Photographs, a collaborative diptych

These two poems represent a collaboration with a sleeping DU member, who spends his spare time writing on the sole of his slipper with a biro. The first poem is mine, the second is his.

Human Remains

We returned to the house
a time after
and mowed the lawn
and painted where
the paint had started to peel.

And somewhere in the process
we found photographs of how they looked
when they were young
and their home hadn't yet become
a mausoleum.

She wore pink crinoline on special occasions
and he wore moccasins.
She knitted while watching TV
and he enjoyed darts.
They took trips abroad to sunnier climes
and she wore shoulder pads while he
wore gold bracelets and drank Spanish beer,
her hand on his shoulder in one photograph,
the other supporting a glass of white wine.

The tissue of story between these snapshots
was not something we ever knew.
We just owned their home through
the neighbours' concern. They'd turned
reclusive in their age, had no children,
and he died shortly after she,
from poor management of his medications,
or so they said. No family came to collect.

I didn't feel right discarding them -
the photographs, I mean -
so absurdly they sit in my loft,
collecting dust as if they were my relatives.

Nain: A Self-Portrait in Libraries of Colour

She told me how once she read in colour,
Wuthering Heights was a shade of purple and yellow
Heathcliff’s hellish soul a vermillion husk.
 
In the way an apple’s colour bleeds beneath the skin,
she turned pages of Anna Karenina to
birth the woman she once was,
scarlet, black and the rusty hue of a ship’s anchor.

In the Land of Her Many Fathers
it was the Summer of 1976 and
damned sun grilled the nation’s crust.

On the day Nain was slotted into the ground
like mouldy bread into a toaster,
rain feathers brushed cemetery gates
and something, greater than loss, was opened.

Her bookshelf leant like the Tower of Pisa
unsure to stand proud or simply fall and
what we found within the leaves were
photographs as bookmarks or, maybe,
clandestine hiding places of special memories
like poem fragments of unrequited love never written.

Tracing the castles, faces and lakes
with young fingers,
little did I realise these were
the buckle of my life’s belt.

Awake in the far away,
Nain stands astride the matriarch mantelpiece.
Her eye still a knife,
cruellest seamstress
cutting photographs into
centric circles of half-truths.