ABOUT FACE

ABOUT FACE

Morning over

The noon sun
squats cold as curdled cream
in a yoghurt sky
powerless to stay the scalpel
of a surgeon wind that flays each facet
of my face and thrums defenceless sinews
exposed and bare.

Escaping the seeping wintry chill
I sink exhausted in a nook of rock
shocking red in a washed-out world.
But enough of this:
this is not the time for purple patches
though the patch is pale and muddy mauve
with lowlights dirty-grey.

This is a time
for ritual exhumation of memories
for assessments of circumstance
and interment of grief.
It is the anniversary of my son’s death
at the picnic-point we both loved.
Here at the Edge he snapped into place
the final pieces of the puzzle
of his father’s life.

Morning over

That vibrant summer of vivid colours
and revelations of violent changes
when three driven children
sought the secret – as they thought –
of the missing years and the scars upon my face.
They’d found a photograph, late teens,
with smooth skin, symmetrical, unmarked
in contrast to their father’s present face:
a mess-mass of centipedes hiding in hair
above a lop-sided lip and tip-tilted chin
alive with a multitude of wan millipedes.

Scarred.
But how, they wanted to know
and why and did it hurt bad
and when and where and why again.
So they learned of the grind of shattered
glass on bone, of many extra mouths
gushing blood, of friendship and its price
- one hundred stitches more or less.
And what is more
they came to know
a man who wandered where he wished
who worked enough to make a meal
and slept in many different beds
with many different girls
in rooms, in tents, copses and mountain ferns.

They met the man with the endless chat-up lines
who swirled the girls with the whirling Waltzers
and tended bar better than Tom Cruise;
who hoisted heavy barrels of beer into bond
and sweated heat-ridden buckets on the blast;
who entertained the children on the Camp
and gave old ladies a welcome touch of youth.

They learned of fights and friendships
of protests, profanity and passion
of scribbled pictures and scrawled poems
thrown away or sold for pints of ale.
They saw their father then
was a different man to now:
secure, settled and warm
like an old fire with flames within.

Morning over, then,

Questions answered
my satisfied son smiled his thanks
traced the tributaries on my face,
hugged me, rose and turned
and gazed with fascination at the squirrels
sequestered in the trees.

Mourning over, now.

-------------------------------------------------

The 27th December was the anniversary of my son’s suicide. I had mourned for a year, and felt it was time for the mourning to end … and remembrance to begin. I chose to visit a favourite family spot and to remember the day when my children, led by my son sought to ‘fill in’ the gaps in my life story. As a starting point they presented a photograph of me – unblemished and notably free from the scars which disfigured my lips and chin. I got the scar when I was ‘bottled’ fighting alongside a black friend who had been attacked by a group of yobs, at a time when I was living semi-rough on the coastal strip of North Wales. It was a side of their father they never knew – and they’d already carefully and thoroughly ferreted information out of relatives about the rest of my life. This was the last piece in the jig-saw.

Before my son died this was the memory we shared.