Future Past Present Tense

 

Future Past Present Tense

 

 

How have you been, these past 20 years?

You’d question, having both learnt life’s lessons -

presumably - some 10 years from here.

She’s 62, that much you’d calculate, you’re 74 -

and – what’s that a-knocking, late doors?

Is it you? Well, love once washed away the flaws,

who knows – what you’d once deemed pretty

is sitting at the table, looking like swirled grit,

potato peelings and dried onion skins,

dug out from the bottom of the compost bin

your mother once, in 76, stuffed your glass with

told you drink, so next time you’d think -

change that goat’s water, clean the trough.

Oh, time’s the leveller, time’s rough,

in grainy box-brownie pictures of thinning hair,

her tattoos once worn fair have rotted there,

on the backs of the legs, on hanging dugs,

stretch marks like shrivelled peach skinned rugs -

somewhere buried beneath - a hardened stone

baked dry - nothing you could crack with teeth.

You’d both smile, try to nurture sproutlings

sometimes - oh, tender, tender was the dawn,

you’d mixed tapes enough to make a cynic yawn,

but – here’s the killer – you’d ask her with a look -

can we still unhook that which was hooked?

A grimace dressed up as a mirror cracked

into what could be called a pout after the fact

might coalesce – you’d think of past caresses,

damp grasses that had stuck to stray tresses,

but no, not that, and not yet, don’t forget

there were plus half the letters of the alphabet

she’d claimed as her own – maybe she regrets,

now, but them’s the breaks, it died years ago.

Yes. Wished you’d known someone down past,

with plum Rolls Royce curves, a chassis to last,

her smile as broad as Norfolk’s and just as deep,

and a bell of hair that flounces as it sweeps -

she’d stroke thumb on her middle and index

into heart symbols, twisting it, up, up,

because she’d know exactly how to fill her cups

without wasting a drop, masters majors and minors

and when she plays – boy – there’s nothing finer-

in vows of swelling blouse, her deepening folds

and how both wished they’d soon enfold

before time might blow all those passions cold.