THE BROKEN 0

painted by darkness, over and over. And my open

mouth is like the leaning elm.
Pale moths the colour of her inner arm powder the air.
We had secrets. Forbidden to meet, we met. And at
midday she promised to leave her hostile house and
come to me when darkness fell. I watched as night's
tide stole up the slope. The black stones were drowned,
seas under. And nothing stirred. Her way was clear and
yet she did not come. Her midday promise mocked me
like a grin.
The climb was easy. I lay, then slid within the black
cascade of leaves. One jerk, my mouth flew wide, and
in the crack of dying my soul's eyes saw.
She was not free. Her door was locked. Her anguish
in that instant reached to me and as I slid she also fell.
She lay, and all night long, senseless and dead, we spoke
under the wide, still elm.
The Broken 0 They thought they cut me down, but I remained.
Within the wider curve my mouth curved also, a broken
0 within a broken 0.
The roots of the vast elm, like a fist dug into fleece,
My eyes were never closed. I saw the lost nights and
grasp the dusty slope. The trunk leans and the branches
the long change. I saw the flower dry on the cut stem.
spread like a slow wave breaking, reaching out to over-
I saw softness turn hard. She never came.
hang the slope's slow undertow. Curving over the last of
But now the long change sees her under her sheet,
the daylight, the elm makes a broken 0. Which, from
the cut flower, dying. All that was lost is lost - but
teeth to teeth, as my head twists sideways, is the shape
she is like the moths now, drifting inside the broken 0
of my mouth; my mouth opened wide and held open
where I am waiting.
here, on this slope, for year after year.
Oh, the swifts' thin screams stitch the dusk in folds of
gossamer where the leaves, ungreen in darkness, cease
to stir as the earth sinks into the last of the twilight.
The village below becomes as black as stones. For
seventy years of nights my dead eyes have seen them
 JOHN GORDON

The Spitfire Grave

AND OTHER STORIES

KESTREL BOOKS

1979