The 'How well do you know someone?' poem

I like to write poems about imagined relationships, I suppose I recognise now that it's from the storytelling side of my character. This one, as I recall, came from a writing challenge set in the Dunbar Writers group. It was written in 2004, and published in Sushi & Chips (Diehard 2006).


Foundations

In an untended day

she looks for dust in his bookcase,

finds a shelf of sci-fi long past its read-by.

Idly, an old Asimov reveals

a scrawly bookmark, a letter

in a hand she does not own.

She hesitates; doubts and rights

and wrongs conflict, and are not

resolved, but fingers stretch,

and sweaty curious hands

unfold and smooth

the wrinkled paper.

Some words are blurred

and waterworn, but darling,

desperate and love are clear.

Downstairs his dog barks

at her row of flying ducks

where he wanted nuns –

his brother has them -  worse -

gnomes who moon all night

in his concrete garden.

Derek might have a desperate darling

but not her John, whose vows

she thought a deep and unacknowledged

sacrament, a layer of himself

rigid as limestone, a core value.

But now she has a key

without a lock, without a door,

an unsuspected room

in a house she thought she knew.

She folds the letter, puts it back,

leaves the cobwebs hanging

and the window unwashed.

Copyright  © Colin Will, 2006, 2016

The acting poem

This one's about acting in On Golden Pond, the first time I did it. I was actually in two productions, separated by several years, and in different drama groups, but playing the same part - Charlie the Maine mailman. I suppose I'm thinking a lot about my acting days lately, because I'm writing a series of short stories based on my career in amdram, from 1982 to 2002, as actor, director, lighting designer and general backstage helper. I loved it. Being backstage in a theatre is one of the most magical experience I know, and I never got over the thrill of it. 

This was first published in my second book - Seven Senses - published by Diehard and now available from Amazon, slightly modified, in a Kindle edition (ASIN B005FG1IU0).

The mailman cometh

(After Ernest Thompson’s On Golden Pond)

I’m listening to Copland’s Appalachian Spring

for the hundredth time or more.

It’s a fine piece on its own

but for me it also tugs back curtains

on backstage nerves and certainty.

The opening, quiet and slow,

dignity in the backwoods,

and then a jaggy dance

before the bassoon’s pipe-and-slippered serenity.

At the side of the song,

on the corners of hearing,

there’s a stringed tension

under the oboe’s yearning

and that’s a part of why I am.

That was when, each night,

the curtain opened and the play began.

I watched from the wings, never bored, breathing,

as every night the old couple entered their Maine

and groused through their first scene,

until my goofied entrance.

Their daughter was my first boy-dream,

and my only hopeless adult adulation.

When she came back with her own routemap

I knew there could have been love -I felt it -

but the freeway world’s dissatisfactions

bypassed my hick laughter;

my forest-nurtured wishing.

You could never be everyone’s everything -

the son your father wanted -

the home-wife for me -

the fiery, assenting lover for yourself.

And yet, as we played our roles,

you torn, and hating, but only self-hurting;

me the audience’s comic relief,

we really lived our paper lives

and the words became flesh,

knowing less than love,

needing more than music.

Copyright © Colin Will, 1996, 2000, 2016