Wait
‘We will proceed no further in this business’,
he remembered her saying,
after it had already ended anyway.
‘Wait’, he’d cried, but too late:
his corpse lay before him,
rotting rigid on top of the sterile shores of grit,
beside a concrete sea of tranquillity,
dark and pale on her icy disc.
Frozen there so fast, legend has it,
that if you fixedly twist your eyes,
blankly stare at those far silhouettes,
blur in ghost vision just so,
then two become one; frigid.
Resting in solid state,
ready to sit out time and wait,
like two gigantic stone hands clasped
in perpetual unemotion.
‘Wait? Oh yes you will,’ she said,
not in so many words,
but he’d got the message
as she swan dived, angel swooped,
swung in graceful pirouette,
hurling her chakarani halo throat-wards.
Then two bloodied daggers to the back,
just to be sure, certain
he understood, got the point,
lying there, amazed, confused, but no wiser.
‘You will wait forever.
Wait until we both see sense,
which will take all of time,
due to the fact I’ve been on the fence,
given that these days it’s no crime.
So lie there, fool, in the dirt and grime
until flowers full bloom
to cloak in colour mare fecunditatis.
Sprawl there until my feckless forest
comes to high Dunsinane.
‘Well, I didn’t see that coming’,
he thought, as he lay in waste, waiting
face down, decomposing,
wondering how it was that one
not of woman born had felled him.
But even while he turned to compost,
to mingle with that lifeless dust,
replaying words he could no longer trust,
in all kindness, he knew he had to. Wait.
While each grain of Arabic desert sand
was back catalogued and listed missing,
when each snowflake was photographed
falling, twisting and caught French kissing.
Until, eventually, he fertilized with slow decay
to bring forth buds to blossom the clay.
‘Now wouldn’t that be grand,’
he might have softly said,
if the vacuum could bear to hear sound
while he melted into the lunar shell.
‘To here be one day waiting, found
tending our garden, alive and well.’
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