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Wes Magee

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Snaps

“smaller and clearer as the years go by”
                                 (- Phillip Larkin.)

Loose, they come springing from a crammed folder,
snaps by the score, as I clear a cupboard
of old letters, programmes, poem notes, crap.
For a decade they’ve skulked here, smiles and clouds
frozen as they moved, like that crazed mammoth
trapped way, way back in Siberian ice.

Staring at them now the faces thaw out,
names come trickling back ; Arnold up a tree,
Ian astride a cannon, army pals
languid outside a whitewashed guardroom
the sunlit days wholesome as fresh baked bread.
Smaller and clearer as the years go by ?

More looming large and fuzzed around the edge,
like that beast glimpsed through its cracked pack of ice,
these friends appear now deaf to my questions
about what we did, and why, and where they’ve gone.
Disturbing to dredge them from this debris
and irritated I stuff them in a box

and fire the lot in the garden’s silence.
Within seconds they curl, flare, and are gone.
And the ghosts ? In ashes ? The memory’s films
don’t burn so well ; slow fades and jerks maybe,
but there, blown up and towering over me,
blackening the sky as the years click by.


 

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