After words

Hunger

I hunger for you.

I hunger for the taste
of your words in my mind,
for the feel of your salt
on my lips.

When I eat,
I think of the meals
we ate together,
the laughter shared,
food enjoyed.

When I drink
I think of the wine
bubbling
on my tongue.

When I sleep,
I think of the weight of you beside me:
the sounds of your sleeping,
and the smell of your warmth.

And while I eat,
and I drink,
and I sleep,
I hunger.

8^th January, 2004

Oncology

The ancients thought of love
as a fever.
They burned with the heat of passion,
raved with mad delirium,
were carried trembling by the rising fire
of their desire.

(Me too).

But love is more like cancer
one of those elegantly named
cancers of the marrow and the blood:
a tide of otherness
washing through the body and the mind
and tainting every cell.

When the lover's left
the victim's task
is patiently to heal,
waiting while life slowly reasserts itself
and painfully,
cell by infected cell,
the loving cancer leaves,
until she becomes herself again,
purified and damaged.
Whole.

13^th February 2004

Dialogues

The following are Katauta, which is a Japanese counted-syllable form similar to Haiku. Traditionally, Haiku are about nature. Similarly, Katauta are dialogues between lovers, the first line asking a question, the second and third lines answering it. The syllable count is 5-7-7.

The first group are overtly sexual, and include strong language. The second group are more obviously romantic. I confess to being curious about which of the two sets convey loss better, and which convey the most tenderness.

Dialogues - I

Jig Saw

But somewhere
in another time
the picture's perfect:
  - Lake Geneva in the sun, perhaps
  - The Grand Canal in Venice
  - Now York, from the sea.

All that I could see today
was a corner of cardboard
shining pure and blue on the asphalt,
the thousand pieces of the puzzle
scuttering down the street,
clumping at the base of plants,
dissolving in the rainbow puddles,

kicked
and trodden
by the blind oblivious feet
of people hurrying past
trying to puzzle out
the mis-fitting pieces
of their own fragmented lives.

28^th February 2004

All poems copyright © Beth Cargill, 2004. All rights reserved.