A THOUSAND DAYS

 It feels like a thousand days have passed

on each of which I’ve looked back and fondly asked

the question that is left of me and ties my tongue

and other limbs so long indentured now to

a devil’s throng of just my kind, each bound unto

the dark one as the price (and what an awful price)

for some brief relief, peace in my head for a day that offered

the filling of the gaping, growing gap between

my need for you and my confidence that I might

regain a seat at the table reserved for those

entrusted with your reputation and repose –

 

in times, especially, when such can shift from day to day

and trust itself – that dandy chameleon, its colours

unpredictable – is granular, commoditised, such that

even I can dig up some dull, objective stone and proclaim that

it is right to post a full-time guard, to watch and listen out

for poachers digging down to treasure truffles of another,

a woodsman’s secret store, hid beneath the forest floor –

a hoard the metaphor of nothing less, nothing more,

than the sum of all your trust in all the rest of us

on which you can rely; and never be denied.

 

I guess you’ll know it when you see it – which

consignment to fate is something I can’t contemplate

as a lover once with no ambition but to love again.

 

And that ambition, that stated, sporty desire of those with

higher IQs or politicians to be or do, must, if to be considered 

broadly a success, have the support and endorsement

of one of the urbane decoration of your own Star Chamber –

it being impossible to win trust without aid from the inside –

enough, in any event, to gild each interface with filigree,

as delicate as a doily, that lacy thing we call respect.

For it is trite as truisms go that there can be no trust where

there lies no respect, that most fickle of the essentials

for the gentle teasing out of trust – like blowing a fine wine glass

in the traditional mind-blowing way.

.

Was it not trust we both enjoyed in the other’s hands?

If either had need to see a thing done, dealt with, sorted,

the other would have known it, well within a moment, and would be

first to deliver all that was required.  And what too was

good and new was your complete, unreserved gift of a full proxy

from you to me, which always meant much more than a simple agency –

all the portraits and palette landscapes, all the photographs, all the tears

and all the laughter you might need or enjoy – me being effectively you

for a while – and still this records just the bare essentials. Remind me

again of your hordes of bons mots and daydreams; they will help us

all recall what it was between us.

 

Oh, and the delicious ambiguity of the word “between”:

did we emboss one life on the other, like a three-dimensional

tapestry or did we haul rocks and make a solid line to seal the decline

of what was inviolable, never threatened by the passage of time?

Is there any sense in squeezing this history more? Of course,

nothing endures but I, as the scribe alone (I think it is so),

insist that he be allowed at least to deal with the beginning (and,

perhaps necessarily, the end).  He promises to be brief and sucks his teeth

to help him ruminate as to content and players, trying to think

of a phrase, even a word, that sums up adequately the early years,

the tingle of shingle on a cold, blowy beach.

 

And in this he finds that the doors do open in his mind, almost

exactly at the same time, then all the lights come on and, picking

back through all the words he has engaged for his task, recalls

his secret love of the Theatre of the Absurd – loved because

it was there when he was nineteen and he kind of understood.

And what better age to be in love? It is all he can do to stop himself

screaming the word that said it all, the word affirmed by a tear

or a mere reddening of a cheek. He muses for a minute and realises

that love is in all our beginnings and all our very ends, where

trust must inescapably be vested; the in between, rather harder

but you add it to his list, nonetheless.

 

©   Peter Taylor 2019