vague memories of a life remarkably ordinary

We crouch beside death
In clergy black houses
Like a full stop on cliff edge,
Salt teases the last sentence
                                                                           to erode.

Only here
Only now
Spoke to Alzheimer’s on 999
God the operator (dis)connects,
>Connects flesh to bone
Those who answer weeping.  

An island skirted by cruising waters.
The ships don’t harbour here anymore,
Lighthouse burnt into little anchor shells, stars…
…oh sell me another metaphor and I will
Summon the curled silence in housed corners.

Mother-of-pearl buttons
Cuffs hand to the phone,
Frail as wren’s rib cage on the wire
Flailed skins of sunlit leaves
Fall from tormented trees.

Calling her children from hill slides
& granite mountains, drifts of
Sifting slate, to be closest to
Beats of her memories
In a heart far away from here.

And here, aside the furthest wall
That was home once,
Flowers torn from our soil:
Walk thru’ distant fields
We are on the horizon
When you look back.

Cradle rocks the abyss -
An empty deckchair in the sun
Fingers too slender to wear wedding ring
Sing to the veiled devil at the altar.
  
This night is blackberry dark
Rotten fruit of earth’s scatterings;
Which God dismembers memory
As apples in a threshing machine?

You must
For you must
Turn to the window screen
& see Jesus waving from the night bus.
The roundabout is full of taxis.

As if the hospice waiting room wasn’t enough:
A big fucking death
A fucking great death.