same way that you don’t feel wet
Fully immersed in water as
We all pass through, before we’re lost.
Invigorated, my old heart
Started to sing in inner realms
Where, once you just start to look,
In the end you’ll find it all.