A Clockwise Direction

I found that old wedding photo we lost

behind a doll in our daughter’s room.

Russian, as it happens, the doll that is -   

I can read some significance in that: 

so full of themselves, they miss the bleeding

obvious. I wiped the dust from off its surface,

made you 21 again and placed us

 

on the bookshelf where P meets Q.

I’d have liked it before your favourite author

but her shelf’s too close to the ground.  

All my books are still in alphabetical order;

I wake at 7 to clean and tidy,

progressing in a clockwise direction,

starting at the front door and ending in the bath. 

 

I compare it to my parents’ wedding picture

that’s hanging next to the dining room door:

they’d a bigger cake, more friends and relations,

dressed black and white, a formal occasion;

contemplative, no eye for the camera. 

My mother’s fuller in the face than I remember

and isn’t that an ashtray beside the cake?

 

I blow these pictures up out of proportion

trying to discover germs of the future:

leukaemia, cancer and emphysema

buried within a forgotten Baboushka.

How happy we appear! My Mum said never

had I looked so handsome, like Richard Gere.

Perhaps that’s the joke I’m laughing at.

 

Behind us I trace the faintest whisper

of the tower blocks tumbled in ‘88.

As we’re cutting the cake, your face

burns with embarrassment    

or anticipation of the sauce to come.

I can feel the grip that you have on my arm,

as if I might be the first to depart. 

 

When lights fade I think I can hear you breathing,

but it’s central heating or a noise in the loft.

I close the windows to keep your scent in  

and reach out to touch an amputation -

I said we shouldn’t buy a bed this wide.  

You never see pictures taken at funerals

unless somebody important has died.