I am beginning to lose weight
I am beginning to lose weight,
each time her arms encircle me
they go a little further.
First her arms embraced my sides
and left so great a space they flapped
like wings too thin for flight.
Years passed and there was room enough
to leave that gap between two poles
which makes a spark: 'You're getting fat,'
she said, 'my arms can't meet around you.'
But soon the tips of fingers touched
and God made Adam on the ceiling of our flat.
From then, her python grip took hold.
First finger-ends, then pads, then strength in arm
and elbow held me tighter from the back.
This morning she could hook her fingers
like a belt-buckle, fast enough to take
the weight of mountaineers:
'You have slimmed,' she said.
'Keep it up.' I will.
Each week she'll find
a firmer purchase as I shrink,
and all my weight is shifted
to her grasp.
Heavy
There is a feeling which comes as heavy
and it weighs whole families down - my cousin
and his wife, from Salisbury, felt weighted like rocks
from a cross-beam and came down, after a holiday
in Lucerne. My father never really knew how heavy
he was, drifting through music and plays and things
which took him bodily out of himself to higher
things - like Inspector Poirot, who comes in
with all the answers, my father alone never had,
only his weight of questions years long and not
answered,
but it is not this weight, rather all
the not done things around us, the whether it is
worth it or was worth the bother, or the phone,
the master of such heaviness, better than a priest
to tell you in its silence what may come,
or just the heaviness of families behind you
pulling you down on a day in sunshine when the forest
clears to clear sky and the birds strike up
and nothing you see from the old bench
beside the clearing suits your purpose quite just now.
Expert in heaviness that generation always behind us,
yet my father's heaviness astonished me.
As the six men breathed heavily to bring him
or what was the rest of him, nothing of himself,
or, as far as I saw, nothing of what gave him weight,
that weight which ran through the family and on
must somehow have passed overhead, making no sound,
I heard nothing but I knew as well as if I had ducked
it had passed me and would land heavily somewhere else.
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