An anemometer tiptoes
in a nothing breeze. Allez, circulez.
Three eggcups sidewise.
A beech hedge shields
the ugly new development from sight.
An ankle thicker than a thigh.
‘It’s all ascesis, from here on in.’
A drip from the upstairs balcony
(the surplus from their geraniums)
convulses her potted lemon,
industrious thrushes turn over
every dry leaf in the shrubbery,
looking for God knows what. God wot.
The shy clang of bottles in the recycling,
a distant church bell, only which saint?
The slam of a car door – rude mechanicals –
the tiny movements of the hospice district.
Irrelevance or irritation. Meals or wheels.
The gaspy whistle of wood pigeons’ wings
and their little-brained Roo-coo-coo
anaesthetises another summer.
A bee taps against a pane.
The draught crosses from the open picture window
to the open veranda door, ‘your papers, please.’
Volunteers and a few veterans.
All weathered, yellowed, cracked.
Crimped lobelias reconstitute her blue-eyed stare.
The birch suite the colour of straw,
the furniture of a life in the future perfect.
Its half-remembered or half-forgotten stories.
Ready to go, ready to stop.
The there and the no longer there.
A panic button. Scents and smells.
A throne on the throne, an elevator in the bath.
‘The last shirt has no pockets.’
(That’s because it’s a shroud.)
The parquet and linen within.
To be here is to be her. All of it
so lived in and lived among,
so endlessly taken in by eye and ear,
a record of self-sufficiency,
historic click click no longer true.
Deeded amateur landscapes, a print
upside down, tweed linoleum in the kitchen,
a foursquare Fifties desk.
A lifelong orientation to light and colour,
optimistic as a flower, or better yet, a leaf.
Consolidated desolations.
Living on sunshine, sunshine and Baileys.
Baileys and discipline. Discipline and habit.
Habit and white grapes. Chiefly sunshine.
Her correct, quavery German.
The enunciating, excruciating visitor.
‘We go on living? Very well, we go on living.’
Send Letters To:
The Editor
London Review of Books,
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN
letters@lrb.co.uk
Please include name, address, and a telephone number.
