At my door I heard someone knocking
Three timid taps
A man that old age had covered
With attractive wrinkles
As we find ourselves face to face
I feel that he is looking for
Something to say but an angel passes 1
I throw him a line
Are you selling something?
Calendars, posing cats
For your hospice, a tombola
But he blurts out “I used to live here”
I did not know how to reply to him
Except to say “Come in”
The time to pour a dark coffee
You will tell me
It must have changed I imagine
I feel he is lost
The kitchen is American
Stuck on partitions
He tells me I am looking for, I don’t even know what
Memories of arrows and quivers
My lead soldiers can no longer fight
In your plaster-boarded house
But what, I wasn’t about to to re-fit the plasterboard for him
To hear him talk I had pillaged his house
But the door of memories is still half open
So I took a piece of chalk
And on the floor
I drew some big shapes
So that he could piece together
His memories that were clearing off
Buried
There, mother’s piano
Here, my bed
That night the floorboard creaks
My big brother isn’t asleep, is loading a bag
He whispers to me “You must go back to sleep”
I see he wears a uniform
I didn’t know what to reply
But I understood
What there was in the shadow
And that he’d had taken from him
A disappearing childhood
And wouldn’t come back
He will murmur one more time
I lived here
1. a moment of silence when nobody speaks