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Pennine Platform Issue No.54

Ron Phillips

from No.53
Shared Possessions
(In Memoriam)

You will always be my first death -
yet now so far away that it might
seem a sacrilege to even write
of you - as though to drag you
from that place you lie alone.

My first death, and yet unknown
to me, until I chanced across
the friend who introduced us:
You see, she had this fit, one morning,
and they couldn't bring her round.

Crude facts, and others that I found
as casual - what else should that news bring?
We were never conspicuously anything,
you and I - friends, then something less,
that corner of the previous year;

me, playing whatever fields there were,
you wanting something more unsettling,
until the split - and then that final meeting
in a blazing street: you, radiant - and in me,
whatever falls between regret and love;

until, that is, I caught a measured hint of
your engagement. Next day, I tore some work
in half, and tramped for hours across
the moors. Now, the worst thing was
the grief I had no place to feel -

and the memory of how I'd steal
up to your room. One evening, you were
deep in Hardy's poems for some class:
all that guilt, and yearning for the past,
and Emma��s ghostly echo on the lea -

and you, that moment, glancing up at me:
then pleading: So what happens after death?
And do you think it possible...? And I,
tongue tied, or not wanting to reply,
touching being where the game was at.

But now I carry in my hands that
answer, and everything that thirty years
have weighed: my silence, your life's close,
its echo - this never-resting blankness -
each, shared possessions, I suppose.

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