|
previously
published in Poetry Review
in
collection Teach Yourself Mapmaking, 2006
Smith/Doorstop,
ISBN 1-902382-80-9
All my dead
The
lately-dead return in the night, balance
their
over-large heads on thin bones and ask
Do
you think I am going to die? Yes, I say, Yes.
Their
faces are crumpled like a newborn’s.
I
hear them screaming under the bed.
It
is not easy to imagine what it is like
to
exist only in someone else’s memory.
The
long-dead are quieter. They leave their toils
in
ones and twos, step up to say their names.
Sometimes
they bring a landscape with them.
Souls
of their dead infants cling to the women's skirts
like
patchy fog; even they do not remember
their
faces. Subsistence is what they care about:
they
don’t mind what you invent.
And
those not-yet-dead who know they
are
next in line, the ones with grandchildren,
make
ready, and talk among themselves about
how
someone should have photographed
the
moor before it was fenced, or haytime even:
this
is the closest they come to saying
what
they mean. Then they start to repeat themselves.
Jane Routh
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