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Carolyn King

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Myeloma Awareness Open Poetry Competition 2004; First Prizewinner

The Last Waltz

That night you came in out of the rain
and danced me across the landing, dripping
puddles of moonlight like stepping-stones,
I knew the carpet would never recover.

You said you liked me soaked to the skin:
we steamed together.

You’d been celebrating all the way home
(7-6 on a penalty shoot-out!),
the soggy remains of a till-receipt from The Angel
still in your trouser pocket.

I didn’t give a toss about the carpet, confident
you were made of sterner stuff.

But I was wrong.

And I saw the replay this afternoon
when I went to collect your dry-cleaned jacket -
the moon, the cloudburst and the blue shirt
clingfilmed to your wiry frame;

for it swung into view, along with a long line
of others, cloaked in cellophane, all swaying
in 3/4 time like the torsos of carcasses
waltzing on abattoir hooks.

And I hugged you to me, feeling as though
you’d been handed back again;

last-waltzing around the shop, irrespective
of puzzled looks from passers-by uncertain
whether to laugh or cry at the sight of a woman
so obviously deranged.

But friends who’d laid wreaths on your grave
and had known us for thirty years
would have smiled to each other,
seeing that little had changed:

I was dancing on borrowed time -
and you were legless.
The Last Waltz simply bowled me over. Its observed detail, pacing and gathering of momentum go with an energy - almost a fierceness - in the face of loss, handled with astonishing finesse. Fine correspondences too, as in the reminder of ‘the cloudburst and the blue shirt clingfilmed to your wiry frame’, in the jacket ‘cloaked in cellophane’ - and the sheer shock of the ‘torsos of carcasses / waltzing on abattoir hooks’. From then to the end of the poem, for all its boldness, is decorously handled, and for my money structured impeccably, with the shift of focus and widening of perspective in the penultimate stanza setting up the last couplet which induced in me a moment of stunned silence, like the poem’s own ‘passers-by uncertain/ whether to laugh or cry’.

Stewart Conn.

Page(s) 68-69

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