KEATS HOUSE   PAGE 1  (PAGE 2)
	Titled Poems     We are Stardust     Margaret   Keat's House       Beaten Back      Kathleen Williams
	Nameless in Camden      They come to me like wraiths out of the mist, Lost, insignificant, the dispossessed Searching for their shadow mislaid or missed, Effaced from the day.  They linger oppressed Without end with the knowledge of someone Since forgotten that will not go away, They pass with only their own reflection For consolation outstaring the day, The outlandish night left there, endlessly Merging as an early oblivion And into everything they cannot see. And sometimes in dreams, in low light unshone, From echoes remembered something is heard Yet recurring mnemonic and conferred.   31st October – 6th November 2003     They trace the heel of the day forever In front, with something of a life straight from The heart as they react between after And before, held in its arc as they come And go with a truth that has come apart And a name’s echo they cannot go back To, a future that refuses to start, That stalling lies abandoned in its track. The last light of a day is all there is Left, the sudden footsteps falling away, Throbbing endlessly through the arteries Of a life on hold with nowhere to lay Its head, hollowing out a centrifuge, An open dark without any refuge.   7th – 12th November 2003     Thushari, Whose Name Means Snow    There was no warning of what was to come Just a photograph on the internet Presaging something left iconic from The day before. Now suddenly night let Fall in a seeming shower of rain, snow So light it became ignited smoke from A flameless inferno, fanned so high no Hose could put it out, stemming from the storm Upsurging and blown on a limitless Low strung wind, searing and overturning Night’s columnar structures and the darkness Of the world. Hail upended came, burning Every surface, leaving the earth downthrown, Sprawled in the haze where a dynamo shone.   29th – 31st January 2004     Hail was blown veering as something broken That could never be gathered together Again, the air was like a fan open Wide and full to overflowing after. Beneath low dull and echoing silence The distant pressure of far falling night Snow layering in the darkness as once Long ago, left in perpetual light In the foreground shadow of forgotten Dreams, where footsteps then imprinted remain As though forever lost in my mind, when A world unknown and illusory came While imagination balanced its trope, Snow laid conjuring its kaleidoscope.   5th – 6th February 2004     Killingbeck Drive   The poems had been laid aside and I Chose to leave them behind, walking away My mind breaking under the strain, the cry From within, there I stood in the midday Glare, turning each way and back, the traffic Roar magnifying, pounding in my ear, My senses recoiling in the panic Silent in my throat, the end drawn and near. I had pushed something from me yet without Knowing why, a last instinct to be free Forever of it all, while slowly out Of the hollow depths of futility, Of abandoned mute imagination, My reason for being alive had gone.   13th – 14th June 2004     There is no way I can ease the pressure Trapped in the depths and confines of my mind, There where I exist beyond reach or cure Searching for something lost I cannot find. Nothing in experience can console, My son is missing and cannot be found, The night collides and veers out of control, The day runs as mercury on the ground. I am there with you in the high-walled yard Where the tin-blue sky is a low ceiling, Your face rests on the brick surface, your guard Shields you from yourself, from the voice seething, Urging you through the fire door that begins The big bang for the residue of sins.   27th June 2003     My mother once worked in this hospital Now rearing as a low-levelled echo, A torched ruin hidden and still formal Beneath the listless mounting June shadow Of half a century of forgotten Leaf, rising green as once and verged between The nearby cemetery wall, and even As I try to retrace your steps, a dream Stalls subliminal in the shuttered drive Where I am endlessly calling your name Trying to find out if you are alive In a race against time on hold again, The circling horizon is closing in, I am unable to end or begin.   27th – 28th June 2003     Cyril lies now in his own cemetery Buried forever next to my mother In mockery of how it used to be. Helpless before them, left to remember And stunned by the sudden recollection Of it all, I turn and turn about, mute And without anything to fall back on, Experience that I cannot refute Seeps imperceptibly through the wasted Years paralysing everything I try To do. Round me from a far time gathered I thread a circle from which to defy, An unbroken line on which to rely, Pushing horizon through a needle’s eye.   28th June 2003     And legend has it that the beck ran red With blood during the Wars of the Roses, The king’s armies faced each other, gathered On Killingbeck Field, wild wheat opposes Now the chain installations of Walmart And Comet and the drive-thru Burger King, The fields of home effaced and torn apart, Their familiarity a ruin. The granite wall we balanced on has gone, Once I inched my way along its surface, Edging towards the utmost reach of stone, Unable to turn around or retrace My journey, yet paralysed at the rim Of something levelling pulling me in.   28th June – 5th July 2003     How often I am reminded to pull Myself together or casually Told the relapse will improve, yet full Of foreboding I know nothing can be Salvaged but a new unalterable Reality, a far-flung ensuing Derailment of time, ineffaceable In a mirror’s endless self-reflecting. Nothing works and the past is left to stall, To peter out in the end as I hold The impossibility of it all, While memory collapses, fold on fold, Set on autopilot right to the end, A flight path nothing can apprehend.   5th – 9th July 2003     Most of the time you hardly know I’m there, Laughing quietly to yourself you do Not need to communicate from somewhere So out of bounds to the rest of us, you Talk to God in an imponderable Language of your own making where long Lost echoes are incommunicable Even while you listen, words that belong To you alone, threading their threnody By night and day for the slow redemption Of the damned and the altered history Of a world heading towards collision. I hover at your narrative’s margin, Everything I have known is wearing thin.   9th July 2003     I stand in the supermarket trying To weigh your needs in the time left before Returning to the ward routine, crying From the depths of an unconscious world for Your mind’s ruin.  The bedraggled language Hardly anyone now can understand, A monologue nothing can yet assuage, The tardy eschatology just fanned Out like a mushroom from the livid day, The manifest apparitions of night, The voice of God that will not go away, The past tense that can never be put right. The co-ordinates of my life meet in The Sanatorium’s summer ruin.   9th July 2003     And today is an anniversary, It is the day of your grandfather’s death, There in the traffic flow on the Selby Road he struggled in vain for his last breath. Back then I cared whether he lived or died, Not knowing who my father was at all And twenty years passed me by while I tried To unravel the unanswerable, As I tried to pull myself together And to give a voice to an unasked why, My father’s illness before and after My mother’s death, was left there to deny. Half your life so far and slowly each year For fifteen years I watched you disappear.   9th July 2003     You cannot see beyond here and now, lost In a world from which there is no exit, Locked without end in a cat’s cradle crossed Far beyond thought where words don’t seem to fit Into their experience any more. They appear at random a makeshift crew Left without any echo from before, In motley adorned outlandish and new, A syntax left to reap with the hallmark Of unreality stamped through and through, A passport to a country where the arc Of horizon is always out of view, Where language exists in combat without Leave trapped in the stronghold of fear’s redoubt.   14th July 2003     Now we encounter the different hell Of remission for a while, you wander At your will for an interval, a shell Empty of who you were, with no after Echo to remind us of the time still Left behind, left in its own vacuum To resonate without meaning until Some answer can be found. The afternoon Presses down and there is nowhere to go With the weight, the endless precipitate Days stalling, veering with their domino Effect on a future that will not wait, Its void seers nearing in the July sun, My mind has nothing left to lean upon.   16th July 2003     How shall I gather these unquiet days In order to thread them on their own string, Words I never thought to hear, in a maze Amassing and beyond imagining. I tremble at the breakdown of language When association has gone too far, The false turning that nothing can assuage, The total loss of the familiar, The siren wail in the labyrinthine Passage just drawing you towards your fate, The random erosion of what was mine And the intervention that comes too late, The closed chambers of schizophrenia Locked internecine within amnesia.   16th July 2003     Even the address of the Asda chain Store still has the name of Killingbeck Drive And the day is dislocated again, Reaching back to the time you were alive. Now it is the semblance of a terrain Of wheat and poppy, still deliberate, Rearing suddenly in between in vain, And verged among buildings as though innate, An inerradicable memory Precipitate as an endless summer And as it used to be. Infinity Left to stand, to reap forever after And abandoned under tarmac, ruin Blurring on an oscillating drive-in.   17th – 21st July 2003     What would you have made of this world if you Had lived, these fields once so familiar, The long shadows of the drive you walked through In the sixties are now beyond repair, Only the blond abandon of the last Field left to stand reminds me you were there. As though to resurrect you I hold fast To the corn’s far ebb tide as I compare This high summer’s day to everything known, And with nothing to salvage but a dream Where you just went on living on your own, Your death a reality that had been Superimposed on a world turned upside Down, a world that you simply laid aside.   30th July 2003     A poem cannot be made to happen, Language comes always of its own accord At its own cost, the spirit is often At a premium I can ill-afford As I wait and then languish with the line Going nowhere and ground to a standstill, With nothing to fall back on to define Mute early echoes left unreachable And inaudible.  Imagination Is an island that existed before Its toll, its route is via depression Leaving me behind with nothing to draw From the lasting untold pressure of time, Now hurrying away with what was mine.   5th – 6th August 2003     There exists no word in the language for Parents who have lost their children, childless Is not a fit description any more Than children there yet not there, the endless, The relentless presence of their absence, Whether it be death or mental illness Or days and nights just left as they were once, Its aftermath is left to coalesce. An emptiness that will not go away, A shadow that falls forever alone Without direction or even the day To cling to, petrifying as the stone It leans upon, without any way out Of existence fragmenting round about.   