ISSN 1758-6488
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Four poems Poetry |
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The Sunroom
In the hotel lobby of a Sunday afternoon, I dicker
with elsewhere. The children are going storm-wild
upstairs with two new kids from up the road.
The wine kicks in. I am listening to the spindly chords
played out by the willow’s decorative, Pre-Raphaelite hands,
but that won’t do. There is nothing here of stillness,
no borrowed play of narrative and flaw. My daughter
is tricksy and intent; my son, doughty and kind.
We are, in this half-hearted hour, some kind
of improbable answer to the world outside.
The sunroom is the porch of a Retirement Home.
They are all taken up, the still-alive, with the business
of buttons to be stitched on shirts, fish spun into thin air,
postcards, roses, the tilt of a waltz, a bookie’s stub
in an old prayer book, something to be grateful for,
like tea in a flask carried out to the field,
her white hand waving from the gatepost,
how loose her hair, how dark on floury shoulders
that she’d let him kiss like a small boy would,
on early, sunlit Sundays, in their room.
The sunroom is a crystal cruise ship in line
at the head of the bay. We are giddy and sunlit.
We relish how warmth pins us to our loungers
like a dress pattern to satin; satin to skin.
From the dining room of the upper floor,
the small talk of silverware and cut glass wisps away.
Shouts from the open-air swimming pool are spindrift
on the deck. A fashion show kicks off in the lobby,
music tinkles downstairs like a tipsy socialite.
Someone calls out, ‘Mother’. Somebody laughs.
I’m through, I think, with metaphor. The sunroom
floats nowhere; there is no other version of this
set out in the garden like a picnic table at sundown
with the napkins still folded, the food untouched.
I’m wanted; they’re calling from lives that don’t rattle
when a wind blows so the willow spells out something
on the glass that is like a name or the co-ordinates
of a moment that spoke once, but quietly, for a whole life.
Here it is, my riff and code: a creak when I stand, a ‘Yes’,
a single cough as I slap shut my notebook, move away.
