WAITING FOR THE RAPTURE
When I visit I walk through
corridors created by everything from your mother’s flat
(she was a hoarder too).
The sealed boxes
are draped with clothes,
empty cans, takeaway containers full of ashy slime
and a syringe abandoned by a temporary lodger.
You are keeping these stacked packages so carefully,
they must be for your life in heaven—
in the middle of the chaos you have packed for a better life.,
one where we’ll all be free.
You are waiting for the Rapture,
when you will sleep safe in white linen sheets,
instead of stained covers with your lover on a crazy cocktail who might,
(careful!)
punch you at any moment.
You will rise and your foot spas,
Le Creuset pans and beauty gift sets
will rise with you.
They will drop heaps of anoraks, trousers and underwear,
and boxes will pull apart (God can do anything!)
All your things will arrive unwrapped,
falling gently on to the shelves.
It will be a 1980s heaven, but you won’t mind.
Thank goodness you remembered to pack
the pressure cooker still in its box,
for all those easy casseroles.
No more days living on lager.
Thank goodness you remembered
the five pairs of fluffy white slippers
for your pristine, washed clean feet.
Dream feet.
With these you will rise to heaven.
GONE
Missing you is less like you are gone and more like you are everywhere,
here in the evening freeze, in the hardening holes drilled into the snow,
formed by water hours ago, when ice was touched by the sun appearing,
haloed by grey in the middle of the day, brief warmth releasing drips to fall
from the trees. These random patterns scattered at the edge of fields
are your footprints, the marks you leave now that you have no body.
And you are the fingers of shadow, when night, with her dark blue body,
night who was always your friend, first shows her face and everywhere
there is snow turning blue-grey. After the thaw, across the broad fields,
in the wide shallows of the river you shiver over pebbles, melted snow
ruffling like bird feathers in wind. For a person so full of grace, your fall
was a swollen torrent, chaos dropping from rocks, and then disappearing
into the narrow gaps between stones, swooshing past and appearing
again like sculpted glass except fast, like the way you moved your body
when you danced, when you drank, when you lived, before your fall
into the sound of all these chirruping birds, who appear everywhere,
whose calls cut through slices of sky, whose song is generous as snow,
touching everything. I walk with you in these full and empty fields.
I see you in other people. One in a hundred in streets, shops, fields,
though they are too old, too young, too well to be you, appearing
so I catch a gesture of yours, a smile, another flake of melting snow.
I want to go to the too-young you and look after her fragile body,
I want to go to the too-old you and congratulate her. Everywhere
there were signs you might not make it this far. Did you finally fall
in love with your life? I want the too-well you to return like rainfall
so I can say Wow, you’re really looking after yourself. Even the fields
are celebrating. And then the inevitable jolt of you being everywhere
but not here. The river opening out into the estuary and disappearing,
water seeping away into sand after every wave. Your missing body
is fragments of stone that have stopped reflecting light. Even snow
is sometimes just an expanse of ice mixed with air. Sometimes snow
closes the world, as a goose’s wing folds after landing. I saw you fall
through cracks down into an underworld, becoming so thin your body
could squeeze into gaps between sounds, leaving you walking in fields
of silence. Without you we couldn’t hear all this noise. You reappearing
would leave no guardian for the background quiet which is everywhere.
You are wide as snow and here. I miss your body. Grasses in the fields
are like windows, so thin the light falls through. Waves keep reappearing
after seeping away. And there is still the taste of salt. It’s everywhere.
DISSENT
I’m in the car with dad
waiting for my son’s school pick up time.
Just ahead of us is a slogan
painted across the back doors of a white van:
ENGAGE INSPIRE EXCEL.
Dad tells me he read it wrong as
ENGAGE EXPIRE EXCEL
I say, It’s hard to excel when you’ve expired.
Dad says, You don’t know,
you might excel at everything.
I sit imagining my dad
excelling at all the things he hasn’t been—
an expert safe breaker, with acetylene torch and goggles;
a recovering alcoholic inspired and exploring his inner life;
an L plated woman on a hen night, unafraid to shout and cry;
a tiny mouse,
sensing every air movement with his whiskers.
I wonder, when dad dies, will his heart flutter outwards
like a small, furred moth?
Will the fur on the moth’s legs
be swept in the breeze,
like the grass in the fields
he ran through as a boy?
The fields where he refused
to take off his cap for the Lord of the Manor,
where he was disciplined for dashing past in short trousers
shouting HELLO!
when he should have stopped,
nodded slightly,
quietly said Sir, eyes averted?
Will he keep on running?
Caroline Stancer
Gorgeous .