19th August 2003     There are no words for the leftover state, The lock out when children have grown and gone, There is only the time in which to wait For those known once who can still abandon Each other without even a look back, Without any knowledge of the impact They will leave behind, the colossal lack Of the familiar lodged as a fact Of existence, shifting rearranging Its ground, with nothing new to hold on to, An echo always coming to nothing, Lingering in vain trying to get through And awake in dreams I am left to search, The end and the origin out of reach.   20th August 2003     Without anything left to live for I Rose up calmly and suddenly and closed The door behind me, free at last from my Own past, now wide open and unenclosed And converging exposed on the future. I had lived my life as though inside out Aware only of incongruity, While endlessly encompassed all about By inexorable disparity. Unnumbered years had become a pressure, An involuntary surrendering, A building slowly crumbling from within Long since abandoned under scaffolding, With the memory of its origin.   10th – 12th September 2003     Suddenly from somewhere in the nowhere Of my mind the lost irretrievable Years erupt, short-lived unloosened from their Holding as shadows unredeemable Effaced now from the light of their own day, Remembered in passing in falling rain The light as darkness on the surface lay, Night echoes refusing to go away. They linger for a moment once again, A fading watermark, their disarray A reality left residual Layering softly through and through after And before, avowing their survival, A mendicant language that will not scare.   24th – 26th September 2003     I heave a burden that is too heavy For my soul yet compelled endlessly here And there with the impossibility Of it all, alone and with the end near Enough to lend a hand I cannot be Any different, accustomed I breathe An airless sheer atmosphere where only The day on hold can say what I can leave Behind.  All around me night’s disarray Gathers head, I am lost in a landscape Of my own making and the time that lay Before me has gone, there is no escape From dreams as a miasma closes in Encircling me with silence fast within.   26th – 27th September 2003     I stand before the distance, the outside Of a fairground as a child looking in, The world unfolds before me, open wide And beckoning and I cannot go in, My destiny was close to the white wall And I never moved out of its shadow Flickering with inextinguishable Colours projected on the far echo Of sprawling factory neon switching Off and on, fifties letters in high night Rain etching their aftermath, igniting The low industrial glow from the light Of a bus terminus on the far side, Shadows on a wall with nowhere to hide.   27th September 2003     Nothing remains now of the person I Was, standing at the margin always, whirled To the edge of things, just a sudden cry Breaking across the span of a lost world Is all I can hear as I try to sound A stranger nearby, taking up abode Without consent within me and new-found As ‘the man of the sea’.  Under his load I stumble no longer aware of who Or what I am, while a tardy future Abandons whatever it was I knew, Leaving me to fend as though beyond cure, Imagination has taken its toll, The years a tangled weft beyond control.   16th January 2004     My spirit breaks under the coming year, It vacillates before each unknown hour, Endlessly they reach encompassed and sheer, Terminal to the edge where I cower. A single moment is sometimes more than I can bear and I am paralysed by The weight of the light, its lowering span The empty rust-coloured air as I try To make a meaning from everything known, The up-ended leftover disarray Where night is no more than the shadow thrown From a mute illusory unlit day, The stifled landscape of an early cry, The co-ordinates of a life awry.   20th January 2004     The Drive was the only way out each night And yet journeying home the next morning You must have sometimes wondered, catching sight Of your children there, about everything That might have been, how the closer you came To Nature and your country left behind, The village you would never see again In scaffolding at the core of your mind. The granite wall still enclosing after And before, stands now indestructible, You would have passed my father working there Where it verged almost on the hospital, Its inexorable reality Was the corner-stone of the cemetery.   16th June 2004     The ruins of Killingbeck have been sold Off, No Entry hoardings are fixed in place, In dreams the entrance to another world Is sealed up now, yet horizon’s first trace Will survive intact in my memory. The cure for TB was discovered here, So the hospital’s open balcony Is safe from the bulldozer drawing near, Destined to stand there in the urban sprawl A random reminder, its history Left to span real estate and shopping mall But nothing will remain of these early Thirties buildings, the sanatorium The refuge for your youth and its ruin.   19th – 20th June 2004     Only here is it possible to stand Still with space enough just to turn around, To follow again the lay of the land, An echo ebbing on the reach of sound. Rising from it all The Melbourne Clock seen Now as in the sixties as you would see It then, the hours overdrawn that had been Entailed and left outstanding, already Long overdue, within the fourfold face, Curtailed and left before you, were your own Last days, a countdown nothing could erase While you pawned the time that was left on loan. Its edifice sustains a single tree Struggling upward beneath surface ivy.   20th - 21st June 2004     I know of no validity outside Poetry and yet the frontiers keep on Changing, ever shifting, an exposed wide Distance never reaching its horizon. Seacroft that endlessly encircled me Enclosed forever within those narrow Confines, ebbing now like a slate grey sea Where the whitened shadows of history Are blown across its surface like a low Summer wind, evaporating slowly Over window glass into the empty Air, from a forgotten ordinary Day folded in the hold of memory, In the hollow depths of vacuity.   3rd - 4th July 2004     How is it possible, how shall I be Able to say what the hidden words meant Then, resonating in extremity Always, unlike time that was only lent For a little longer, it was too late, It was always too late, the stifled years Were somehow put on hold and left to wait And innate with the sum of all my fears. How much I have missed you never having Known you through every unfolding season Since then when you suddenly went leaving Me with only anger as my reason, The pain since then, the years do not abate Your quiet fate, it was always too late.   22nd June – 5th July 2004     Silently I wait in the triangle That still spans the outward rim of York Road, The fields of the adjacent hospital Once a sanatorium, form the mode Of an open ruin.  Random echoes And their stories lay now in the fallen Corridors as they ricochet through those First days like down-turned abandoned leaves when They close or hold the seared summer shadows Of the light. Yet Killingbeck Cemetery Folds its layered history as it throws Its mantle on my son left behind me, Each time I leave him lost in his knowledge And waving now as once from his college.   6th July 2004     Through sixteen months as ‘one of the damned’ you Are back in Intensive Care, ‘The Middle Man of Christianity’ as you knew You were all along, but the hospital Is the disguise for a torture chamber, Somewhere you can be poisoned on a whim. There is nowhere to go beyond after And before, you reside now at the rim Of impermanent unreality In a region still unknown to us all, I have missed your familiarity In silence since your life began to stall Beyond understanding, I search among The hours for a peace that will never come.   6th July 2004     And for forty years I have been in thrall, Subjugated to memory without Knowing anything of myself at all, Left to nurse a colossal absence out Of the depths of which there was no escape, While I walked through the shallows of my own Life, a momentum halted by its gape, Sometimes stalling refusing to give way As though my shadow was only on loan, A passing moment of the utmost day. Darker than darkness in a mirror seen, The cursive script of what the words would mean, This world was the preliminary scene For its final rehearsal in a dream.   5th – 6th July 2004     It curves silently backwards, endlessly Replicated, a mirror turned upon Itself, reflecting an entrance only Time can understand in its summation In a dream, wheat clings to the beginning Of Killingbeck Drive, high and white and out Of control, melting into rain falling Suddenly through July, while all about Me an airless encompassing future Presses into being, rearranging its load, Horizon darkens under the pressure Of a near sky, here there is no abode, No refuge to rest in, my life stalling At the entrance unable to go in.   28th July 2003     Oxford   I’ll not stand in your election again Nor nurture from another century, What lay between us then, the long-drawn pain, Poetry in its own ignominy Lost, yet buried alive in an unknown Grave and left bound about in fast endless Silence laid. From an origin unshone, Anonymity signals a distress, A Morse of airlessness between the years, The darkness since then, in dreams that survive In their scaffolding. The waste beneath sears Through the surface depths, struggling still alive For a name, for a last identity, My country has failed to take care of me. *   4th May 2004   * After Elaine Feinstein’s translation of Homesickness by Marina Tsvetayeva     Prologue   So many are the days, I no longer Belong to them and I cannot summon An echo or its momentum after For the buried words I am lost among. May is heavy in the darkened early Leaf hold of a far evening left as though At the reach of another shore, slowly Dissolving in the lengthening shadow. All night I have struggled with memory, Trying to make a meaning of it all, Weighing the years and their proximity, The distance of the future left to stall. Imagination running on empty Parrying the end and the verb to be.   12th May, 2004     Every morning now I wake to a dread Beyond imagining and a failure Of nerve enough for the silence ahead, Something of infinity and its lure Is still confined in me, yet encompassed Round about are words that cannot get out, With an origin that was meant to last And a language I have to live without. In dreams I remember another time In memory’s firmament aligning As a far lodestar, a forgotten rhyme Held fast in chains of my own defining. I exist now only as a shadow, As an echo refusing to let go.   13th May, 2004     Epilogue    All day I have been compelled to explain Myself, driven as though to the utmost Hilt, the mute words to justify a pain Which has become detached from language, lost Somewhere in the nowhere of distant grey Stars lusterless now, dipped down and darkened Beyond counting. The ordinary day Loitering at their rim between the end And its origin, random, with nothing New to bring but the seasons seen as wind Held over glass in moments effacing In passing.  Only silence can rescind Itself in the vacuum of being, From what is left behind beyond seeing.   