Poem

PLACES I LAST SAW HIM

This morning I’m on the train again,
leaving the village where madness has steam
and divorce papers have been served.

The car has died. I’m cursed by nostalgia
and fear, have spectacularly failed my MOT,
am close-up and off-balance every time,

upset at time passing me by, by the fact
I am dreaming with my socks on. Outside,
the kids run by, just living their lives,

although it is colder than I have ever been.
Inside, I am a little wizard of joy,
preparing to go back to work via the bookshop.

We don’t visit because the cathedral’s empty.
If we did then Cornwall would be nearer home.
Trains run by secret beaches I sang on as a child,

sandcastles rebuilt by strangers and their children.
Each day every summer I see him, and here’s the station
where I cried, heading back up the line as the future arrived.

Indecision and uncertainty mock me. He would have
loved to have seen today glimpsed from the train.
Glimpsed from the train: a house we visited

hidden in trees across the estuary, in trees across the
estuary. Even this city where, this city where we once lived
and the hospice where he died. Mum has lived

where he died, where we grew up, for ever.
The park is still there, but now the alleyways are gated.
Everything knocks me off balance each time.

Cry for my dad and the fact he never arrives,
then back to work, to indecision and uncertainty.
This morning I’m on the train again, leaving.

© Rupert M Loydell

Rupert Loydell
Truro, UK

Rupert Loydell is Senior Lecturer in English with Creative Writing at University College Falmouth, and the editor of Stride magazine. His new book of poems Boombox is forthcoming from Shearsman, and he has just edited an anthology of manifestos and unmanifestos for Salt. In his spare time he is hyperactive.

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