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last update: 17 Sep21

 

 

The Naming                      Last Times

 

Leaving                      Inscrutable

 

The Naming

     We are all of us held together by words,
     and when words go, nothing much remains.                      

          Martin Amis
 
It’s a little after five
and in this unfamiliar landscape
I’m watching birds I cannot name.
 
Nights here are so short in high summer
my body thinks it’s been awake for hours.
I’m still enough not to trouble
these birds I can’t give names to –
that must be some variety of wagtail
and this perhaps a nuthatch –
but what’s troubling me is
I can’t retrieve the name of the woman
I used to have lunch with
at that Italian place in Shepherd Market.
 
I know her family had a holiday home
in Aberdovey, where she’d sometimes
spend weekends, and her nickname
No Relation, but can’t recall
the reason for it. Was it
the frustration of the attempt
to summon the memory
or the early break of day that woke me?
I can see her face, recall the way
she wore her hair, and know
with ninety-five per cent certainty
that our relations were platonic
but her name is buried by the years.
 
I never knew the names of these birds
so my ignorance troubles me less
than all the names that once
came readily to my lips and cannot
now be brought to mind.
 
It starts with the names but doesn’t end there.
One by one substantives drop like leaves,
are carried on the breeze.
 
I knew a man once whose theory was
we each have our allotted count of words
and when we’ve used them all, it’s time to go.
I wonder, though, is it not that we run out of words
but rather that we lose the wit to summon them?
 
Either way, it’s the silence that endures.
 

Jeremy Page

in collection The Naming, 2021, Frogmore Press, ISBN 978-1-8380179-2-7;
previously published in The Interpreter’s House



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Last Times

I’ll never know
when she swam
for the last time –
felt salt water on skin
as she breasted the waves
one summer day
or one still evening
after a day of August heat,
my father nearby.
 
And I’ll never know
the last book she read
from cover to cover
or the last film
she really watched, or
the last time she laughed
and meant it.
 
But I’ll always know
where I was
when she breathed her last –
upstairs from where she lay,
half asleep, willing
the suffering to end,
willing it not to.
 

Jeremy Page

in collection The Naming, 2021, Frogmore Press, ISBN 978-1-8380179-2-7;
previously published in Poetry Wales



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Leaving

They are leaving.
 
Soon the house will have forgotten
the rhythm of their days.
It will no longer witness
their early morning rising,
the comings and goings
that have punctuated their lives.
 
It will not know those evenings
in dead of winter
when the lights they read by
were the only lights for miles.
 
And all they will take away
are memories – half forgotten
visits, wedding breakfasts
for marriages long dissolved,
good times, bad, indifferent –
the missing pieces
of the jigsaw they leave behind.
 
When I left for the last time
I had no reason to suppose
I would never return,
so cannot imagine
how it will feel to drive away
along the lane so often driven –
nor how they will now look back.
 

Jeremy Page

in collection The Naming, 2021, Frogmore Press, ISBN 978-1-8380179-2-7;
previously published in Agenda



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Inscrutable

When I asked her if she loved me
she told me that she’d never been to Rome.
I wondered what her favourite colour was.
She said she preferred Beethoven to Bach.
Did she eat meat, or fish, or both?
It seemed she’d never learned to swim.
How highly did she rate Virginia Woolf?
Her late father was a Man United fan.
Was she concerned about climate change?
She didn’t favour changing horses in midstream.
What did she make of Zeno’s paradoxes?
She had a brother who’d moved to Theydon Bois.
I told her that I loved her anyway.
She reminded me she’d never been to Rome.
 

Jeremy Page

published in Finished Creatures



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