Seams of Repair

Loss can’t be measured by numbers – the people you once belonged to, the floorboards of a house that was once a home, or the hours you travelled to get away. Although you try to count the possessions you couldn’t keep or the number of steps from the street to the door, zero is the only answer you ever get. But this year you find the pieces of that old pottery bowl, pushed to the back of a cupboard, long thought too broken for repair. Four odd-shaped pieces that still fit with each other. Maybe you never tried to put them together, after the fall. Maybe then you saw only wastage. But now you hold each piece in place, your fingers carefully spread, one by one, tracing the edges with gold-flecked glue. If there was once breakage, now there is more than repair. Fragments bound in beauty, measured only by what was lived and can be transformed.

Walking the esplanade at dusk
a leaf from your notebook in my hand
a gift made so long ago
on the bank of another river
as the orange sky fell down
to meet the ravaged city.
We watched ferries crossing the river
small packages lightening the dark
and we followed the river pathways
edging ever upwards
and you wrote me bright words
that still whisper across time
    corniche, souk, cartouche
your compendium of scratched hieroglyphs
images that hook onto my eyelids
and wake me in the night
how before the revolution
that was not a revolution
we played word games together
and watched people arriving and
departing at the docks
and how afterwards we were quiet
except for our lonely conversations
with beings too old to name.
And now after all this time
the longing hasn’t gone away
like the vast river itself
always rising and falling
always riffling the plangent earth.

My father was always a question mark
holding his thoughts to himself.
I see the shape of him now
in the taut curve of an umbrella
unfurled against the rain
or the slim arch of a bow
pulled back against the arrow.
On weekends I watched him
leaning over his carpenter’s bench
long arms moving evenly
forwards and back across the grain.
And sometimes I saw him
on weekday afternoons
in the quiet hospital dark-room
with his mysterious developing tray
tucking his thoughts towards his chest.
In all his work he measured
lengths and widths precisely
lining up frames and struts
or mapping errors and interruptions
within the forms of unknown lives.
Each year, as I grew taller,
his wooden furniture filled
the moted rooms of our house.
My mother would say to me
   Stand straight
don’t look down.
Maybe she hoped
I would never copy
the figure of my father
a gentle parabola
in his blue shirt and
grey cable knit vest.
If my father never answered
the grey questions of his life
he still dreamed sometimes
as he whistled jazz tunes
of his own invention
bright flights and improvisations
making up an imaginary life
as he assembled his ordinary days
abroad on some adventure
in his mind, always, unexiled.