Geoff Page: Two Poems

Testament

 

Three signatures accept it,

this document you’ve long deferred

or recently updated.

 

In weeks or months or years (who knows?)

there will be people gathered here

and you won’t be among them.

 

They’ll hold a photocopy each

and listen as your lawyer draws

a few key lines to their attention.

 

The rest is just “machinery”.

And later, by the elevator,

they’ll contemplate your motives,

 

the emphases they hadn’t noticed,

and smile at your insistence on

some detail of the funeral

 

or disposition of your ashes.

Why not, you think, depart unsigned

and leave them to their to-and-fro,

 

their lawyers’ cheerful pickings?

But, no, that’s not the way. You’ve (nearly)

always done what was expected.

 

All wills are just a quick run round

before the cleaner comes.

You’ve kept your health insurance up.

 

You still have coffee with your ex’s.

You hope that your apartment door

will not require a locksmith or

 

some constable’s “enforcer”

to show you, two weeks gone,

still sitting in an armchair with

 

a whisky and the TV running.

In bed would be no less grotesque.

And, as you sign, you’re almost sure

 

you overhear them talking.

 

Geoff Page

 

 

My mother never quite believed

 

My mother never quite believed

in how her seven made it through

to adulthood and propagation,

 

seventeen all told.

Across those final, spinning years

her mind returned unfailingly

 

to what she’d heard when still a girl

among those nineteenth-century women,

mother, aunts and female cousins,

 

who, over cups of Lipton’s tea

in parlours strewn with bric-à-brac,

would finish their accounts of all

 

the neighbours they had known out west

by counting off the babies born

to women who themselves had been

 

lucky to survive the blood.

Thirteen she had, and two dead.

Eleven now, I’m sure there were,

 

and four of them died young.

Which mostly meant within the year,

feverish with dampened foreheads,

 

a doctor standing by

with nothing more to give.

Often names were lost completely.

 

Some were kept like locks of hair

(little Mays and little Charlottes)

as, meanwhile, mothers found they’d had

 

another one to still the pain.

My mother caught it in the voices,

those losses hardened over.

 

All childbirths had a deathbed feel—

until, at last, a war trailed in

its age of penicillin.

 

Geoff Page