Jamie Grant: Two Poems
The Written Word
The spoken word can sometimes be forgotten,
but phrases carefully set out in hard
clear script, once written, can never be unwritten.
Thus, at the end of a marriage, and at the end
of more than two decades, a wife presented
her soon-to-be former husband
with a children’s exercise book, in which
all of his offences against her had
been recorded, set out in each
case in careful handwriting, where an instance
would be underlined, sometimes, and linked
by arrows or stars to a previous offence,
such as: November 20. Late to come
home, without notice which was connected
to: Once again did not come home,
the two examples being more than ten years
apart. The infractions he remembered
clearly: office functions, with beers
and the last train missed, and he knew as well
that his guilt was never to be questioned,
nor would it have helped to tell
her that most of the crimes were trivial:
Dishwasher—again—incorrectly stacked.
Accumulating over several
years, they…
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