From room to room

The space between your chair and screen
six feet at most, was where you spent your later years
that’s hardly strange, but you were younger
than the normal sit-ins of that place

it wasn’t just your bones, though heaven knows
the cancer that like woodworm, filled with holes
your frame, gave constant pain, and turned your body
into news

no, it was your deep unease, not eagerness to please
so much as wanting to escape, to not be seen
not judged, not needing to perform, or have a shape
that made your burrow so magnetic

life began to gather round that space, the fireplace
pile of newspapers in place beside your chair
part-started books, and here and there a knitting pattern
plate or two, some tea-stained mugs now turning cold

How different it could all have been, had Peter lived
or better, had you met a man who looked outside
had wanted to have seen the world, and seen it all with you

Or if every meeting with another, wasn’t fear like a disease
could have let you felt at ease, been something you’d enjoy
then your life could fill a house, a street, a neighbourhood of sorts
not seen you hiding in a corner

what would your room be then? Not one all day
but maybe, when I pick a scene, I see you at a table,
a coffee and your elbows as a tripod, find your words
as you laugh and tell a tale for your two friends

and the radio adds yellow light to fill the holes
as conversation pulls and flows, the fumble of
the speaking stick, one talks over another

but is this you? In this room I place you now?
to try to make you happy, how I think you always wanted
if this was my dream of you, I think it was your daydream too
but a dream that is transplanted

No, it’s someone else, we’d have to change the clock a long way back
to a time when shapes were made, that nineteen fifties house
your parents, cowards, passing so much rage
through the little girl they made

redecorate that room, add love, dissolve that wax
teach them how to talk, to learn that vital knack for kindness,
and perhaps, just maybe, add another playmate

and then, and only then, with changes to that room
which so many years before had made you more
of the core of who you were, then much of anything that followed

you could make a room for now, that’s filled
with verbs and friends, how you’d always dreamed you’d live
with evidence of doing