delirium
Ewan Howard
I. Delirium, 15th August 2019
I don’t know where to put my eyes, when yours are empty like this.
So I scan the marmalade and medicines on the dinner table,
The same old window on the garden,
Searching for something sharp enough to pierce the silence.
There is nothing.
You’re not sinking like a stone now,
Nor floating free.
Just dissociating your fragments,
Falling to pieces,
Unthinking your thoughts,
Unedited in slow motion.
‘And that was the most obvious thing’, you said.
‘You are here’.
‘I didn’t want you to think I didn’t love you’.
There isn’t much else to say after that, is there?
And I wouldn’t know how to say it anyway.
II. Your frustrated eyes, 20th August 2019
‘There’s always one.’ you said.
‘And which one is it today?’, I asked.
You didn’t reply – except with
Your frustrated eyes.
III. Mothers, 23rd August 2019
‘Tell her it’s OK.
I’m happy for her.
I wish her all the love
And I know she’ll be
A good mother;
Better than me,
And that’s the truth.
And she mustn’t
Be troubled
That her joy will make me sad
Because,
As sad as I am already,
Her joy will make me glad.’
IV. Dissolving, 26th August 2019
These strange conversations always start with a sighed, ‘I’m sorry’,
Though I never understood, for what?
Is it now or was it then,
This imagined wrong?
Tonight, you spoke of a girl
Taught always to tell the truth,
And a father who didn’t believe:
‘Ridiculous’, he said. ‘Ridiculous’.
But to me, you have been the salt
Of the earth and in the world;
Sparingly soluble, sometimes
In the wound, stinging to heal.
Later, you stirred and said, ‘I used to have faith’.
‘It’s hard to hope sometimes’, I mused,
From the depth of this darkness.
It is not soluble, but we are, sparingly:
And maybe this is your dissolving.
Even then, love is the sediment.
It will form stone again,
Given time and pressure.
The old woman in the middle bed looked on in sympathy.
She said she had the strong impression
You would have been an attentive mother.
I said you were, and, progressively,
the past tense took me by surprise.
Now I am sorry too.
V. Infuriating waltz, 31st August 2019
Today you spoke about a girl who knew a secret;
Her family’s shame, to be confessed in church:
Her father’s fathers couldn’t save those families.
Refugees of war.
Siobhan’s baby was taken away and cared for by four Scottish nurses.
There was a miracle girl and a wonderful wife,
And a young man doing military service.
You said he had faced what you now face.
But he didn’t clipe.
He wished they could all be here to tell their own stories.
You were sorry — expressed ‘sincere apologies’
That you couldn’t take care of the people in the church.
You said (to whom I could not tell),
‘I hope I never see you again.
And your wife who I can’t remember’.
‘I just want you two to be able to get on with enjoying your lives.
There isn’t much time before it’s too late.
I know and you know... it was actually...’
That sentence stays unfinished.
Then you break the silence with a sudden, strange, shrill noise
And there are cannula bruises on the backs of your hands,
Purple pools between the sinking veins and the translucent, gossamer skin.
The drip alarm trips again, one note three times:
It bleeps a warning but none listen.
Time, time, time.
Time, time, time.
Time, time, time.
It is an infuriating waltz, so I silence it.
I hold you close, one arm around, your shoulders slumped.
I kiss your hair, voice my love, wave good-bye.
VI. Strange Mutterings, 1st September 2019
Finally, I realize:
These stories of yours,
They are folk and faerie tales,
Deliriously true.
You weave souls and scenes that matter
Into strange mutterings.
They speak of dark and light,
Your tales of wrong and right;
Of men and menace,
In churches of complicity.
There are always children lost,
And some who are rescued.
There are families in flight,
And even some who find refuge
From their histories.
VII. Index, 3rd September 2019
‘What happened to the man?’, you say.
‘Which man?’, I ask, ‘the one from the church?’
‘No, the man on the bus...
Or was it the subway?’
‘Your father?’ I enquire.
(He worked the buses, trains, and trams).
‘No, not him.’
‘A passenger, then?’
‘I DON’T HAVE AN INDEX!’, you reply, indignantly.
After some chocolate cake, you tell me
With sudden candor and clarity:
That I need to change my lifestyle,
That I should tell my wife that I love her very much, and
That my son needs to know there is more to life than football.
I’m passing these messages on.
‘Ewan Howard’ is the pen name of a Glaswegian academic who sometimes writes prose, poems and songs.