A Scattering and Anniversary by Christopher Reid

Author:Christopher Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

The documents are gathered, assorted, stored.

Archivist of box files and shoe boxes,

like a miser I lift to the light and count

treasure I own but cannot spend.

This currency has been withdrawn from circulation.

Among the too few photographs of you,

your self-effacing self-portraits

pierce me with their dandyish nonchalance.

(And why can’t a woman be a dandy?)

Mirrors, shop windows, reflective surfaces of any kind,

served for these studies in the erasure of identity.

The very means of recording became your mask;

your hair, your hats, your clothes, your confronting stance—

like an exclamation mark conveyed sotto voce—

the signs by which you are known.

Sometimes you have your husband by your side,

a vague, off-centre presence.

Old doors were another subject you favoured:

eloquently weathered but taciturn

as to what lay behind them.

Memories. Weighty emptinesses. I live in a memory

the size and shape of a house.

Such was my luck that, lacking religion, you gave your ardour

to customs, ceremonies, graces

of a domestic order.

Shopping list, phone message, birthday-present label,

proxy greeting left on the kitchen table:

you told me you never threw away a scrap of my writing

without kissing it first.

When we sold the flat we had lived in for—amazingly—seventeen years,

you visited our few small rooms in turn

and out loud said goodbye to the empty spaces.

One afternoon, years later, we crossed on the stairs.

Unprompted, you announced, ‘I love our house’—

an outburst of the plainest happiness

that the high stairwell

enshrines still.

While the innumerable air kisses

we exchanged in passing

remain suspended to this day,

each one an efficacious blessing.

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