CW: Car accident and loss of life.
Death Knock.
A fen road took them,
sometime in the early hours, when the mist hung over the muddy dykes
and the reeds sighed with grief
and the handsaw lifted, on solemn beats
of its grey and shrouded wings.
They left traces on the tarmac,
small pieces of crimson plastic, pressed into the asphalt,
an oily meander, a smear of panic,
the upturned revolution of a spinning wheel,
a radio playing, somewhere, lost,
out in the lethal marsh.
Back-along the narrow straight,
at the groaning limit of its stopping distance,
the stain of the lorry’s deadly, dozing drift
was grain, spilled like atoms, split
and blown apart and laced
with hydraulic oil and tachograph.
People have a right to know,
and otherwise it was a slow news day:
a couple of committees, a planning row,
a golden wedding, some parish football,
a few unusual hobbies,
a desert of un-filled column inches,
and so, hours later, tea now cold commiseration in the cup,
curtains drawn and phone left off the hook,
there came my callous knock.
A neighbour, maybe, or a friend,
face grey-drawn and grip white-knuckling the door,
told me to fuck off.
You people, vultures all, you feed on fucking death.
She’s lost all three: her husband, sons,
and still you fucking call,
only the daughter left, and they too would be gone,
were it not for a change of plan.
I write the headline:
Tragic crash-wife cheated Death.
Daughter: saved.
My editor is lunchtime drunk, and stinks of fags
and I am empty-handed on my return,
apart from a nosy door to door: an exhumation of the teenage boys:
happy, kind, school prize-winners, freckled six-foot rugby heroes,
killed on their way to the regional final,
a husband, father, school headmaster,
honest, fair, allotment holder.
For fuck’s sake! slurs the gaffer, we need the wife.
Go back, you twat, and knock her up again!
The gravel drive seems longer now,
the knock feels like a split of skin
and out on the fen road, by now there are chalk marks,
diagrams and calculations, cones and contraflows,
plastic zips and silent spinning lights.
No more need for sirens there,
but here, here on the doorstep, every alarm must ring.
She answers, too weary to resist my lie,
my tale of tributes, my typeface print memorial
and, empty, turns and leaves the door ajar,
and winds rush in, to scour the hall,
to scrape and dig and excavate.
She cannot hold this moment in her head,
these kin now smashed like sparrows’ eggs,
the slipping time that falls between, in this world and the next,
her eyes flat blank but never at rest.
What time is it? They should be back by now.
What do I want from her?
what must she do?
what must she say?
A bell in a concrete tomb, her questions separate
into how and why and right and wrong, into autopsy and identification.
What reason to insist on this post-mortem?
At once I share her ashen, sinking, endless fall;
there is no reason, no reason to be here at all.
And so I stumble, my notebook bare, no shorthand for this loss,
and I suggest: why don’t we just
remember them?
The firemen always say the wreck looks worse
after they have cut the bodies free.
The metal peel of recovery
leaves the vehicle torn,
exploded.
Poetry by Jonathan Croose has been published by The Bangor Literary Journal, Ink Sweat and Tears (2021), Spelt, Loud Coffee Press, Poetry and Covid, Poetry 24, The Brown Envelope Book, Word Bin, Up! and Places of Poetry.