The Plant
I cannot handle dead bodies since
I had to shave your lifeless skin
and scrape off sins like chalk from a board
with broken glass, as if death squeaked
through cracking lips and hollow cheeks.
Talking is easier.
Do you remember the plant
in the top-floor lounge
that we loathed so much?
For me it was merely ugly; for you
those large waxy leaves were its ears,
leaning in closer to overhear,
to steal your inner secrets.
I sit beside it now.
The old place is closed down, supplanted
by Home Treatment, Star Workers
and voluntary organisations.
The staff were left to rehabilitate
unwanted items of furniture:
my wife took a shine to a table, chairs
and this antiquated listening device.
I sit beside it now, like a priest inside
a confessional, hearing you itemise
your errors, schoolboy misdemeanours
of tuppenny ha’penny pettiness –
not serious, not the stuff of formal therapies.
Hardly hanging offences, I state,
you must be a saint or simply
don’t get out very much.
But I was mistaken then
and so many times since
I’ve had to witness the brown leather belt
you haggled over with the market trader,
wrapped around the bathroom door handle
cutting your neck purple; the angle
of your purple shoulders, veins bulging purple,
my purple faced shame,
your eyes popping and pleading for five
or six days on a life support machine,
waiting for consensus to gather and grow
as long and thick as your beard,
waiting to turn you off.
I’ve never managed to turn you off.
Raymond Miller
If you
have any thoughts about this poem, Raymond Miller
would be pleased to hear them
