Worlds separate us now.
I have tiptoed across the creaking floor
of the locker room
with its bits of grass stuck to the floorboards
and odd scratchy golfballs kept in cardboard trays,
closed the door
and gone down the brown, waxshined staircase
to the bar and the boys.
I’ve looked my last illicit look with you
from my grandparents’ room
in the top of the house,
down on to the old cracked wood
and frosty glass roof
of the women’s end,
–the birds hopping
and the green moss
caked in wedges on the sills
and tropically thick and wet
on the black earth of the gutters,
Just like in the Hollywood film of
a decaying house in Cornwall,
weird and scraky music,
mystery and horror.
Not really;
Just women playing cards,
the dew on the grass in the early morning,
trees,
the high curtained windows of my bedroom,
and you.
I’ve said good-bye to you
and the white marble washroom where we met,
its huge and rajlike airfilled grandness,
the water gushing down the smooth vitreous tiles
onto the magic cleaning crystals below.
I’ve walked without caring
through the dining room where we used to stay
for such a long time,
a long time ago,
smiled and said hello
to the cleaners sitting there
having their cream crackers and tea at midmorning,
even felt good when I heard them say
in the echoes behind me
“I’m so glad he’s feeling better,”
and then gone into the billiards room
felt the velvet landscape
and the thick hide of the leather chairs,
and thought–there’ll be no more
playing islands together as they wash the floor.
Now the park is empty,
the wood and the stream
fill some other children’s book.
Our childhood sweated on to adolescence
and died on a seat under a flagpole
waiting for the new dream that never came.