CHANGING TRACKS                                                           96

Must I change now the track I took,

so many years gone, step aside to let the

pack lurch on, sweet health oozing from

every pore, always pushing, being pushed,

asking more of every pliant limb, every

pumping cell? I can tell it is the time, I

hear the bell and a number that I somehow

know is mine – and so I step off, unnoticed.

It has been so for some while, no longer

of them, so no longer with them –

so much no longer, I miss it all,

too much I still remember.

 

Better, then, to loose the ties to what I was,

to start again, some far off place where

every face is coloured green and regularly

cleaned with thickish mud? That would

wake me from my reverie and fill my

plate with worlds to learn. Burn those bridges,

change the view, behave so not to stand

accused of giving in to striped pyjamas,

comfy shoes (or tabloid news). I dare I do,

yes I will go but maybe one last

look at the merry-go-round; and

round it flies and certainly their eyes

see none of me, their feet are

far too far above the ground.

 

So walk away I say to me, myself,

take some time (there is some left) to

think of how to build anew,

review the deal that I might do with life

and he who opens unnamed doors

that go forwards, sideways, sometimes back,

to stone-built mansions, wooden shacks, to

so-slow strolls, to lurching limps, to and fro’,

between the tall and tonsured yews of some

thick and twisting maze, then on to crazy

canters here and trottings there,

unsure of how to wear the thinning threads

of what was once a head of hair.

 

What is there to keep me here, for

me to care about, to fear its loss?

Is it because I age my focus fades;

or because the faces loved have

walked off stage, so silently I did not

realise that they had gone until

half-way through an unrehearsed

soliloquy? Do I take my leave now,

statement made, a thank-you bow and

vow never to return? Questions burn the

barren space between my ears: is there any

sense in it, something new, a template for

at least a few more years to come and go?

 

Meantime, looking up, I see the bright

night lantern, dancing in and out of cloud, a

shifting halo round its pocked clock face –

it wears well its age, fit through change:

full and round each lunar month in life

(and death). And with a slow intake of breath

I start to build upon the thought of learning what was

never taught about the movements of the moon,

its shapes, its silver sickle, its pancake yellow.

I see there’s nothing in this burdened world to

stop me gazing up toward this mutant orb that

shimmers softly, bathes my face;

nothing can deny its right to shake

moondust on white winterscapes, still

summer nights, autumn’s melancholy falls;

the gushing stream of spring’s new life.

 

I feel that dust brush eyelash tips,

which flutter for a moment, as if kissed.

 

And other guides with which I might ally?

Stop, look about for they are there and

better if not quite aware with any strict precision

when and where – the rarer gem is surely

that more fair? I fix on the eternal fire that

warms my limbs, yet makes no charge.

No man, no thing may banish day,

nor heave of oceans, the sparkling spray

of wind on wave, the rainbow’s rise from

washed green vale, then rapid fade, the

skip of clumsy lambs in chase

across the fields where dry stone walls

recall the sweat that made us all.

 

So shape begins to stake a claim on

my attention; and I start to frame the

rest that’s left of me and mine, the

spine of ten or twenty years to come and

go, oh so fast. I want to feel that some of me

will outlast the passing of the flesh – if

only by virtue of a nervous cough

followed by the reading of the words I

wanted all those gathered there to

know were meant for him or her.

Then may the march begin again and

all that’s passed be sluiced by rain.             © Peter Taylor