Death of a Friendship - Harry Guest
I mourn, now that your house contains such fractured shadows. This wine you've handed me tastes sour. I joke and you do not laugh. When you speak, assuming my approval, I stare into discoloured depths of my glass, longing to get away.
Rain drives against your walls. The few shrubs you have planted shrink in the cold. Where there was amity, questions echo between us. Tufts of dark lilac branching from tall vases shed minute dry flowers like grief for a lost fragrance, leave on the smooth piano scattered omens neither of us can read.
The past is empty of romance,
its summers flecked with heartbreak
and its negatives destroyed-.
But weren't there moments when
the blue sea glittered, when the lithe
curve of a diver forged another
link between wave and cloud?
I wonder, though, in fear
were those young grinning faces always
plague-marred, was the fun a lie,
were dreams we've jettisoned
mere husks about this dirt,
dislike? One fiction may
have replaced another for
wherever I look with you I find,
instead of light, a slyness.
We could not name the truth. What used to brag
lies in your cupboard under lock and key.
You care no more
for angels or the underdog,
translating all the terms we used
into intolerance. Your world
now clusters round
the emulation of the rich.
I can't feel glad about old times because I am afraid that what I see here I suspected then but shunned the knowing. The tarnish of this has rubbed off on me. The years we shared look counterfeit. If so, more than affection died today. What hurts perhaps the most is that in you as in a mirror shows not only what I could have been but what I was or am.
Big Book Of Poetry
... comment