Purple blush of sky and lilac drooping
by the greenhouse. The last heat of day
rests in the grass, and from the shadows
under the conifers, there comes a moaning,
a pain riddling from the undergrowth,
a voice caught out after dark. And my mind,
closed off from sight and the body’s reading
of the world, convinces me it is the crying
of a child left out in the yard behind ours.
Naked, its soft fat limbs and wet mouth open
and wailing and helpless. And I stand frozen
by the back door and the quiet house,
trying to listen, receptive and distrusting
my body – the ring of light from the kitchen
over my shoulders making of the garden
a more solid darkness beyond the patio,
like the darkness that lives behind eyelids.
And I swear at first the crying seems to stop
my heart as I think of it, sends my mind
whirring outwards into the night. Trance-like,
I begin to step further from the light
of the window and into the garden, slow enough
for my eyes to reinterpret with each step
the shapes of bushes, the forms of shirts
hanging on the line, but still I can not imagine
the sound as anything but a child cursing
in the pitch-dark conifers, and as I walk closer,
my hands white in the garden air, a sudden
panic breaks in the bushes, a brawling,
and I see the darker shapes of two cats
mating. It is here, by the swaying conifers,
away from the glow of the house,
that I realise I have found myself at a place
so close to life, to its truth of violence,
that my mind has wired out, but even now
I could not say which was the truer thought:
the cats or the lost child; and I think again
of calling home that night from Sweden,
of hearing my mother’s voice and telling her
what you had done (tablets, rum, calling
to say goodbye), and how I made
an animal sound, a noise so primitive
that I felt inhuman, how I cried
like something new-born
because I had found myself
in a world where all abstract things
(death, fear, loss) had been born in my mind,
and what is a parent to a child but a god
who we turn to when we still believe
that everything is fixable, a god
who we weep to as we grow
into the world, as we age into it
and each abstraction comes closer.
And wherever I have found myself now
seems somewhere other than my own body,
and each living thing is a child, and our parents
and gods are only children and again
I am in the garden thinking of standing by the lake
in Sweden and considering all the ways a mind
can uproot itself, of all the short-circuits
left in the world. I am thinking of the shadows
under trees, the lives of animals, the places
where words extinguish themselves and leave
all the things that cannot be fixed or forgotten.
Seán Hewitt won a Northern Writers’ Award in 2016. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review and the New Statesman, amongst others. @seanehewitt
andotherpoems.com 