LINE LENGTHS - readwritepoem

This poem has been posted twice before, each time in a revised form. I’ve done some more work on it since its previous appearance last year, principally adjusting line lengths.

In my poems generally, I’m more comfortable with shorter lines. The voice that speaks the poems in the first instance tends to be terse & laconic & any subsequent embellishment occurs in the crafting process.  A Clear Blue Sky emerged in one session pretty much as it appears now. However, I’ve been gradually trimming & reshaping ever since, shifting or editing out words & reorganising the enjambment. This version will, I hope, remain intact.

A CLEAR BLUE SKY

My dad was a man of prose – a specialist: words used
like gardening tools to conjure shapes, to fashion patterns.
Language mattered: correspondence ran to pages –
letters to the council; ‘thank you’ cards to nurses
that read like testimonials. Even notes to the milkman
came across like billets doux to an old and valued friend.
And the writing: tiny box-shaped words in biro,
whispering in lines, or gathered quietly in the margins,
small-voiced but insistent, looking for truths.

When he knew that he was dying, he sat at the edge
of his life, scribbling a commentary.  Twinges
from a cancer hotspot got a note immediately,
draped around the Guardian crossword clues
or squeezed between the calculations in his ledger:
where it hurt, for what duration, and, in imagistic detail,
the character of pain (like a voice, like broken glass, an ache
like winter rheumatism).  And, towards the end, in his little diary,
potted phrases: “Slept well”, “Insomnia”, “Coughing still”.

For we who sat around his bed, it was the silence
that confounded.  To the nurses plumping pillows, lifting cups
from which he didn’t want to drink; to waiting family
fiddling with the radio, sifting through his laundry,
he said nothing.  All his words were spent just days ahead
of the breath that carried them.  And then, the afternoon
of the day he died, the clouds drew back, late spring appeared.
Mum leaned back towards the window, smiled and said:
‘Look - a clear blue sky’, and we turned to see.

My father didn’t turn his head.  Whatever sky he saw
was far behind in time, or maybe just ahead.  Whatever sky it was,
no messianic veil, no chariots of fire obscured the view.
His great abundance, just like ours, was absolutely empty –
birdless, sunless, silent and ineffable, mocking the mad commotion
down below.  He drew in breath, breathed out and said:
‘A clear blue sky’, floating the words on the sterile air
like autumn leaves.  He didn’t speak again; he died that night
and, one by one, the stars went out, a lexicon set free.