To Say a Sorry Sight

 

To Say a Sorry Sight

 

A foolish thing – to think

and yet you’ll often find yourself sinking,

waiting on the past, weighted

by cement boots, holding up his flyover,

ten years passed and ten years older.

 

Is that you, floundering in my night visions?

It must be – nice to suffer no revisions

to that face I once dearly held

before he came to fell

our forest – where thought keeps you imprisoned.

 

A foolish thing – to chance across

that which you have certainly lost

you look without looking, a trace of hoar

that was not so before,

no, I read in your face  so much more –

 

quickly picking up a paper by the shop’s door

to scan without scanning,

if I could form a plan

oh, then I was a man –

but what? Perhaps contempt, maybe grief,

way past bargaining or belief.

 

In thoughts much kinder than the facts,

I move away, not looking back,

to let the past be the past,

perhaps it was time enough at last –

 

little left of her I once knew,

scraped back hair, tinted red, grey tattoos -

boiling love to leave love flustered

refitted with hardness, bluff and bluster

of avoidance – we are blocking the stage

for a read through at 50 paces adrift.

 

No – stay lost in Sargasso thought, becalmed,

where ten years passed has done no harm

and holds up to catch the light,

before the other can say, ‘A sorry sight’.