Page 41 - the NOISE MAY 2016 Edition

NIGht tImE
Driving across the desert at night alone is like driving with a time machine. straight lines, straight paths
across billions of years
through tortured Precambrian schists
upon which Miocene fires once uneasily flowed, and the bones of seas which grew in between, covered with cacti and memories.
I drive through skies emptied
of friendly stars by a malevolent full moon. I wish you were with me
— that anyone worthy was with me —
but there is nobody,
and the air lies about the coming spring, and so I return to my skellig in the sky alone.
I thought time would heal all my wounds but I find, the older I get,
and the more time passes,
the wounds just turn into scabs
painful for all to see.
They scar my face,
they scar my heart,
and nobody wants to come close to see how my eyes view the world.
not since you left for the sea.
since you left,
I have tried to fill the void
in a thousand lonely ways
with other people, and other things and all they do is rummage around in the open cellar
and steal the good wine
which you laid down to age,
leaving me empty and without soul.
I am alone now, upon the mountain with my glass of bitter Chenin noir and the salient fact is:
I don’t know if I can love anymore, without you; how can the land
fill the gaping hole
left by the abandonment
of the lost sea which
once covered it like a warm blanket and left it to dream of wonder?
How do I open myself up,
when all those who come seek
to destroy that which I have
laboriously tried to build and maintain? what was so wrong with my land
that you abandoned me for the sea?
EaRly ‘63
It must have been a bright spring day,
a deckchair in some garden casting shadows on the path. Hand-knitted cardi, buttoned up high,
with matching ribbon in my hair,
dressed up to visit.
would that I could remember that brief moment in time, my father, open-collared and grinning;
his cheek pressed to my cheek;
safely held as if in fear of losing me.
I share his smile, his widow’s peak; his weaknesses are mine.
I imagine my mother, invisible behind the camera,
inexpertly held to capture the pair of us,
relaxed and smiling,
a stolen Kodak moment in grainy black and white.
This single photograph of father and daughter speaks of more than this: two people who loved but could not be together,
a man, younger than I am now,
and the child he could not acknowledge
until the years made him an old, old man,
and this shoebox-hidden treasure saw the first light of day since early ’63.
— Marnie Devereux
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thenoise.us • the NOISE arts & news • MAY 2016 • 41
cAllie lUedeKeR