6th June 2004     Nothing makes any difference, the page Unwritten is a dull echo empty In the far distance of a worn-out age Yet old before it has begun, vainly I wait helpless before my own shadow, Wondering without end why the words won’t Come.  Nothing lasting seems to hold, although Each utmost day breaks into it all, burnt Out with the locked dreams they are lost among, Hours left to loiter as though on a street Corner, with the residuum of some Thing left undone, a place where pathways meet, A space for time to turn around instead, Somewhere for the spirit to lay its head.   12th June 2004     Martyr’s Memorial    This is no city for crying within, There is no lasting harbourage to be Had, here, there is only the outer rim Without a footnote for posterity. I am the crowd at the back looking in, A journeyman or just someone for hire, Casually caught by chance in the din The utmost sound of a funeral fire Reaching from hell even up to heaven Where smoke breaks charred orange from a pale sky. And yet that these late mouths should cry open,* And in The Great Tradition what am I But something the world cannot understand, Poetry and protest go hand in hand.     For nine months I sat in Wellington Square Trying to forget my time at Magdalen Nine years before in Oxford’s first winter. By the Epiphany I had again Come to the end, just worn out not thrown out As before when the police were summoned To Magdalen’s locked door, I was led away, Put away in a prison cell that day And my life once more left to run aground, How had it come to this, yet bound about With poetry, its mute echo after, I tremble whenever I remember The police then, accused and in trouble, Each day I walk to the Memorial.   7th July 2004   * from Poppies in October by Sylvia Plath            The Fordwych House Protest           The Darkest Rim   My destiny was to be turned away, Rudely pushed back always to the furthest Edge, the darkest rim of the livid day Wherein I dwell without purpose or rest. Yet I have seen great sycamore leaves turn, Closing like fingers on their own surface, Exposing whitened hands of paper thin Drained skin, holding something fast as they brace Before an onslaught, an upsurging storm, Clenched and deliberate and as though they Held everything vestigial locked within. Long after this day's vanishing away Look for me in the shadows, I exist Only as the pariah in your midst.   19th August 2004   WE ARE STARDUST for Drs Doris Lister and Peter Raven                     Part 1   They say that poetry does not matter Anymore, that the sound of the spirit And its reality can no longer Be heard, even to the utmost limit Of its jeopardy and joy, lost among Contingency and circumstance, a lay Leftover from another time, a song Echoing yet mutely falling away. I shall be left to the silence after, The end unknown and with nowhere to go, Measuring the metre from a whisper To an audience of my own shadow, And from somewhere deep inside the heart’s core, Nothing seems to matter anymore.   22nd March 2005     All day I have struggled with the lost years, Random residual hours, a lament In makeshift time, my mind a storm that veers Over the void, mute moments that were meant As smoke to flare for a while or to pall Suddenly in sunlight to a pale sky. The emptiness is interminable As darkness that on the surface lay, I Don’t know who I am and the rehearsal Is almost over, the lines have been laid Aside and they cannot help me now, all I am is but a shadow left to fade. We are stardust charred with the sound of us, Echoes levelling and incongruous.   12 – 13 April 2005      I want to tell you about the morning When my mother left her home behind her For the last time, she just sat there crying Transfixed in silence before my father Who refused to give her the money for Her fare for the bus to the hospital. She had heard these words many times before And yet this was something different, all She remembered had converged on the end Where I stood paralysed trying to face Her, everything I had come to depend On was as darkness left on the surface Of the livid day, now there was no time Left and my mother was no longer mine.   13 April 2005     And I sensed she was quietly screaming As she stared straight ahead at my father The late September morning was streaming With fast held shadows abandoned after. None of us guessed the truth that only she Knew but my father had already been Told, we moved in slow motion and hurry While measuring the distance in between One life and another. She did not move Yet the door was open to the outside, Its narrow span was all she knew of love, Just left ajar or standing opened wide, When a taxi was summoned by someone She had passed at last through its horizon.   13 April 2005     The help that had been so long in coming Had come too late to save her, there was no Time left now just a few days outstanding, The jettisoned echo of tomorrow. When I try to remember the language Used for the mockery of her spirit, The incoherent inordinate rage  That he used to summon to its limit, I cannot breathe, caught in the cat’s cradle Of it all, there where I turn about this Way and that with only a syllable Count to sound each silence left in stasis, Her mute reply was the secret refrain Found etched below the surface of night rain.   13 – 16 April 2005     How I long to be able to pull free And to lay aside her daily sorrow, The nights without end when she had to flee In fear of her own pursuing shadow, In flight from the footfall hurrying near, Random his clamouring far-flung echo Veering between us and before and sheer As the neon darkness of tomorrow. The streets would encircle us one by one In a secret maze of their own making Where the sodium glare of lamplight shone On an orange concrete morning breaking, Things unsaid and left too far off to say, Fugitive as grey stars along the way.   16 – 17 April 2005     How easily I lose the tightened thread Lost in a broken weft unravelling, Strands trailing out of time and ungathered And imperceptibly diminishing. April rain seeps among the listless drained Levels layering the fallen poplar Leaf dark in its own light and scrolling waned, Its burnt umber rusting into paper. And I have become unfamiliar Even to myself, the words are not mine Anymore, just purloined by amnesia Lodging now between memory and time, Only through language can I be near you, Always in silence in the streets you knew.   17 – 18 April 2005     Only through language can I be near you, Abandoned days that break from the cordon Of loss, inexorable nights that drew To the end beyond imagination. Even as a mirror self-reflecting, There fifties neon signalled your despair, An echo darkened and emblazoning Flickered intermittent across the air. No one knows how you hid your pain never Letting any of it out, a secret You kept to yourself, a way out after With a single ticket one way and yet You took your leave of us in the same way, Too afraid to say where the country lay.   18 – 19 April 2005     Only three days before, we had both gone To see about a room, to see about The way out from a life that had become Unmanageable, she would leave without Saying where she was going but he knew. From nothing would ensue the usual Unforgettable trouble for the few Days left remaining, not a syllable Had she been heard to utter, not even When he tried to besiege her before she Made it to the door, nothing could soften His last intended impact, the many Times casually waylaid on her own, Left to walk the nights she had always known.   26 April 2005     How much did she know that Tuesday night one Month before her death, silent beside me After Mary had let her down, no one Knew what you were about to do as we Slowly returned by the way we had come, Until we reached the cross road, the very Route we had chosen before had now gone, It was as though we were permanently Lost, only a torn note left on her door Had any meaning, for you there was none, Will be wait for want to written before And then left for us to find. We had gone For nothing but the key was left behind For the journey to the unconscious mind.   15th May 2005      Always the silence, the mounting pressure Of silence which you kept so tightly wrapped Within and now beyond the reach of cure Or anything for you to cling to, trapped Within your last moments before my eyes, Left to watch you drown, mute and paralysed, To stand stranded on the banks of Lethe And without anyone there to go with You, quietly crying for your children For the last time, beside yourself with them, Still trying even then to hide the pain Knowing your silence had been held in vain, From the cemetery flowers that he gave, You would know too soon he would dig your grave.   15th May 2005     Whatever murderous thoughts were in his Mind that last morning, he had already Killed you many times before, the crisis Was that you could not know until then and Now it was too late and there was no time Left just to say goodbye to your children For whom you had gone without for so long. The endless silence for us to belong A little longer and for you to be Our mother for another day even One more morning, the silence that was mine, The exit I would never understand, There was nothing left with which to defy, We were too afraid to speak or to cry.   14th 15th May 2005     You were as one overwhelmed by this world, Nothing that was done was meant to hurt us, You just kept your agony in and told No one, yet gentle and incongruous Right to the end, with nothing to explain Anymore even to yourself, taken Over suddenly by the intense pain Of carcinomatosis which by then Was inoperable as you well knew. We had seen this so many times before But you never let us in, only through Silence could you get to the other shore Of the place you were in without letting Us know, or that this was your last morning.   14th May 2005     God’s Little Nothing or so you became And by the time you got to your last year You already belonged to another World, you struggled with your usual day Hand-in-hand with death and yet as though they Were still ordinary, the growing pain Was something suffered and softly offered Up to God but the end was drawing near. The future or what would happen after Was not in your thinking, you would not be There then, on the matter of time you said Nothing and the past was once your country, Home where you could be as a girl again, Not this place where your life had been in vain.   14th May 2005     The end was something I could not amend And for the rest of my life I would be Told to pull myself together, the end Was simply put on hold, reality Would become what was left, you had become In your own effacement by your own hand As an undisclosed suicide by stealth, Yet unriveting your soul from yourself You worked while the secret cancer grew and You went leaving us completely without, An accident of circumstance among So many that left you with no way out, And in disarray we were your children And we loved you more than your own God then.   13th May 2005     The end is bound up with what I have known, It threads itself around me endlessly As a cocoon out of which I have yet To break, as though from my own shadow thrown, It pulls me in and will not let me go. That morning is conjured out of nothing Before my eyes, before it has even Begun, its volume fills the void, welling Wide open with curtailed infinity While the end assails me, sure as a debt Outstanding, her life was a wager thrown, Her soul was subjugated long ago. Trapped and wrapped inside my own chrysalis Language bound about beats in its stasis.   