Numbness comes not 
creeping but routing the roadblock, 
Emotion block of everyday duty
Designed to maze my mind.

Mind hazes.

Away, abroad, anywhere but here.
Stop … do not pass … do not … 
Concentrate on clothing:
Divest of pegs, prepare to pleat.

Boldly folding.

Crimped creases storm into a shirt
Seams suggest paper, pretending

Perhaps a prelude: To a lazy penguin or
pale lotus, long petaled lily.
Shoulders fold in, not crane, nor gar.
Not beginning a butterfly, just me

And shirt. Completed. Folded. Lifted. 
Basket bound.

Mysterious in the moment,
An age of ache, an ague of absence.
Absinthe might sink my senses,
Lack of my beloved, love being lost.
 
Beware! Be where? 

Be longing 
for her to be belonging. 
She, my world, 
Still in my universe.

Not receding.

Comets circle and cycle across
Solar system, sunward rounding,
Retreating defeated, conceding
to the darkness.

Analogy malfunctions. 

Thought a broken record.
Peace, or oblivion; living on
is costly, love forever lost.
Comets always return.


		June 2023

Notes:

Sometime between Christmas and New Year's Eve, 2022, I did a load of washing. As it hangs in the laundry, there is no urgency to take it in, particularly when Juliet had taken a turn for the worse on January 1. So it sat there, and 4 days later there was even less urgency or motivation to take it down and fold or iron it.

I don't remember if I started taking it down before the funeral or shortly after it, as seems most likely. And while I was folding up my t-shirts, I was struck by several lots of lightning. The first was the similarity to my hobby of origami in the way I fold the t-shirts. This is where the middle section of the poem comes from, although you will see it was quite underdeveloped in the original version in the early versions at the end of this note.

Advance warning: There is an "Easter Egg" in that section that came about somewhat out the way the words fell, and then required just a little work to get the words in the right order. See if you can find it now. If not, it will be revealed at the end.

The second was the thought that the very mindlessness of such tasks at least protected me from the absolute descent into grief for a short time. At least enough that I didn't have to hang them up again so the tears would dry.

I sent the final draft to my friend Sammy, who taught me a new technical term: Oronym. According to the Collins Dictionary, oronyms are a string of words or phrase that sounds the same as another string of words or phrase but is spelt differently; e.g. ice cream and I scream”. So Sammy told me that this was what I had with "Beware! Be where? " (and it's also there in the "Be longing" / "belonging" pair. Sammy (among her many talents,) is a percussionist, so the rhythmic meter is one of the things that she likes.

The final lightning strike occurred at the same time - not only did I scribble the original notes for this poem, but at the same time I also got the melody line and lyrics for a hymn. So I had to write that all down too. 

I learnt a long time ago to take notes from which ever muse talks to me at the time, or chances are I will lose it. Driving home from visiting Juliet last October, I had lots of words for a poem to her running through my head, and short of stopping, I just kept speaking them out loud, memorising each bit and adding to it. I managed to get it all, tidy it up over the course of the next few days, and was able to read it aloud to her while she could appreciate it. It would have been tragic if I had put it aside to polish later - because chances are she would not have heard that final love poem to her. But she did, and it made her happy, so job done.

Now back to that Easter egg: the hidden word was originally a tentative title for the poem - Origami. If you sound out the end syllable of each of the lines in that section, you find the word: I've put them in capitals, bold and Italic, as WordPress won't allow me to use a different colour in a paragraph.

"Perhaps a prelude: To a lazy penguin OR
pale lotus, long petaled lil-Y.
Shoulders fold in, not crane, nor GAR. 
Not beginning a butterfly, just ME."

Most of it came by accident, and I saw the pattern appearing. Originally line 3 had the word "gar-ment" split to the next line, and I wasn't totally happy. But I fold different types of fish, so a gar was perfect in the end.

First Draft

There is an oblivion that comes
from everyday tasks
The mind concentrates on a shirt
lines up the seams,
folds this way and that
as if the cloth between your hands
is paper, and the job at hand is to
produce the miracle of a butterfly,
a crane, a lily.

A moment in time when the ache of absence
the feeling of my beloved no longer belonging
in my universe, has receded like a comet
Peace, but at a cost:
Comets always return.

                                January, 2023


Second Draft

Numbness comes not creeping
but routing the roadblock, 
Obstacles of everyday duty
Designed to maze my mind
Away, abroad, anywhere but here.
Stop … do not pass … do not … 
Concentrate on clothing:
Divest of pegs, prepare to pleat.

Creases crimped storm into a shirt
Seams suggest paper, pretending
perhaps a prelude to a penguin or
pale lotus, long petaled lily.
Shoulders fold in, no crane, a gar-
-ment. Not beginning a butterfly, see:
Completed. Folded. Lifted. 
Basket bound.

Mysterious in the moment,
An age of ache, an ague of absence.
Absinthe might sink my senses,
Lack of my beloved, love being lost. 
Beware! Be where? Be longing 
for her to be belonging. 
She, my world, 
Still in my universe.

Not receding.

Comets circle and cycle across
Solar system, sunward rounding,
Retreating defeated, conceding
to the darkness.

Analogy malfunctions. 

Thought a broken record.
Peace, or oblivion; living on
is costly, love forever lost.
Comets always return.

                     June, 2023