Hecate
Looking back, I’m amazed I got away with it,
or even what I thought it meant -
that letter I sent.
They were called aerogrammes, scribed on ships
and you’d write dozens, little blue slips
folded and choppered away –
forgotten until some day
you’d put into some port and replies were strewn
across the mess deck, torn into, consumed.
Trivia herself helped me over thresholds,
and today she loans me her ghosts
as the morning’s plummeting projectiles and missiles
remind me of that one epistle
I’d sent my lover left behind,
who later would become my wife
for approximately 11% of my life.
Oh, how I’d moaned, how I’d whined
in self-pitying, excruciating prose
that commiserated mostly with myself, supposed
I’d been abandoned to my fate unloved:
because I’d had previous, wrote something grievous.
HMS Hecate had pulled into Las Palmas
when I received her reply, harmless
but just a little mocking –
like was it some sort of test, give it a rest,
laying off self-indulgence might be best.
And indeed, it was that evening and getting late
a picture of me snapped with two shipmates
shows nothing of any scribbled sad depression,
and is on my desktop to this day -
Hecate looking from that past into this future
No comments:
Post a Comment