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
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
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