Et j’ai fidèlement aimé ta belle tête
Sous des cheveux châtains et sous des cheveux gris.
François Maynard, ‘La belle vieille’

The harbingers are come. See, see their mark:
White is their colour, and behold my head.
But must they have my brain? Must they dispark
Those sparkling notions, which therein were bred?
George Herbert, ‘The Forerunners’

The polaroid-rescued mirth
of a couple in their early fifties standing on hot, stone steps
before a joyful, baroque façade;
our wistful eyes pouring over holiday snaps,
sighing for a juicy slice of Italy’s oppressive sun
in the electric heat of our humble flat;
the things people do and did or not
in simple chats about this and that
over dinner… tea… cakes… (for her) ciggies;
evening TV blending with our observations,
the years slowly dimming yours and my agitation;
daily blether, the carriage of the hours,
the air pervaded oft by fiery voices,
angrier in appearance than in deed;
laughter generous, raucous;
the abided teasing that erodes pride,
till tinged with meanness –
later regretted, seldom reneged;
arabesque laces of our understanding gazes
and smiles, opulent in mood and meaning,
which blanket the wide world with a meek, warm stillness;
tenderness as punctuation;
your excitement at dolling up
(at last, removed the scarf-enveloped curlers!)
for our simple nights-out and excursions;
even the very gut of the evening our destinies knotted
with Glenn Millerish band swing and sway,
in a soft-lit hall…
it is all, all, crumbled
in the crucible of your mind.

The larder’s riches of your immutable, girly chuckle,
piecemeal raided. Everything taken.
The timeless child’s questioning returns:
Where? What? Who…? Who…? Who…?
Answers fail to hold.
Sceptic earth brooks no aerial root.
Your spirit slips away.
*
[My widowed grandfather told me
that the place they’d lived in for decades
became estranged to them though change.
Their convivial Motherwell traversed by the strange
human chilliness of unfamiliar faces.
So they moved to a smaller town
and lived together, according to a well laid scheme,
till she (no longer enough of herself)
became too much for him.

Rain that year spared them only fourteen days.
What a strange sodden land
Scotland once must have been
to some intrepid, discovery-hungry Berber
sailing by its mist-emerging, rocky harbours!]
*
So soon, dear, you left me alone!
Minds are not from quakes protected;
yours is tumbling down a dark slope,
by Alzheimer’s hand elected.

What of the worker’s pact: years of labour
for the prospect of a shared retirement?
The con-tract tugged beneath our feet.

Every innovation these days is bad news,
all amelioration for the worse.
Ignorance, once curiosity’s midwife,
is now its crabby grave-digger.
The universe is a pane of shattered glass
and peevish young folk play and ply
with the tangled, knotted, wiregrid that is merely the shadow
of what holds everything in place
for purposes we may not know.