Roy Kelly

Roller skating down the main road in the cycle lane, her easy, smooth and flowing scissor stride on booted castors, measured, steady and elongated, seamlessly pushing through yards and moments, as if traffic was merely imagination and grace impervious to danger.

All the books stored above our heads, all the books there aren’t enough hours to read again, and still we hesitate to banish them complete. The second-hand life, charity shops, jumble sales, car boot fields: the slow long-term dance, temporary ownership, possession and loss. Charity shops can take anything unwanted, books and LPs, the unfashionable fashions, but all those hours that used to be you, what ever happened to them? Sometimes, as with burnt toast, things can’t be salvaged or scraped right. You have to discard. Start again.

This winter morning between seven and eight, half a white moon still present, a ghost not shining on plentiful frost and mid-January, in the weeks when Christmas might as well be a lifetime ago, distant as dreams or fate; when journalists shore up columns by defining all the factors converging annually to load some blue Monday with the most misery. And waiting on the landing a fortnight too long decorations, boxes of lights, bauble heirlooms, time-travellers tissue wrapped to be put aside, a loft storage act of faith that all will abide another year, one more Christmas, our rooms blessed with what’s known, fresh each time like a song, or the moon showing and hiding its changing face day and night in the same old, brand new place.

On the hearth of the working fireplace, the flags dusted with ash, we leave mince pies and a bottle of beer that Father Christmas might feed his face and wet his whistle while he is here, refreshment before he has to dash, having deposited the mystery of wrapped packages a further time in his series of deceptive appearances, the continuing collusion, what you see and what you get, and how they rhyme with the evidence of disappearances: the empty bottle a child lifts from the grate; the mince pies missing from a crumb-specked plate.

I am thinking about you Annie now that you are no longer a few miles of motorway and a couple of roundabouts from us here. I am remembering the meals, the easy chat and coffee; farewell coats and hugs in a doorway; that holiday we shared in Brixham, the fear of the foot noise on the stair which made us believe in ghosts that week, the sea house creaking, and the air screeching and crying with gulls in the dark or light until the wives couldn’t sleep in the haunted place. (How easy it is to be scared of no-one there.) And now you are not here, and your face can only live in memory’s day and night and everything that was you has been made to leave.

Walking down the sands to investigate what they might find, shells or stones, flotsam pieces abandoned by tides, two figures walking, slowly walking, beyond my sight. One small, one smaller, a boy and his mum in jeans and tops, an everyday disguise that makes them look quite like everyone else scattered about here between the sea and the dunes. I watch his white T shirt for the longest time, tracking his progress down an indefinite edge stretching for miles. And then only the sun, and wind, and me watching other tops and jeans on the shore, waiting until the ones I love return bringing their unique pebbles, wood and shells, unique like us, or like everyone else.

Early August and not yet half past eight, but all along the dual carriageway more than half the cars have headlights showing in the air from which daylight moves away — the summer, not the hour, being late — the shapely boxes streaming and glowing under the sky that was brighter two weeks ago, and two weeks before at this time, the season turning at the speed it must as the cars race or dawdle, and dark leaks through the porous heavens, and the stars climb to visibility in blue August early dusk, the beautiful headlight beams illuminating what leaves. Children. Dreams.

An unidentified lizard, the same size as a Grecian stick, the colour of dirtied sand, holds the dissolving power of invisibility. Only by the abrupt weird- angle turn of the head is its presence revealed; only this and movement swift and soundless as vanished moments, as previous love, here and gone, here and gone, so limbs and friction seem almost never to have been involved.

Midnight to dawn adding one more to the serial tally, love and irritation carried over, borrowed and paid back, all these vulgar fractions seeking to shape a perfection divisible only by one and itself.

Perhaps Heaven is like being foreign abroad where even the groceries appear exotic. All is before you exactly as it seems. Everything is as false and true as dreams. The language excludes you, familiar and strange, though all is apparently recognisable, all absent and correct in the world as it is. You are learning to call things by another name. The money looks like works of art, pastel coloured, value grown abstract and meaningless with beauty. Relax on these caféd squares, inspect the view, experience a larger meaning escape you. Look, the lake is furrowed with the long white wakes of steamers and ferries, clear despite the haze. A silent, pale, triangular sail tacks its way to a blurred destination. The car ferry hoots. A baby is fractious or sound asleep.

I’ve been occupying myself trying to write a long-ish poem. It’s an odd sensation writing a poem. You’re trying to make something come out of nothing, and you have an idea of what it could be, of stray lines and thoughts, and it takes shape as you do it, and you have to somehow notice what you’ve done and see how it tells you what you are engaged in and what clue it gives on proceeding. Even then of course you have no guarantee of the finished thing being a ‘success’ or that anyone else will like it or get it; or, in fact, that it qualifies as finished.