Curtains

Through the crack in the curtains
I dimly, without attention,
Discern that a van is reversing
And we should steer clear.

Flickering, my mournful tablet
Shows a leathery hand - old, strong,
Fingers full of music
Touching a tiny one
With love and delicacy
Met by a curious fist
Grasping for wisdom.

It's a hand I once grasped and found full
Of friendship, fun, foolishness
Skill and streetwise laughter
And the will to keep a smile going
On our absurd mirthless journey.

We giggled our way through the white peak
On a cloud of herbs
In paroxysms at the silly sound
Of exotic words like paw-paw
On our urban English tongues.
We played and sang and danced
And clocked the devil's time sheet
With wistful wasteshifts that return unsquandered
In the memories that now repay me.

We took different roads but could hear each other
Just out of sight over the hill
A crested hill, with sun on both sides
And joyful other company
Until the long descent brought our footsteps together
And we hugged. We'd never hugged before.
We'd never hug again.

He's gone to the plague that pushes us apart
Leaving only echoed happiness
And my curtains shut as though
My soul can't bear the sunshine.
Not today.

The van repeats its admonition
And I remember the same warnings
The night we had to evacuate when power cuts
Crashed the sewage farm next door
And the threat of a medieval epidemic
Secretly thrilled the history majors
While I delivered my thespian lines
In a bedsheet before boarding the bus.
That time comedy avoided tragedy
And we kept getting away with it
Until now.

Steer clear. Avoid. Stay alive.
Finally the van changes its trajectory and tune
And rumbles off.

And in this space of nothing but mindless birdsong
I can't summon the will
To open these curtains if I can't hold the world close
And laugh with it and hug with it and dance with it
Because somewhere in these things
The graphs and rates and ratios and algorithms
That divide and demean and render our humanity forfeit
Dissolve.

For now, words fail as breath expires
Meaning subsides to a hierophanic whisper
My old friend is needless and untimely gone
And our cliché lips freeze motionless paying the devil his due.
But, when we're safe,
Stay close, hear the echoes
Of the music he made
And the laughter he left
And make them ring again
So love is not lost and like the old religion
It bursts again into green shoots.
Remain unsplintered even when on different slopes
And share the redeeming sun that binds us all under one canopy.

He was my friend, and he is yours
When the curtains open up once more.