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Peter Asher

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Blanket Box Wood

The window becomes not there.
People die in the bedrooms,
and upstairs is not a place
for eight year olds to think or grin in.
Granny says so.

She knows about men and their breathing
in gassed lung fragments
unto their deaths. So I stay out of doors,
on the sofa, being
not very well myself,

and run in and out of the woods
within my books beside me,
which, funnily enough, eventually lead up there
to the landing where grandad’s huge
wooden blanket box is.

All his damp, staling T.B. left behind him
for me to play in and out of.
Until the landing becomes him;
an awareness of his not here still
hereness. The stillhereness which lets

me smell it, close the box lid,
and being sure to look behind me –
go downstairs to the absent window
of my mind’s absent wanderings
outdoors on the darkened landing
in the dark woods growing
from the sofa’s safety.

 

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