12 – 13 May 2005                             Part 2   What my father said is now too painful To remember, I only dare to go There in dreams, generated words that will Not settle and that possess no echo Of their own, my mother took them with her Knowing they would last for the rest of her Life, as she quietly found the exit, And without alert the way out of it, Something about a slow and painful death, A bull’s-eye, the target he could not miss Uttered every time until her last breath. They circulate now in their own stasis, I would become their leftover echo Left in the panic to rock to and fro.   11 – 12 May 2005     But there was no answer to my echo Mute in the emptiness of a darkened Room, in the fierce sun where could I go Without you, with only the verb to be For the span of a bridge across the end, Left to exist forever in her place, To turn about without identity, Your memory etched below the surface Of its effacement, inexorable As your silence, its resounding volume Now an open fan unalterable In the rain of an April afternoon. I became a poet to hear your name Answering once in the distance again.   11th May 2005     But what was she like, my mother I mean, And there was nobody there to answer, It was as though you had never been seen Before and your death just forgotten after, Your name once was Kathleen and that was all You amounted to and failed to explain. Sometimes in the empty rooms I would call Out your name as though as a child again, Waiting to hear my own name given back To me in vain, left waiting to belong As your daughter once more and with the lack Of the familiar in all that’s known, Merged shadows with nothing to lean upon, Left immaterial in dreams unshone.   10 – 11th May 2005     I exist at the mercy of my mind, Now unable to foresee even a Moment of the time that is left behind, Known and yet foundering in amnesia, Left to struggle with a life of its own, Eroding within its appetency, Memory lost and found as once, then torn From the shadow of anonymity. In a race against time how shall I come To the end again and for the last time Write it down, the years I am lost among, Salvaging something once from what was mine, Always the pressure, the unwritten page, The unlit ruin I cannot assuage.   9 – 10 May 2005     Then death became a familiar guest, As a salesman at the door, urgent yet Softly spoken, and leaving you no rest From his entreaty you quietly let Him in, the ventriloquist for your voice Miming then the final dress-rehearsal. And after, was there ever any choice, Held within his fast inextricable Grasp, surrendering to the random chance Of time and the end for your mute way out In a last accident of circumstance. I failed to find out what you were about, For I knew only what I did not know Faltering beside you in your shadow.   7 – 8 May 2005     For a few minutes before my visit To your grandson, I stare from a window At the entrance to Killingbeck Drive, it Now lies in ruins and the double row Of close spreading horse chestnut trees has gone. Did you stay because once you were a wife, Something to do with duty, the question Has the sudden capacity to stun Me while I search in silence through your life, Left looking for something I cannot find And there in your own imagination Preventing you from leaving him behind, Was your heart put on hold from the time where Once falling snow was curling in his hair.   7th May 2005     Nothing can encompass what you endured As my father’s delusions tore you from Yourself, even from your shadow, immured As you were with your four children among The days and nights of your leftover youth Brought to an end too soon, with no warning Of a time to come, when dismantled truth Left as the only thing continuing, Would be the only refuge I would know. Back then how did I manage to forget You, a slow imperceptible shadow Effaced and just felled from the day, and yet There was no chance, it was always too late, The world around you left you to your fate.   5 – 7 May 2005     It comes to me suddenly and in dreams, In hidden flashback what was happening, Day by day where nothing is what it seems, It is the only thing continuing. I never heard him call you by your name Except when the police were there the night Before, then over the hours you became Nameless and helpless and left in his sight, We grew accustomed to him calling you Woman, the times you would be told to pull Yourself together there in the onslaught, The nights of your life, inexplicable Now his own throwaway line for your death, Uttered every time until your last breath.   5th May 2005     Always the silence, the endless silence And such as I hardly know where to go With it all, left in another time once, With my own silence now as an echo Of your own. Such a space was left behind That it is still impossible to fill With words and how it was, how shall I find Myself when I amount to no more than The end, something left interminable And written down as though from memory, From a template going back further than Choice or chance, before their contingency, The pressure is unbearable and I Cannot contain the silence of your cry.   9th May 2005     Your last morning was put on hold while you Said goodbye to your children for a few Moments, at the furthest reach of your mind, There you shook the hand of your youngest son, Too afraid to love or leave him behind, ‘Michael take care of yourself’, your reason Was your paradigm and a short life spent Trying to keep us with you a little Longer while hiding the truth, the silent And inexorable fact of it all. I used to dream that you were still alive, Choosing to live by leaving us in time, Your secret let you feed us and survive, Living as a mother no longer mine.   30 April 2005     There are no records left they have all been Destroyed and it is as though you never Existed, nothing has changed, you are seen Every day, momentary as you were, In the closed kaleidoscope of my mind, Aligned within a mirror’s corridor Out of the scattered fragments left behind Washed up from the sepia at the core Of time, I calibrate your spirit in My mind’s eye. Across the neon terrain, Off and on and through the unceasing din, Mayday your warning was signalled in vain, Clutched in the hand of the only witness, The unacknowledged Morse of your distress.   29 April 2005     Known yet unknown and still I turn about Torn apart between these polarities, Where can I go, left to follow without Even looking back, the interstices In time through which she moved just amounted To a single day, the span of the pain To come, so casually encountered At the door of the night before. In vain, Your whole life was lived dying with the pain, Your last years spent in silent surrender To cancer the secret you kept in vain, Pain with a life of its own long after, The surface darkness on the livid day, And all your children left in disarray.   28 April 2005     So much about you must remain unknown Forgotten long since somewhere in Ireland Just a few momentary years no one Wanted to remember, abandoned and Thrown away in another century, My heart is still bewildered by it all. Your legacy was your own mystery And to this day it holds me in its thrall And there is no answer to the echo Of your spirit, it will not go away. I falter with the nights you were to know, Knowing you would not live to see the day Or watch your children grow, caught in a trial Of words, trying to raise us for a while.   28 April 2005     As a poet I have to get it right And as her daughter once I have no choice, The unwritten lines are beyond my sight, Yet as the ventriloquist and his voice So I have to wait for the words to come. My life seems to have been about the end These were key words just scribbled at random, The end was something I could not amend, Known for four hours only before she died. I was running across the Melbourne field From rhythm hidden with nowhere to hide, Giving voice to knowledge so long concealed, Running with my own primordial cry ‘She’s going to die, she’s going to die.’   26 – 27 April 2005     And that was the end of everything known, There in a field without any warning, Breathless in the October wind, alone With the evening and another morning. There was not enough time to say goodbye, That night it was not my turn to visit, Pounding in my ear was the final cry Of a lost deracinated spirit. There was no one to go with her and how Would she go alone without anything In the dark, left there and penniless, how Would she pay the boatman, what could she bring Instead as the barter for her journey, Where could she go left standing on the quay.   27 April 2005     All there was left to do was to follow You however many years it would take And of so little use to anyone, That only the stars below their surface And unseen waning had any meaning For me then, when morning would break its banks Precipitate among their scattered ranks Flickering deliberate and in vain Or in darkness scuttled in shallow rain, So many so few the resonating Stars left to efface your earliest trace, Echoes now unshone I am lost among In dreams, in front in flight and for your sake Quietly beckoning me to follow.   25 April 2005     MARGARET   ‘I am tired of fighting… I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.... From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.’ –        Chief Joseph, Leader of the Nez Percé                                                   Part 1   The end remains and who knows what to do With it, leftover as though by chance from Another century, where do I go From here, watching rain slowly falling through May’s marble darkness, when I hardly know Where to belong anymore. A poem Has to find its own way out of the years It is lost among, while the evening seers Into a last light, aluminium Among leaves and the wind’s rhythm, what am I, bound about in a closed vacuum My life thrown to one side, an open fan, I too am nothing, in the strands of time, From slanting depths the surface stars were mine.   16th – 19th May 2005     Yet I have never felt before such an Intense hesitancy, afraid even To put one word in front of another, For fear of it all collapsing into Itself, and I stifle under the end As it rears up suddenly from nowhere, Mute with my silence in a cavalcade, A mimicry with a garish motley Worn, assailing me with my destiny And my ruin, echoes in between, made Out of nothing in the unending span Of a dream, and all I amounted to, My mother’s spirit unable to fend Torn from her shadow in the darkness then.   18th – 25th May 2005     The world is being swept away around Me and death is standing on the corner Casually loitering with intent, Waiting for me to try to calmly pass By, how can I turn about without him Noticing, when the future is not an Option and when I have not reached the end, There is something that I have to attend To and I cannot put it right, its span Is but a spent candle I cannot trim Anymore, a silent spirit that has No refuge, a fugitive never meant To be heard, in its own meltdown after, A low flame eternal in which I drown.   