Geoff Page: ‘I like imagining my ex’, ‘Shoulders’ and ‘Chartres etc’

Shoulders

How is it they are still so real?
We see their shape in someone’s shoulders
whose face is turned away.

We feel a tumble in our tenses.
Surely they have just stepped out
or been caught up in traffic?

And now the added revelations,
the little things we should have known.
Collaboratively, we build them with

a vividness that life refused
although its absence has become
their working definition.

Later over sandwiches
we’ll tell their favourite jokes,
each time a bit less well.

Slowly, almost wilfully,
they have withdrawn from us.
Soon now we will stand about

chatting in the sun and know
that each of us in our turn
will be no less obdurate.

Geoff Page

I like imagining my ex

I like imagining my ex
taking dictée straight from God.
She hopes she’s not ungrateful but
His punctuation can be odd.

His way with grammar’s often shaky;
instead of “who” He uses “which”
but not consistently and so
she feels a wild, unseemly itch

to set Him straight on stops and…