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they have withdrawn from us.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 commas,
His overuse of “three” and “seven”,
the stiltedness of “Thee” and “Thou”.
These may pass muster up in Heaven

but not down here, she’s bound to say.
Thou really hath no cause to skite.
Some say Thy message is impressive.
Why aren’t Thy semi-colons right?

Geoff Page

Chartres etc

I enter by the western door,
all that height and all that air,
and look along the nave to sense
the meaning in the apse
and, roseate behind me,
a window with the day that waits—
the soaring of the righteous,
the plungings of the sinners.
I hear the fine acoustics but
the space remains excessive.
The pure, unbroken voices
hint too much at heaven.
And, yes, I know about the masons
needing more or less three lives
to be there at the finish.
I know about the sound of bells
and what a steeple yearns for.
I know that “nave” derives from
navis, Latin for a ship
and this one’s bound for God.
The transepts are its stabilizers,
the buttresses a kind of rigging.
I have to be impressed
and it’s not without regret
I step back through the heavy door
and over coffee on the square
watch it put to sea.

Geoff Page