The meal was filling, delicious, diversionary.
You ‘watched us eat’ and ‘it got later,’
both baubles of the child Time, and his playmate Space,
but I was still not sure you wanted such a ceremony,
until the moment with the fire in the water.
I had secretly placed you in the Asia of my mind,
where every attention was paid to your death tower,
its building and meticulous festoonment.
I know now that the urge to unceasingly travel
the overgrown pansy pot of Asia on and on,
despite fear of the living drama played out in
every street gutter and beneath each tin roof,
was bound up with how I could help you to die, and me to live.
So, I took you there often in my mind while you were so ill,
and I wanted to be the one,
though daughters are not sufficiently revered,
to stand with your Ganges body,
and to break open your sternum with a
heavy metal bar to let out your heart.
I took you to Bali and walked behind your decorated tower,
carried by 100 bare-backs to the cremation site,
your swathed body peeping out of the very top.
Just before incineration, I won the race to its top,
to pluck out your flower along with your enlightenment,
and shin down to life with them.
But when the time came in an English drawing room,
I hand-built the tower, close ones passing me
stiff hollow struts and cross-pieces, red carnations,
candles, a pomander stuck with your favourite cloves,
string, sellotape, another charge of thick red wine in my goblet.
The heaps of materials surrounding me indicated a modern tower,
but it was no such thing.
When the sky was black, wind and rain propelling me
down the slippery dark bank to the rushing stream,
I carefully floated the tall tower on its board,
gripping its moorings for your death, and my life.
Its ignition showed your route, a blaze of memory.
Then you pulled me churning through smallish waves,
flames and smoke somehow an incongruence on northern water.
This little fell-side brook would reach the great Ocean
with some fragment of your photograph,
a snippet of your naval hero’s hat with its RN band.
a splinter of your slim devoted lips.
a glob of the pulp of your dark blue eyes of faith,
leaving me, waist-high in torrents, a soft wet page of you.