21st May 2005     The tree before me has broken under The strain of its own weight and now it trails A fallen canopy along the ground, Outlandish in its young ignominy And sheered white into the bark exposed where The branches fell. The throwaway day fails And May light flares its last over London, I turn away from the Thames which holds no Interest for me now, without even Looking back, as though another country In which I am homesick and no longer know Myself, nothing lasts long enough around Me, only memory and now and then Something left infinitely lost and won.   22nd May 2005     It hurts as though I’m reliving her loss All over again, and I shall never Get used to people who were once just there And now are not, as if they had to cross Into another world and as they passed Too soon, they suddenly forgot to wave. It is we who are left behind to crave For the little that was left or the last Remembered stumbling in the dark without Anything to light the way, with nothing But random misalliance remaining, The casual certainty and the doubt That will not go away, the life we lend And borrow from diminishing the end.   25th May 2005     I dreamed that life was an elevator Halting in an infinitesimal Space to let someone get out, I felt it Come to a standstill momentarily, A sudden momentum in makeshift time, Through a world of make-believe, descending In its own oblivion, pretending. Yet nothing really mattered anymore, Each of us stood alone carrying all That we were, with no room for the spirit To inhabit, trapped between memory And the moment that nothing can confine, Among so many, clutching what was mine, In suspension in the lift-shaft of time.   25th May 2005     Why does the spirit try to surrender When prisoners are not being taken, When there is nothing left to remember The world by in a last look backward then. Is it the spirit’s own longing to be Free, encompassed round about, the tenant With a lease for life in the memory, Something unchanging and yet attendant Even to the end when the mind is no Longer recognisable in the form It once was, what is it that we don’t know When the body from its shadow is torn, Precipitate the isolate desire Thrown on the chance of circumstance for hire.   25th – 26th May 2005     It is the emptiness nothing can fill That will propagate with infinity In time, and that meanwhile begins to spill Full to the brim with the end already Installed awaiting a cataclysm That will turn language into the silence Of itself, there in a locked room, rhythm Into the hull washed up on a shore once. And we are left with the silence after, The echo through time, a forgotten tongue In a Babel of its own making, where Speech was the wreckage it was lost among, What happened in the interval between The end and its enactment in a dream.   26th May 2005     What happened in the light of a shuttered Room filtering the breaking May morning, The heavily laden storm that augured No good and that would end without warning. The utterances, at once disparate Yet fast locked, held in their own momentum, There for the world to realise too late. The carousel would become an omen For fixed horses soundlessly galloping Before the silence of eternity, The semblance of an enmeshed sky arching On birds in flight in an aviary, The audience at the last scene, left there Only to wonder endlessly after.   31st May – 2nd June 2005     No one can imagine in the present Tense the last moment of someone driven To the edge, the life that was only lent For a little while, failed to break even. Silence that was to descend just before The end, was already apocryphal, While the day converging on a locked door Would be seen forever through sepulchral Smoke, yet etched indelibly in the mind. The frozen panic of cataclysm, The past left with nothing to leave behind, The future, the vacillating rhythm Of the heart’s last countdown right to the end, The unending sleep nothing would amend.   2nd – 3rd June 2005      The hours beforehand were now converging On themselves, and whether time was counted Or forgotten, the date was emerging That would be all a person amounted To, when about to die by their own hand. When anger and love are in tandem With each other, they cannot countermand Or just pull back from choice or the random Chance of circumstance, sudden and awry, Then is the spirit silent and averred Left at the mercy of time and the cry For help always unheeded and unheard, The last unwitnessed ceremony for A world on the other side of the door.   3rd June 2005     How many times would the final moment Be re-enacted in the mind, only To fall back again to a time not meant For the end and then its reality After. What failed to make the difference Before the shortfall remaining, between The day’s deliberate effacement once And the familiar that might have been, Was it something to do with the spirit Quietly falling silent in the din, A leave taking calm and precipitate Unfaltering in its timelessness, in The fast locked last roulette of hit and miss And memory suddenly come to this.   4th June 2005     That it should come to this, in the chaos Behind your door that stood against the world, Forced and fallen and open on the loss Of a life unattended and untold And left in the guise of Ophelia Before us, drowned and entering the flame, A cocoon, a blossom-strewn nirvana And with only a familiar name, Without even an echo to adhere To, or a tardy note to leave behind, Locked as a shell rocked to and fro the sheer Flow and ebb of a tide trapped in your mind, The more you struggled the more you were caught, While flights of angels occupied your thought.   5th June 2005     Is it love or anger after that drives The self towards the end or the simple Act of just letting go, so many lives Lost and yet each irreconcilable, With a past beyond repair, a future, Fast-forward, or on rewind to the end. What is it that is beyond reach or cure Or anything that this world could contend, Could it be the vacancy after joy Has gone, with a To Let sign for ever There, or memory left as an alloy Of something known and now beyond compare, Yet its loss the colossal loss that knows The emptiness a mirror’s image shows.   6th June 2005     It is the emptiness inside that kills By degrees, before the unfaceable, Staring out at something unseen that wills The spirit to a last immutable Flight path and now locked on autopilot As it jettisons and sheers away from Its own habitation, precipitate Yet spiralling then into the unknown. The spectacular cartwheel from the sky That fell unnoticed on a busy day, Without warning or any exit cry, With night coming on in the disarray, The frantic search through the locked isolate Hours where fate had knocked already too late.   6th June 2005     It is the world that has come to an end, Its equilibrium and its orbit Awry with a malaise nothing will mend, The desperate and fallen, the spirit Left to contend with a future that is Not negotiable. Margaret forlorn Succumbing alone to her last crisis And left in her home with nowhere to turn, Pleading for the time she could ill afford, Forced into the only resolution, Left to cry at the door of a closed ward Too afraid to ask for an admission, While booked one way for an unknown country Without any luggage for the journey.   7th June 2005                            Part 2   If the right words exist I cannot find Them, within I am as a volcano Erupting, she was one of my own kind, Someone of like mind and she had to go Down as a casualty of her own Folly, and yet she amounted to so Much more, an unexpected death alone, Its consummate reality like no Other, she was known to us as Margaret. Silence seemed to become her only friend At the end, with an urgency she let Takeover that she might herself transcend, Collaborating with a new found mute Anonymity she could not refute.   8th June 2005     Margaret, like Christine before her, became A brief episode in the theatre Of sudden death in Camden with the same Pass through internal review thereafter. Nothing was done, nothing would ever be Done yet the patients kept on dying by Their own hand, pushed towards extremity With nothing more to be done but to die Waiting there for help that would never come, Left to beseech for a hospital bed Which for some would be permanently full, They lay abandoned in their homes instead, At the mercy of crisis teams, a cull Subliminal and as such it was done.   9th - 10th June 2005     Words break under the weight of their burden, She was left there completely overwhelmed, Her last scene with Christine before her then, On rewind in her mind as it was filmed. That they might never be effaced again And in the cold light of day as the world Hurried past unstartled and unheeding On its way, abandoned they stood alone With nothing left that they could call their own Except for the manner of their dying, As the slow cold intangible scarves curled Around them, their shadows left with their name, Unlit without echo in the mind’s eye, The future to measure and judge it by.   13th June 2005     There was no help forthcoming, not even Hope for one more day or another hour, Everything had ground down to the time then And silent shadows in which to cower. Mortal smoke would engulf every crevice Of the slow turning locked room, with a pall Impossible to see through, its soft vice The hold of low flame, as the natural Day was obscured and left beyond reach or Cure, with time enough then for you to fold Back as a girl again down to the core, Without any meaning any more, curled Up with the end unwritten, passing through, Silently leaving the world behind you.   13th June 2005     You would have read To be, or not to be, Preparatory in a time before, Pondering inevitability Or accidental death behind your door. Who can say if you followed Sylvia The first day of a week you could not face, You could quote by heart from Ophelia And like her would vanish without a trace. And always the hours, yet you knew full well When Virginia entered the water, Literary to the last, you would tell Her that your death would mirror her’s after, Was it a cry for help we shall never Know, a life too soon you were to sever.   14th June 2005     In your own way you were a campaigner For justice and equality for all People, and I never heard you utter As a Pharisee, you were a loyal Friend wondering at us all to the end. You would read aloud with rapt attention, No one intruded on your narrative, Once when you read about the Indian Chief who had resigned himself to fight no More and to look for his children among The dead, someone entered to then offend, A lapse in manners you could not forgive. Blaming the staff for Christine’s death, and none Other, you would follow in her shadow.   