Many years ago, I had a Russian boyfriend. (I would love to visit Russia. Yes, in
spite of President Putin’s anti-gay stance. One day, maybe…) His name was
Anatoly and he was studying here. He answered to Nat although I’m not sure
even he knew how this had come about. He was not only a genuinely nice guy but
also good looking and a brilliant cook. In short, he was every gay man’s dream
of a partner and way out of my league, or so I thought. Yet, somehow Nat and I
became more than friends during his stay here.
Nat is
the only boyfriend I’ve ever had who loved poetry. (Yes, even mine.) I missed
him a lot when he returned to Russia and hoped we would stay in touch, but Fate
had other plans for us. About three years later, I received a brief note that
has been forwarded from several different addresses to say he was getting
married to ‘a girl called Anna.’ It was just as well he hadn’t put an address
or I would probably have caught the next plane to Moscow.
While my poetry is a diary of sorts. no one but me will ever know which poems are
based on my own life or on observations of other people’s lives or just
wishful thinking on all our parts. It is not surprising then that, as I browse
my poems, faces, places and circumstances spring to mind that may be directly
related to the poem or simply passing at a tangent to it. So now I find myself
thinking about Nat and wondering what happened to him, hoping he is happy, but
concerned that a hot-blooded young gay man should have chosen to marry. Has
Anna made him happy? Do they have children? I will probably never know.
None of
us are perfect nor do we live perfect lives. Yet, it is in those very
imperfections that the roller coaster ups and downs of everyday existence lie.
Whether or not we are feeling quite up to the ride is another matter…
As I grow
old(er) I find myself looking back on the past and regretting much of it for
one reason or another. After all, where has my life brought me but to
this growing old alone…and me with such a capacity for love?
Oh, but a
pointless exercise, this negative stuff, I agree. Better by far to engage in
some positive thinking, be glad for the parts regret cannot reach and try to be
that person regret could never touch. Easier said than done, but methinks well
worth the effort or old age is likely to be even less of a picnic than old
bones would have it…
WHERE THE ROAD IS BARE, PLANT TREES
Smoky
haze on a lonely road,
rogue
leaves falling one by one
like faces
in a Hall of Mirrors
reflecting
such multiple fractures
of times
past, hints of joy
and
laughter mangled by tears,
as those
I have loved and lost
gazing
anxiously through my fears;
a
merciless naming of parts
(success,
achievement…) heads
turned by
the darker side
of
fulfillment, tiny flames licking
at what
we care to call 'soul’
Smouldering
seasons lost
to wisps
of smoke, scalding caresses,
half-truths
let drift with a smile;
familiar
faces rallying at such times
of need
as this, reassurances
once
betrayed and tossed aside,
now
returning to haunt
the self-centred
manipulations
and
errors of judgement
that
brought us here, fuelling a pyre
of
purpose-built paranoia;
time to
put life’s illusions to rout
and its
angrier fires out
Look, and
find a hunchback called Pain
planting
trees on New Memory Lane
Copyright R. N. Taber 1999; 2014
[Note: An
earlier version of this poem first appeared in the anthology Duende, Poetry Today [Forward
Press] 1999 and subsequently in Love and Human Remains,
Assembly Books, 2001.]
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