mrs lazarus
I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a day over my loss, ripped the cloth I was married in from my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawed at the burial stones till my hands bled, retched his name over and over again, dead, dead.
Gone home. Gutted the place. Slept in a single cot, widow, one empty glove, white femur in the dust, half. Stuffed dark suits into black bags, shuffled in a dead man’s shoes, noosed the double knot of a tie round my bare neck,
gaunt nun in the mirror, touching herself. I learnt the Stations of Bereavement, the icon of my face in each bleak frame; but all those months he was going away from me, dwindling to the shrunk size of a snapshot, going,
going. Till his name was no longer a certain spell for his face. The last hair on his head floated out from a book. His scent went from the house. The will was read. See, he was vanishing to the small zero held by the gold of my ring.
Then he was gone. Then he was legend, language; my arm on the arm of the schoolteacher – the shock of a man’s strength under the sleeve of his coat – along the hedgerows. But I was faithful for as long as it took. Until he was memory.
So I could stand that evening in the field in a shawl of fine air, healed, able to watch the edge of the moon occur to the sky and a hare thump from a hedge; then notice the village men running towards me, shouting,
behind them the women and children, barking dogs, and I knew. I knew by the sly light on the blacksmith’s face, the shrill eyes of the barmaid, the sudden hands bearing me into the hot tang of the crowd parting before me.
He lived. I saw the horror on his face. I heard his mother’s crazy song. I breathed his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud, moist and dishevelled from the grave’s slack chew, croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time.
Carol Ann Duffy