14th June 2005     In the countdown to the end there was no Time to draw from or to turn about in, Suddenly overtaken and as though Mutely diminished in the clamouring, As you just gave in to necessity For nothing while trying to imagine What it was you knew, the transparency Of smoke welled within slowly dissolving The real thing trapped there before time after, Parrying as Hamlet with your own name While you invoked angels for an answer And left To be, or not to be, in vain, Lured unsuspecting to the terminal Silence of the end beyond your last call.   14th June 2005     The stories abound but the crisis team Came to your door first thing in the morning And they found it closed, this could only mean That you were out or heavily sleeping, It took the rest of the day for something To happen and by that time you had passed Away, the rest of the day unfolding In the nightmare narrative of your last Stand. The police were to break down your door At four on a storm-laden afternoon, Just a month into sixty-three and your Voice as a poet just beginning, soon To be heard, not as a muted echo, But as Margaret, someone we used to know.   14th June 2005     What was it about the door, you could so Easily have left it open, was it Closed in order that you could not follow Your heart’s instinct to survive, the spirit Would be trapped there after, locked in with you, Left alone with its own mortality To face the crew as they rudely burst through, The door would have saved you from your folly. It was your one last stand to make the world Finally understand, you had to try To end your life to get your story told, The isolated dark of the day, by The light of your life you wanted to cry, To draw or yet to write and not to die.   15th June 2005     And yet you would have known from Sylvia That Monday morning about the margin Of error that comes in to play with a Vengeance customary and still within The timescale converging on a crisis. Was it a last pitched gamble that went wrong Or were you left there on your own, it is Too late, Margaret was made to wait too long And abandoned in the heart of Camden To die and by her own hand just to get Things done, to persuade someone to listen, That no one be refused, their needs unmet, With nothing but the spirit and its fee, Left to loiter on the banks of Lethe.   15th June 2005      When I try to think about the seven Hours it would eventually take to Rescue you, I feel the panic even More, the endless hours it would take for you To be allowed to die and with no one To stay your hand, the locked door your bitter Response to the hospital doors closed on You, as the tablets took effect after. While you waited for them to suddenly Come, to break their way in before the end Could begin but you would not live to see It happen, abandoned and left to fend, They were to say you died around midday, They knocked first thing then simply went away.   16th June 2005     You should have been in the day hospital Or on a ward which is where you wanted To be, not this sudden political Destiny, the ward off limits instead. You were never forgiven for Christine Blake, you gave it to the managers straight, A death by hanging when she should have been Observed, discharging herself to her fate, You let them have it, holding a mirror To Medusa and turning them to stone. You fought for art therapy from the core Of your being, not for yourself alone, Yet you were blind to discrimination, They let you die believing they would come.   16th June 2005     Margaret had been told she was ‘becoming Too dependent on the day hospital,’ Yet an assessment date was pencilled in After her death, this setback was crucial, The statement would lead directly to an Overdose and her subsequent death by Default, the unmentionable life ban On any acute admission, awry And still in place after. The crisis team Killed her by knowingly dragging their feet, By withholding a bed, and like Christine Before her, left to accomplish her feat, Her recent warning attempt had been scored As nothing and the last one was ignored.   16th June 2005     You were suffering from anxiety, You knew the end was near, three years ago Everything went wrong and it was simply A matter of time from then, the shadow Of Christine Blake was now the nemesis And template for future care in Camden, Subsumed under the aegis of crisis Team remedies, with only the garden And art therapy a fleeting refuge For us all. Back then, against all reason, You were discharged home to face a deluge, You would overdose there in the flood on Amytriptaline, your spirit broken, And found by random chance and awoken.   17th June 2005     You began to cry when you were reading Dismantling Fordwych House, you knew by then It would all be swept away and nothing Would remain after but a barred Eden, What was coming in its place would not touch The surface, yet the new reality Was final, its weight was certain death, such Was the shortfall after the remedy Of care on the cheap, the crisis teams all We were worth, with a fast track to the grave If they got in. The pity of it all, The hunger strikes, the protests, what you gave Just to keep a day hospital going, With nothing but your death for the showing.   17th June 2005     She was to be left alone to manage A life full of perpetual sorrows And nothing after can ever assuage This, but your dreams will sound through the hollows Of their minds in the certainty of things To come. You gave your life for the future, For art therapy and for what it brings, You were given the crisis team to cure Your imaginings for a little while, Like the Chief you gave up, resolved to fight No more, unable to go the last mile. Out of hearing and always beyond sight, That willing compromise of mental health By arbitrary proscription and stealth.   16th June 2005   Note: The author met Margaret Walsh (3rd April 1942 – 9th May 2005) at Fordwych House in the late 1990’s.     My Soul’s Garden   Welcome to the silver gates Made from a thousand spirals, Welcome to the stream, the toad on the rock; The stepping-stones to comfort, Tenderness and a loving angel presence.   Why do I let other people Distract, disturb me, turn me From my passionate purpose? Why do they laugh When they should weep With the grief of it? The pain of not loving Or, of only finding love At the bottom of a well With a bucket that is broken.   Thirsty for love and water I search my soul’s garden: Where all but a few things Have been destroyed. Who has done this? Who? The Beloved? Why would She demolish everything Except this shining stream?   Here on the bank Is the cup of connectedness; I shall take a sip And taste our loneliness.   Margaret C. Walsh February 2005     KEATS HOUSE for Jeremy Reed                           Part 1   When I was last at Wentworth Place, the end Of my life had then already begun, Ill met there yet lingering it happened To be, with all that I was, left undone. Trapped between two poets, lasting silence Summoned me to a place I was not meant To see, unlit and planetary, where once My mother took her leave of me, intent That I should follow as I’d always done To the end as once and with her again When there was nothing left to call my own But Keats alone and unknown and now in vain. Jeremy, I wanted to say goodbye Imaginary there as I passed by.   8th – 9th January 2006     Death came back again after fifty days A collaborator familiar Threading a tightened string, the hours always Of my own making are held in their far Alignment, stemming from a source that tolls With the low vowels of every moment, That rears with the sound of scaffolding poles Suddenly round me, hurtling in descent From the shell of a building left within, About to fall, a structure left open Only to the dark, to the years coming To nothing among their silence since then. My life breaks against a century’s sound And runs as mercury along the ground.   26th – 27th February 2006     If only I could have told you about The snow that morning, so high it was and So impossible to see, there without Warning appearing and as though the sand In an hourglass had been turned round, nothing Mattered but the moment and a window To the sky and a mist over Hampstead That no imagination could borrow From, that the snow just fell through, vanishing, Much the way you were to do one mayday Afternoon, left to squander life away, The far side of suicide. From a bed On the liver ward, Margaret, yet so soon, I had not thought to follow you so soon.   28th February 2006     What a time it is here, forever left As the simple residue from before When I walked through an unlit night bereft, The random darkness of another shore Relentlessly yet quietly pulling Me in, leaving no opportunity To say goodbye and homesick with longing For the end I thought had eluded me. That it had come to this and without my Knowing why, was I too weak to resist Its plea, and already overwhelmed by Then, I had already ceased to exist, While slowly encompassing amnesia, Turning bound about eyeless in Gaza.   12th February – 1st March 2006      But the building had already fallen And it lay around me as a ruin From the past, sprawling plundered and open To the sky and even in its crumbling It was the only thing remaining, as A shadow briefly flickering, clinging To the dark, where suddenly I trespass On my dreams, dispossessed and lingering, With night coming on and nowhere to go And the recollected hours a burden Of ceaseless whispers, an unstill echo Yet resounding thrown from its own Eden, A serfdom where meaning is what is meant And remembered in the heart’s arraignment.   9th March 2006     And yet I could not remember Hamlet So casually known and left behind As something synonymous with Margaret And her death lodged forever in my mind. Was I preparing my own funeral While to be, or not to be was being Weighed, balancing there the impossible Burden that time had laid on me, fleeing To and fro from the utmost task, its last Reluctant reality and the day, As a bird in an aviary held fast In flight as darkness on the surface lay. There was no way out of the need to bend Time to an apparition of the end.    10th March 2006      However long it takes I shall never Understand how easily suddenly Life breaks against itself, left forever An inaudible answer, a slowly Surging and imperceptible ebbing In the dark, a warning signal too far Out for anyone to reach. Only in The faltering is the familiar Made known, a collaborating passion Deliberate yet hellbent on the end, The mind’s endgame when everything has gone, Time alone on standby left to attend, Random the tolling and the distant bell Erupting rupturing the earth’s Babel.   12th -18th March 2006     Yet if anyone could have offered me A way out, but by then it was too late, I was alone with an affinity With death and all I had to do was wait. It would come in its own time and on cue, Meanwhile I was to simply turn away So as not to allow the future through To the autopilot of a new day. Only silence meant anything at all And somehow it made the thing easier, It was the total immeasurable Hell, the shortfall, the difference after, And the past that was to jettison me Absolving all responsibility.    13th March 2006     When it came it was with an unearthly Ease, there was little to do beforehand, A semblance of order, an hour maybe, As though the thing had already been planned. Yet how reluctantly and tardily, A diffidence at once deliberate, Still then hanging back and to the very Last moment and until it was too late. And once I stepped into the unlit night Nothing remaining could now intervene, Neither memory nor whatever might Have been, forgotten lines left to mean Something of a life after and its cure, There at the last outpost of the future.   