Alison Michell

Contact

He has gone
beyond the darkroom
out of reach,
until one day
a snatch of words
half-heard
on the road by the beach
teases with the sound of his voice.

I turn to see a car like his,
window down,
a dark-haired man in shirt sleeves
steering one-handed
the way he used to,
making it look easy.
 
He waits at the horizon,
draws me back
into that summer
I learned to swim,
had my first taste of melon.

I chase his image
near the edge of the light
before the positive dissolves,
hold him unchanged
etched on the lens of my sight.

On Parade

Mustered at the bottom of the wardrobe
in dusty reproach to polished standards
kept though fingers fumbled over laces,
brown brogues line up beside plain black size twelves
worn with fine silk socks and City bowler.

I place my smaller feet in the vast spaces,
remember how he stumbled over kerbs,
tripped behind the Zimmer – till he shifted
gently to a soft-shoe shuffle, slippers
dyed the colour of his favourite claret.

He would not let them go unbrushed, without
their wooden stretchers: straighten them once more,
give them a last coat of Cherry Blossom
before dismissing them to Oxfam shelves.

Leftovers

At the back of the fridge
there is always a pot
of forgotten mince, a cold potato
in a blue-striped bowl.

Whiskery lemons jostle for space
with half an apple wrapped in cling film,
and a flotilla of small jugs,
each with its skim of milk.

Her shopping remembers
his appetite for pies,
small print on the packets,
the calories he should have counted.

She drinks tea, pecks at biscuit crumbs,
no longer troubled by hunger.

Strings

The fabric frays, its untidy weave
falls apart at the seams,
warp separating from weft
to leave a tangle of unravelled threads.
Impatience picks at loose ends,
tightens the tension of stubborn strings
into impenetrable knots.

I have unlearned the mastery,
forgotten what I did not know
I knew of intricate geometry,
twining a cat’s cradle
round eight-year-old fingers
in a distant playground –
over, under and through.

* * * * *

Biography

Alison Michell lives in South London. When a busy career was interrupted by ill health, she took the opportunity to pursue a long-held ambition and concentrate on creative writing. She writes both prose and poetry, and in these poems explores different aspects of loss.