And Swiftly Moving On...

So yesterday I moved out of my house of three years in central London, which was super sad. It is amazing how much you rely on what seem like insubstantial things. Mundane images or actions like turning left into the bathroom and seeing the picture above the toilet and the toothbrushes all in a row. Or knowing there is someone there to talk to without worrying whether you're coming across a bit crazy because you just woke up or had too many coffees that morning.

An amazing friend is putting me up but it doesn't stop those pangs of missing that make me want to cry every time I go into this new bathroom or brush my teeth in a different mirror. To console myself I read one poem and wrote another.


House Break

Fractured
Broken like an old piano
Chords strung out
And shattered
Battered back and forth across the street
By buses and cars

Pixilated also
Like a shifting image on TV
Disappearing in hisses and crackles
Unwatched,
Undesired gradually

Smashed up
In a sort of way
Unreproduced
Undelivered
Unloved
Unworried
Unphased

It bled out and in the dark street lost
A multiple of memories
Retracted back
Attacked
Jostled, thrown and tossed

Yet, holding still
A suitcase or two
The house is broken
But its remnants, still carried
Loved
Delivered
Reproduced




One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.