13th – 18th March 2006     Even now I don’t know how it happened, I know only that my story held fast To the unforeseen attempt and the end As I lay, an outcome that was the last Thing I was expecting while emerging From a spasm of uncontrollable Trembling, left midway between wondering About the time, the unalterable Finality of a single moment, And the life that was mine to throw away And of no account as though it was meant, And had always been meant to be this way, How I wanted to be allowed to live As I lay there with nothing left to give.   15th – 22nd March 2006     What road did I come by, how had it come To this, and all my dreams unrealised, Clinging to vestiges, echoes among, And a silence that could not be reprised, That could only be answered with my own Life, and with the end recurring between, A harvest that should never have been sown, Forever leftover from what had been. To be, or not to be but the answer Was always there just below the surface, Whispering and almost as an after- Thought conjured out of nothing, yet a place I had imagined many times before, My mind left prone and homesick for its shore.   22nd – 28th March 2006     But there was no one to tell my story Only the darkness echoing after Through the low and unlit reach of Hampstead Tapering in the far columns of the Distant rust-coloured trees, reminding me Suddenly of something that Hamlet said, And the evening left in apparition As the only thing I could leave behind, As though already inconsequential, At Keats House without words enough to call Once more from the shuttered walls of my mind, There I stood condemned to execution. Absent thee from felicity awhile, My own words contend as in a trial.   28th March 2006     All I could think about was that no one Should see, that there had to be dignity Right to the end, even while quietly Waiting to die, unknown and on my own, Searching for a reason but there was none, Left to wait for another hour to see If it was too late, without poetry, The lodestone always that drew me along. And now there would be no absolution, The ultimate sin against God had failed And the rest of my life would be entailed In tracking the pathway back, it was gone, Nothing could prepare me for the outcome Watching snow falling through the mist among.   29th March 2006     It was not so much death I was afraid Of then but more having to live at all, In a last act of surrender I made A pact with life for my own survival. But I could hardly know this at the time, The total of the years pressed down on me And the fact that only my life was mine, The hell I lived and its polarity Pulling me to a last proximity Always to the end, that was what I knew, The insignificant anatomy Of a throwaway day, the hours seen through The pall of a life that has come apart, The ordinary things sheared from the heart.   30th March 2006     Did I intend to bring my life to an End, the real answer is I do not know, It simply became something I began To regret while clinging to my shadow After, when they asked me in A & E, While responding with an overwhelming No. I knew there had been a certainty, A deliberate intent preventing Me from calling a halt to the whole thing, How I wanted to be done with it all, The hours and their unending faltering, The tardy lifelong cowardly shortfall. There was no choice, to be, or not to be, Contend with chance, simultaneously.   31st March – 1st April 2006      What was it that so effortlessly quelled My last resistance, who should I explain It to even if I knew, and yet felled From the day as a shadow left in vain. To be remembered as someone only In passing, or a new year’s suicide Caught in the headlong chance of jeopardy, Yet paralysed in the darkness outside A & E, a wait left too late to go In until, and still with no audible Reason. Without refuge left to swallow In silence what was not negotiable, Without any hesitation, without Harbouring any residual doubt.   6th - 11th April 2006                             Part 2   O but there was no deliberation Nor even the time for a last goodbye, No sudden or untimely decision Precipitated me, no strangled cry Or stammering utterance escaped from The fast-held fortress of my mind. Only The hours outstanding at most, the problem And its reckoning, the outcome to be, For the first time no longer concerned me, As though leftover now from the past tense, From another life once, yet already Jettisoned and left in vain with a sense At last of what I was about to do, Alone with no way out and no way through.   10th – 12th April 2006     I just came to a standstill and then gave Up, surrendering everything I thought Was mine, rooted there, unable to save What was left, stunned and caught in an onslaught Of opposing momentary armies, And with no room anymore for a no- Man’s-land in the margin in between. This Was how it was, searching for a shadow In the darkness that somehow I mislaid, Left forever bereft and without it, And longed for in sunlight in dreams that fade. With nowhere to rest its head, my spirit Was ready on the banks waiting, afraid Only of the end my own words had made.   12th April 2006     How I longed to get back to you, to be Alive once more and even as we were, It came and went, your anniversary As insignificant then as after, An event that would remain unremarked, And without a soul left on the planet To really remember enough to know Your age now. For me it was a sentence Of death, the time had come and was embarked On my own execution, a date set For a life, a future that was mine no Longer, and it failed to make any sense Anymore, forty one years was the bell And the death knell summoning me to hell.    13th – 14th April 2006     If only I had existed, content Enough to wait, letting the meaning come In its own time, experience, the vent From the day’s disarray, was then as some- Thing I could bring from nothing, with a voice Of a kind and able to stand alone. Then everything suddenly burned out, choice Was a thing of the past, meaning had gone After struggling for breath entirely on Its own, involuntary for so long, Now there was a last deliberation Quietly awaiting chance, poised among Night shadows, loitering with its knowledge, A death and a life after, left to dredge.   19th April 2006     It was a way to get my story told And the only course open to me then, Any control over what would unfold Was wholly lost or surrendered, even Bartered away and of my own accord, For I no longer cared and no one was Listening, life had become a drawn sword Parrying the world, incising the cause Of my silence. I was finished, a blown Husk, but the light would not sing eternal For me, what was written was on its own And unapparelled in an infernal Storm, walking the night just as she had done, Its life unravelling and left among.   20th April 2006     I felt as though I was on death row and Nothing could halt or prevent the ending, Time would run its course and be left as sand Loosening in an hourglass emptying. The ordinary day seemed to be held On an uncontrollable fast-forward, An oscillating interval propelled On the blur of meaning, yet in accord With the hours hurrying towards the end. The years there were an interminable World I could neither count on nor contend With, time was the unimaginable Space where the lineaments of her face Would quietly disappear without trace.   24th – 25th April 2006      Life itself was to come to a standstill As if it had been running on empty, Meaning was simply abandoned until The end with its familiarity Was ready to be faced alone once more, Resolving then to be, or not to be. Why do I falter even now before The night’s inexorable memory, Something outlasting and distant and yet No more than half an hour at the utmost. What of the time after, why did I let It happen, insignificant and lost And left with the longing to be as we Once were, the end before us, quietly.   20th May 2006     Something that had been there now just gave way, Collapsing beneath me without any Warning as the day’s edge began to fray Into the leftover hours, too many For the interval needed for the end, Or the outcome she tried to struggle to Or the silent hours she could not amend, Too few for what I was about to do. There was no way out and the only thing To cling to was the unpaid absolute Foreclosure on the future outstanding, And I would go to it as she did, mute To the end. I could not bear the anger Nor even the remorse I felt for her.   21st May 2006     Nothing had changed and the years since had been To no avail, the silence or shortfall Of language then, was too late to redeem And you had drifted too far out to call Out to anyone, now it was not us Anymore but only myself alone. The hour I had become autonomous Came back to me when everything was gone, The rage, the remorse, the pity of it All, the interminable legacy Conferred thereafter, leaving me unfit For the story of your brief destiny. When I tried to salvage what had happened The journey led me only to the end.   21st May 2006     Nothing could be recovered from the end Subterranean, unfathomable, But the time alone with which to contend For a pledge that was not redeemable. Such a storm it was that suddenly drew Me in without so much as a warning Just to sound an alarm echoing through To a night on hold without a morning. I no longer seemed to belong to the Day anymore or even to my own Shadow and as insubstantial after In the amnesia of everything known, And alone on the edge of time destroyed, And already hurtling into the void.   22nd May 2006     Time was cancelled down to almost nothing And the enervate hours existed then Midway between the past and the melting Future, now fragmenting without mention Into momentary paralysis, Subjugated by default to my will, My whole life amounted to this stasis And to see it through to the end until. But what had brought me to this place at this Hour without even a last backward glance, To walk the night left with nothing to miss Of this world, abandoned to random chance And the outlandish circumstance of fate, It was too late, it was always too late.   23rd May 2006     It was done and nothing could stop it now, My spirit was condemned with me to hell, All the numbers from the years were aligned, An involuntary cancelling out. All my life I had waited for my turn In an endless imaginary queue, Left in line for a time to come, to be Equal again with you once more, the world Behind us and the night in front to call Our own, this side of the sleeping city, And the neon flickering off and on And outlined momentarily and then It was gone, yet still recurring, night-etched, The burnt out shadows of letters unshone.   24th May 2006     Such a storm it was that coming out of Nothing it could only leave a lasting Sudden final momentum, as though it Thought to pit itself against immortal Odds and it was taking no prisoners. The numbers were in countdown and beyond My control, yet silence was the only Toll that mattered, all the words of the world Were scuttled from below, a wind-torn craft In the mounting waves of a perfect storm, Heightened drawn in the whorl of their current, And slowly breaking up like killer kings  On an Etruscan cup, words left declined, With the denominator of zero.   24th May 2006     Where should I go on a night such as this The years passing before me and only Myself to blame, with nothing more to do Than to pull myself together as she Had done so many times before, and now I could not and now there was no way out. The end would be easier, it would be Something to cling to, a country where words No longer seemed to matter anymore, Where silence was again the currency, The simple language for a passing day, The barter for night’s recurring stasis Where only the words for the end written And mute, would signify its existence.   