CLOCKS
1.
The house becomes a museum.
Horological, maybe,
with clocks in all
its rooms:
coffin, mystery, cuckoo,
skeleton. Like the collage
on the wall, lineal shots
lives away,
wedding sepias
and movie-poses. You look
for clues in their faces,
that fearfulness, eyes sliding
to
a distant skyline. The house chimes
five minutes or more,
stirring the silence, the light
like water washed
over
white paper. You sort out stuff
that years had stored
under the stairs: kids'
jigsaws with
one piece missing,
a wall of games without
rules or dice, ripped envelopes
variously addressed,
pinpricked
posters of Marilyn
and Jimmy Dean, a diary
mostly done in which you go on
walks up to the Common, where
"moss hoards the road."
2.
You pull the car off the lane
at a quiet place
you used
to know. It's all big sky
here, an utterness which spans
flat fields, flat land, the field
you
stand in. On the horizon's
a scrawl of trees, the church
you once tried to walk to,
an attempt
at faith,
which remained just that. Your son
is asleep in the back, the toy
still anchored in his hands.
You brought him out to get him
off, and now, at last, he's
gone. You light up. This field
has
been harvested, and,
around it, the next few,
and then further, the next.
This year, last year, whenever.
3.
Where the houses are was once
grassland where you shot rabbits
with a rifle
that fired small stones.
This new road was a railway-track,
though the station which gave
the street its
second name was sunk
beneath nettle and weed. Once,
poised on the edge of
the platform, you watched a rescued
steam-train thrash by. Seconds shook,
the legend of it passing
through. When was this? Over there
was
a humpbacked bridge. You stand in
the middle of the air.
Your son, a refraction of
yourself, waves at no-one.
Holding
his hand, you like to imagine
it's how he talks: the pulse of his
blood, the faint shift of
fingers,
a secret code passed down. But, no.
So what? You walk him back to the
place you called home. There
will
be food, family, a photograph,
clocks chiming to the echo.
Copyright © Nigel
Pickard, 2009
