}} The Before & in the After |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










The Before & in the After

Dying wasps crawl into shoes, settle and curl
                                                Lavinia Greenlaw
 
 
The year before you leave, dying wasps
crawl into shoes, settle & curl, the garden
puts on armour, becomes a fossil of itself,
birds sing through night, the throttle
of the magpie marbling the darkness,
& I lie face to face with the waning,
a circle of bones in a scraped edge of skin.

The year after you leave, the fret begins,
summer becomes swelter, winter too wet,
while autumn and spring, angled in between
act crazily & spin about each solstice.
I do not care. You are gone where I
cannot reach, but even in the friction
of my dreams, I still hear the shape
of your voice before your body collapsed,
before its swallow dive. Your lunate voice,

like the corpse of a wasp, curved in
on itself, like one I’ve just found
in the heel of my shoe, & I’m shaking
the shoe by edge of its tongue, in case
it can tell me how to release you,
take back those moments, After &
Before, moments which settle &
curl, which won’t stop stinging.