Cindy
Lee
| Birthday
Gift Your forty-seventh April candleless for we are not religious in the garden gaudy branches float with early bees the sea breathes a weight of silver there is no horizon in three days the flowers will fall three times since your last April and we will sow a pale petal shawl to warm your bones as they drag and furl beneath the ice bright water Birthday Through lathe, plaster and stone our ears discern the rhythm of next door’s grandfather clock: the familiar Tick Tock as the pendulum arcs in a heartbeat. In this room, beneath the bone-yellow candle flicker, the ghosts of Donne and Eliot murmur in the shadows while we wait straining for another heartbeat. We watch as ink-blue shadows begin to creep over your cold toes, smudge your eloquent lawyer’s fingers. They are guide marks, my love, signals that you are closing down your house making ready for the journey. (Later, in that last room where only the silk facsimiles of flowers keep you company, I will find you ‘done up’ in salmon pink lace about your wrist and throat, your wedding ring a loose halo about the bone. These Bishop’s clothes will lend you such a godly air that laughter at the affront of your coolly godless self will vie in my gut with the unbidden urge to snap that bone for safe-keeping.) But here in the sick room, with iron in our mouths from the blood seep that scents the air, we wait, as the world spins… Breath comes abruptly. Shuddering. A diver’s boot stamp on your drowning heart. Desultory rain falls against the window – the sound of mice scuttling through leaves. Beyond the glass iron-grey sea merges with a pewter sky, the horizon indistinguishable. We stand at the world’s edge, at the end of time. (In those latter, foolish days, we visited a fortune teller. ‘I cannot tell you of harmful things,’ he said, the pendulum stilled ominously over your palm. We fled, Mystic silence imprinted on our faces.) This morning, this morning it was your birthday - the children’s gift, a namesake St Christopher. ‘Only lend me the medal,’ you smiled, soothing their anxious faces. ‘It will keep you safe when I no longer need it.’ Day passes into evening. A marine breeze slips over our sea glass on the sill – each green or blue shard a reliquary of euphoric younger summers, when these were translucent gems snatched from the tide’s milky edge. You lie on your side, a marble knight waylaid. Your still face bears no stamp of the last whirlwind days – the visits from those, the gentle nurse assures us, who came to guide you home: strange children playing just out of sight; poets arguing by your ear in unintelligible voices. Outside, the sea breathes for you – the rushing of stones pulled by water. But, far beyond the horizon now in superluminal flight, you have no need of it. Beached, we are left here, our little band of three. Slowly, the rhythm of the clock asserts itself. Our son touches his sister’s arm and whispers: ‘Shall we sing that last version of Happy Birthday?’ And, because all that is normal is gone, because here lies both an end and a beginning, we do. >>>Caleb Cluff
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