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Anniversary: March
Death is about now with her close downy smell,
the sheen on her feathers,
her broad encompassing wing;
so broad, it’s all I know of her,
that wing - its shadow, its draft, its strong flight
its dark crook:
Sián, in her sleep, already widowed at 43,
so weary her heart simply forgot to beat,
two daughters left rattling between lost co-ordinates.
Ebony at 6, tripping since birth
too tired of carrying her backpack of drugs
to kick-start the day.
Lauris at 75, her poems finally stopped,
who told me in Wellington decades ago
of sitting all night at her kitchen table
urgently feeding her daughter reasons for living,
falling asleep at four a.m., while she walked out
and killed herself.
And now you, Claire.
Your ovaries had sprinkled
their tumour eggs across your organs
‘Six months’, ‘No, I’ll have a year’;
‘A year’, ‘No, I’ll have two,’ then three;
annually laying yourself down in that tight room
while they emptied your very marrow
opening you to the burn of chemo,
flooding you with its hot lick,
body struggling to assert itself.
I can still hear your laugh, feel the hot wire of your drive
strung like fairy lights across the ocean,
so far away I think of you constantly
beautiful Claire, lovely Claire.
You siphoned four more years.
Too many I know
this week are travelling light with her,
wooed by offers of comfort in that rich velvet down;
seduced into deep flight by a vital wind,
thrilling to her promise of weightless freedom, of lightness,
of the body’s loss.
But I was never one for giddy heights
frightened even of the top bunk.
Walking the beach my naked toes grip the sand
in spite of the tug of sea.
Then, among the fluoro pink lace-weed
clumped like wet serviettes,
and the chestnut kelp
flapping its lifeless ribboned limbs in the gale,
a dead fairy penguin on its back;
white underside open and tender,
neck thrown back as if in ecstasy,
it’s blue-black lustre across the peach sand
small mimicry of that greater eclipsing wing.
On my fourth anniversary surviving cancer
all this death has me jittery.
I dig my toes in deeper,
breathe the big sea air, thankfully,
smother myself in the arms of my young sons
sticky with warm nectar-sweet love
and reach for the ritual of daily habit:
my swim, their lunches, time for school readers.
I take them to see The Hobbit on stage:
red-eyed goblins swishing in the dark;
Smaug breathing fire,
while under his scaly skin,
that one vulnerable spot.
Why not me?
Maybe it’s them: the boys.
Maybe they slipped out into the night with their paint box;
used every colour striking beyond rainbows;
slapped their bright demanding mark
huge across my door
and She has passed over, for now.
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