Invocation
whatever it was – the slow shutting off
of your lighted capillaries,
or the currents one by one unplugged
between us, whatever stories
we route to this aftermath –
I couldn’t disable a sense of you
alive in the mortuary, of you struggling
to know where you were, to understand
the blue brick walls, the absolute cold.
As I rinsed beans after your funeral,
chopped the splayed chicken
for the faithful supper, it wasn’t grief I felt
but faithlessness for being voyeur
to this struggle. I wanted to reassemble you,
not as you were, the textbook remembered best,
but mind-haul you-in-pain across every yard
of pavement, invoke us washed by drizzle,
swallowing the petroleum tonic of fog,
hearing the drum pulse of a helicopter
somewhere at the city’s edges,
name each street, feel the frontal lash
of wind on a north corner, bring
your ghost to stand, twist-locked,
at my shoulder in the kitchen and I could say
that you were here and this was death.
For several days I breathed on empty,
kept you close, spelled out your traces,
the constellated stains of tea across an atlas
you’d opened for my kids to show the yellow
of equators, until my heart settled,
found its level in the wideness filling
each page, the receding oceans, deserts.
Rosalind Hudis is an award winning Wales based poet. Widely published in journals, she is a 2013 recipient of a New Writer bursary from LiteratureWales Academi. Her debut pamphlet, Terra Ignota is available from Rack Press. Rosalind Hudis www.poetrypf.co.uk