Like Flaubert…

Like Flaubert, who kept away from his mother
when she had not much longer to go, I keep away,
at times, from you. I almost do not want to know
which programmes you watch, what newspapers

you buy, toothpaste use, since those composites
of your dailiness will have to be lost as they lose me.
In consequence, I try to mislay deliberately,
rather than by chance, those stitches you cable-knit

into me. I ought to give a permanent presence
to you, and, conscience-free, not as if on the run,
steal moments precious as rare stones for you
to wear, shaking over you brass holders of incense.

My flippancy is deliberate while I establish
rituals with you: shopping for those heavy things
you cannot carry: detergents, potatoes, flour.
I ought never to ask; instead magically replenish

your supermarket needs, forbid the strip-lighting
to glare its unremitting accusations at me
for failing to fill your trolley with the world
of vanishing values not registered on tills. Fighting

for your life, I ignore your fumbling on shelves, peering
into deep-freezers too closely for those with good sight.
I should be your right arm, your reading glasses,
an offshoot with buds, your musical aid for hearing.

Yet, an eternally overgrown child, I forbid you
any decay and, pulling earlier portraits of you
into mantelpiece frames, I make irrational demands:
oblige you to return all my library books overdue,

then to concoct dishes which I pretend that I, myself,
have made. My only concessions to your years:
bits of my life I withhold lest they prevent your sleep.
Your unbreathed advice I store on the top shelf

reserved for pills, potions and tinctures seldom used.
Safely, I inquire about your ailments as if you are
nothing but an ailment when I should announce you are
my hearth, my lap and root which symbols have abused.

Unlike Flaubert, whose mother did not keep away
from her son, I watch you twist my approach artfully,
as if I make too premature an ending to your biography.
I realise how, playing pretend, to protect me, you say

you prefer to give friends from your own vintage entry
to confidences, not me. Mother Teresa afternoons
and tea-parties where needles click out scarves and hats
mean we are both protecting each other from emergency.

Aeons ago, because you encouraged me to leave,
I kept coming back. Now when I hang on to you
carefully, at a remove, you must know I am rehearsing
selfish skills for coping when I have to grieve.

I imagine not being able to pass your house, look
at your chair. I imagine hiding away your silver
as you do when going away – as if that is all it will be,
despite an edge to the light at the window which shook

from vibrations you attributed always to passing trains.
I imagine feeling halved like the tulip tree outside
which will linger on like myself, gagged and bound
by the frayed umbilical cord earthed in your remains.

House Clearance

Like anonymous furniture removers, we move in
to scan the contents of the house, clearing drawers,
weighing the camphorwood chest, tallboys, desks.

Business-like on purpose, with sleeves rolled up,
we cannot afford to let emotion take over as we climb
and descend the stairs, lifting what is too heavy

to be lifted into our hearts because her way of life
has terminated. In rooms shaped like her second skin,
blank pictures that we cannot carry away hang on walls,

ghosting those just gone. Her thoughts too remain
like fixtures patterning the air with a special electricity
from more than three decades of dwelling alone.

On backs of mirrors and wardrobes, the dust she would
never have tolerated betrays her, boasting cruelly of
its secret existence scribbled upon by spiders behind

her house-proud back. Lucky she cannot see the carpet
dotted with black plastic bags awaiting the dump.
Or know how her waste-paper baskets fill as if

of their own accord with scripted lines she refused
to use on suitors she called old codgers. Not for her
any rescue from a widowhood lengthier than her marriage.

As we cart out pieces of furniture – cushions,
eiderdowns, rugs the last to disappear, easier not to feel
we are carting out the life she is still tenuously holding onto;

to consider how much worse it would be if she were
dead. And to recall how she had little sentiment
for keepsakes and memorabilia. Perhaps why she turned

her daughters into hoarders, labelling clutter with
‘do not throw out’ when her spring-cleanings threatened
every season. Though her intimate descendants,

we disturb her privacy on each floorboard we tread.
Unwilling to divide her legacy into anything other than
the value of what we remember her by, we resent being forced

into this piecing together of her by her possessions.
Like anonymous furniture removers, we move out with her,
absolved from liability, to where, inside us, she lives on.