24th May 2006     All the years had come to this, only now Could I face myself and for half an hour I saw what you had seen, every morning Every moment and in dreams or awake As you struggled to your feet in order To survive another day another Hour. And you would say I’ll be glad when they’re All grown up, even then outwitting death A little longer, while we stood by and Watched you die as we tried to grow without Knowing. I could never live up to you, So I could only die like you without Knowing, I thought it had always been just About courage, never seeing the rage.   25th May 2006     If only I could have told you about The snow that morning, destined unlike you To survive, everything existing lay At last before me, as the asphodel And temporal. The longing to be free Had almost cost me my life, yet snow was The lasting reality, quietly Falling into the mist and drawing me To a territory so far beyond Mortality echoing calling through My mind. There I became a child again, Knowing nothing of what lay behind, I Was alone in a new world unexplored Leaving only the footprints of my kind.   25th May 2006     BEATEN BACK   The days are buried somewhere deep and I Am left to drag them from the agony Of their existence, lifeless as they lie And dissolving in anonymity Leaving not a trace of their narrative Behind. The effaced nights of another Time when my mother was a fugitive Running for her life, that echoed after In a language poised between pursuer And pursued, and there where I falter mute, Carrying the silence of my mother The words she was too afraid to refute. Poetry makes a meaning of it all Even as memory begins to stall.      Only by reading a poem aloud Can I find out what has happened before, From words left out or openly avowed, Silence echoes reaching into the core Of being, sounding the limits of time, Even when my mind has come to a halt, Rhythm surges beneath its paradigm Searching a surface rhyme, its last assault On memory before the night closes Down and experience explodes under The strain of what a new day exposes. Nothing lasting seems to exist after A poem, only the far disarray From darkness once that on the surface lay.     I long for a refuge in which to write, The day sears as shadow overexposed In the light and nothing can put it right, It effaces as the blur from the closed Shutter of a camera’s lens. Nothing Has any permanence but in a dream Lost at the time of its remembering, Yet something existing that might have been, Pushing memory towards breaking point Like an outstretched fan spreading wide never To be folded back again, out of joint Or unrolled, fading into time after, Each panel the surface trace of the day In starlight’s interstitial disarray.     Nothing existing can ever put it Right and there was never any refuge For her lost deracinated spirit, No shelter for her mind from the deluge Of language or the one way argument Reverberating without her answer. Mute even to the end, you never meant To hurt us, it was the silence after That hurt, the unfathomable echo You left us as your will and testament While we watched you founder in the shallow Water, signalling in silent intent. I amount to no more than what she meant And I let it happen and was silent.     Apart from a low insistent echo, There was nothing but emptiness after, Stretching to its furthest limit hollow As the future that was open to her. I said nothing and I let it happen Searching for the end in words and in vain, Silence was the simple constraint and then It became the carapace for her pain. There was no way out for her or for us, Silence itself would resound forever, Interminable and autonomous, Her unlived life left only to confer. Nothing on earth could free me from this hell Or the effort to bring her asphodel.     It was your birthday, you were forty one, By then you had but sixteen days to live, And daddy had brought you chrysanthemum Wrapped in cellophane, attempting to give You something that would be remarkable On your day, he was struggling to be kind, For you would never leave the hospital, He meant them to lay gently on your mind. Makeshift there in his unthought-through fashion Without warning of anything to come, He gave you cemetery flowers after From someone’s grave before your funeral. Too late, too soon the silence then and the Endless ensuing search for asphodel.     There was not enough time to say goodbye And the flowers were never seen again, You just gave up without so much as why Knowing that everything had been in vain. You hardly spoke from then on and only With a mute sometimes cursory reply, We stood there wondering and warily While we calmly watched you about to die. All your life flowers had been an omen Especially blossoms of the lilac, You would not have them in the house, even When we brought them you made us take them back, And you recoiling so little so much, Wrought in silence I had not heard as such.     Why do the flowers haunt me even now, Wrapped and amassing under cellophane, My father would never have known then how In silence you received them and the pain. This was to be his one shot at remorse And only he could have got it so wrong, Only he was to know there was no force Or treatment that would keep her in the throng Around her, yet he gave her flowers for The dead without her knowing, from the core Of his being, he believed this after. I had to bring her something more, the hell, The pity of it all, lily of the Valley, hyacinth blue and asphodel.     There was not enough time to intervene And nothing that anyone could have said Would have mattered, it was somewhere between Remorse and sudden atonement offered Up to her for her very last moment, In order to save himself in the next World or for the rest of this one. It meant Nothing in the ordinary context Of his day but this would not go away, It was the end, he had to do something For the darkness that on the surface lay, It was her last birthday, he had to bring The flowers, with nothing for anything Then, they were beyond her imagining.     Cyril you never gave her anything And when you did, it was too late and too Soon, it was to remain like everything That had happened before, unknown and new And yet so very familiar. You Were your own man and nothing ever got Through, and it would never have occurred to You that the flowers you brought her were not Appropriate or even that she knew Without showing, that you gave them at all Was the only thing that mattered to you, Alone uneasy and sentimental, Yet she saw without knowing, quietly, Simply and as mute as her piety.     He brought the flowers to the ward and gave Them to you and there was nothing that I Could do, I was left unable to save What was lost, without any reason why I could not. How much I wanted to spare Her the unprepared for ignominy Of it all, the sudden panic after, The inexorable reality That was to come, instead I just stood there Stooping, my head to the ground silently, Moments that would take years to disinter, It was as though you were dead already, How casually she was to suffer While the flowers were held out towards her.     Even at that late hour she felt pity For you standing before her, ludicrous And with such outlandish hesitancy, Holding something that was synonymous With Killingbeck Cemetery. The sexton After hours, there in your visiting suit, Solicitous, somehow awkward among Your flowers, faltering under her mute And uncomprehending gaze, her lifetime For a moment would later hold his love. Was she remembering you in your prime, Snow curling in your hair, or something of A song I’ll take you home again Kathleen Or Ireland when the hills are fresh and green.     Why could she not tell you to simply take Them back, was it because she grasped at last What you knew, and just refrained for the sake Of a genuine mistake there amassed In your hands for her birthday, she also Would have known there was really no money For flowers as huge as these, there was no Way out of their proffered reality, There was no way out of her destiny. At that moment I realized where they Had come from and the possibility Of their random origin, as they lay As though for her own anniversary, Without any refuge from the affray.     The flowers would reveal much more than I Could know and something only my father Had been told, all that was left was to try To end the ensuing silence after. In silence he told her in as many Words the truth the doctors had kept from her, She was going to die without any Hope or any recovery after. It was the unsaid that had existed Then for as long as I could remember, There was nowhere for her to rest her head, Her nights were spent fleeing a pursuer In search of the pursued. In the shortfall Of language his flowers had said it all.     No one moved and we were all paralysed As though we had just been condemned to death, I was guilty of having realized Saying nothing even to her last breath. No one was ever to apologise Nothing after was ever to be said, The way an ordinary day descries As if the night had never existed. His simple act contained the paradigm, The echoing rhyme of a time after, The flowers became the symbolic mime Of her whole life, she had been our mother, It meant to her she was going to die, They took away my chance to say goodbye.     How I wanted to bring you asphodel And failed, no one now would know your story Effacing even as I tried to tell Of your mute anonymous history, Stemming from an origin where words well From within, a tale so ordinary, Existing then between heaven and hell, As days left with their own posterity And trapped at the everlasting level Of truth, a refuge random and only To be reached in the search for asphodel Illusory as her mortality. And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain Where all I have written is left in vain.   May 2003 – May 2006   Kathleen Williams   How I wanted to bring you asphodel And thus I was compelled to search as far As I could even to the edge of hell In order to find it, my life ajar, My mind left only to run to and fro Just collaborating with an echo Endlessly calling from the century, Trawling the flickering darkened city, The oscillating low industrial Wake outspread beneath neon’s beating sky, Lit or intermittent in temporal Starlight stalling and fading as your cry Falling away from the day, as I tell Of the perilous search for asphodel.   25th April 2006     Why am I so tongue-tied always, afraid Even of the moment what it will bring, Alighting on meaning already laid Out before me, retreating panicking And inchoate. Is it the absolute Calm and paralysing knowledge that I  No longer belong to anyone, mute With existence or just wanting to die, I amount to a part of another Life, locked into memory without leave, A brief reality on the other Side of time, a forgotten place I grieve For, where imagination is the key And my begotten words the currency.   18th April 2006     How I wanted to bring you asphodel And failed, or orient and immortal Wheat, in this harsh world I managed to tell Your story, an unknown memorial Stone, effaced and indecipherable Among the long and uncut corn-coloured Grass, and I tried to make it audible And failed. Words written and yet ungathered, Whatever it was I remembered, it Was destined always to fall short, somehow It never measured up, and my spirit Was left with the leasehold of then and now. Daddy brought you flowers only to quell You with the end and all that they would tell.   April 2006     BACK TO TOP