Life Writing
No one will ever know
what happened to the green scarf
you wore, the long winter skirts
given away in a different city
for someone else to wear.
At the Indian table others
will be drinking tea, no sense
that you were there. If there
is a ghost, I haven’t seen one
except sometimes there is a likeness
when someone tall and elegant walks
towards me
or if I stand close to the chestnut tree
where you are scattered, it seems
you are mapped into the wind.
Diaries not in sequence and gaps of years,
underneath the ink I can still hear you
speak to me.
‘These things we kept for our records’, they said.
Certificates of competence in History and French,
a family tree tracing a lost connection.
But I can no longer ask what happened
in-between. Was it you who painted
the primroses in the wood?
I close the box file, thinking how your handwriting
changed as you grew older and in the kitchen
I still have the old cup you drank your coffee from.
Clare Crossman lives outside Cambridge. In 2013 Shoestring Press published her second collection Vanishing Point She is currently writing a short monograph about the cumbrian artist Lorna Graves and working on another collection. She runs poetry readings and some writing workshops in association with Cambridge Arts Salon and the Romsey Festival.