In The Dining Room Dreaming

Thank god you’d left your Nottingham bed, past four, to sit upright,
opposite, at a dimly-lit table and laugh until I dropped my cutlery
woke myself, the tremor of a stifled giggle curling my feet.

As if in your honour, when I’d finished, the itch, a quiver, moved to my nose
massacring fairies, one that came out not as a sneeze, but an orgasm,
half-formed, a loud ahhHH without the cho.

With each sneeze, I opened the tissue like a book, instinctive
as a new-born gripping a finger, perhaps pre-birth we all lay
sneezing into palms, fascinated, parting each hand like moth’s wings.

With that finished, I moved to coughing, as if acting each winter ailment,
cataloguing the systems. One of Austen’s women, not leaving her sick bed,
no piano recitals to go to, no man to lead her under a bridge of arms.

The old ladies around the dining room, push themselves up from their chairs,
sighing ahr, ahr, as if that’s all they could say. 80 years siphoned to one sound,
so they made it beautifully and it ricocheted round the low-hung ceiling.

We each stopped, everyone to listen as the doorbell chimed each one out
and the ahrs mixed with the seagulls call as they swung down, swiping bread,
until the last one rang and we were left questioning if they ever existed.

Sensing the awkward void, the intercom chirped up relieving the world
and at that point it all seemed too much like that film
as I looked down at the rubber food and started to giggle.

The next sounds surged up as if they were a time of day, the acoustics
of cutlery clinking against plates, an orchestra warming up,
so I laughed lower, not wanting to disrupt the pre-carvery rehearsal

and that’s when I glanced up at you, hooked over the table,
laughing too and the force of it pushed the knife and fork from my hands
where they made no sound as they hit the sparrow-speckled carpet.

And that’s when I woke up. An empty symphony hall,
with no one to warm up the instruments.
That’s what we were doing: laughing, singing, listening.