Afterwards

Alison Croggon

*for Marina Tsetaeyeva*

You can't hear your own voice any more.
The air is loud with geraniums and daisies
but you pass through more quietly than the rain.
You have no business with flowers or with the earth.
You have no business with the people hurrying past you.
You are still and hidden.
You want to hear yourself, how much you want to,
but a valve in you has sealed shut.
If you take a knife
maybe you can find yourself all the way in
but you are too sad, any action is dangerous,
the cancer might blossom behind your ear
or the sky slide down and shatter.
Maybe no one is listening, but the walls are curious.
Maybe no one is watching, but the trees are attentive
and ripple with unseasonable winds.
You don't know when you will hear the knocking
so you stay awake all night, a flickering ear.
In the day you are as small as possible.
You wonder if the dead are still in pain
and if they dream, for you are forgetting to dream.
Already you are insubstantial as the corpse of a sparrow.
You can't even scream, you are empty,
you want to be empty, you want to feel nothing,
because nothing can stop it.
When she visits you, you sit ashamed
fiddling with the cutlery. You have forgotten the formalities,
you have snuffed out the wingbeat of courage
or maybe it was never there. You study your mirror,
a white plate broken in the mud.

Alison Croggon