Girl with a Silver Tongue

“Time’s a great healer...don’t dwell
on the past; move on. There’s a life
to be lived out there,” they said,
so pack away her comb, her brush,
with its trace of ash-blond hair.

Put the book back in the drawer –
the one I was reading her, albeit
on her ‘good days’; the last chapter –
never finished.

Bin a ‘to do’ list, in florid script
buried deep in a pocket of her coat –
smelt of snowball fights – the slow jazz
of the River Café, on a lazy,
Sunday afternoon.

Stop beating myself up over a note
she left, in its shell-pink envelope
telling me goodbye; the one I can’t
bring myself to open, even though
it was four winters ago.

Give up imagining her toes kiss mine
in bed at night...that she’ll be here,
when I get home from work...crack
me up with a mudpack on her face,
kidding me it’s quite the latest thing
in fashion.

Strike autumn from my diary...when
we first made out beneath the turning trees
and when I wrote her, from then on,
she’d always reply with a fallen leaf
pressed between the lines.

Apollinaire, wasn’t it, who said,
‘Memories are hunting horns,
whose sound dies on the wind’?

Forgive me for saying he couldn’t
have been more wrong; they are
but she alone... and her cornet
of the soprano kind; silver-tongued
songs, stronger still, unwinding
from my mind.