ROOFLINES PUBLISHED 'OASIS' 1999
"What are regrets? They are small insects, darling, that crawl over your soul in the early hours of the morning." (from 'The Willow Cabin' by Pamela Frankau)
Lest he be subtle, Gerry always managed to hit home with his glance. Unkindness was his method of being natural. He knew his women wanted at least that - to be himself. The modus operandi of his eyes.
"A poem is like a story with all the stuffing taken out..." he started.
Myrtle grimaced. A slanting ricochet of looks. She felt her stomach grip around a plum-puddding, uneaten yet lodged in the gut nonetheless.
"…the plot of a poem being the meaningfulness between the words and, yes, Myrtle, let's not forget, ghosts speak such spaces as their bread-and-butter of communication ..."
Gerry was fast losing Myrtle. The pudding was steeped in a fiery sauce and broken glass fell from some window above. The couple scattered to avoid the plummeting shards. Wartime had bombs even when there were no planes in the sky. They seemed to be offloaded from nowhere in those erstwhile days of black-and-white, threatening the roofliness of rooflines.
"....only going to show that the spaces we move into are safe as houses…"
Myrtle did not have time to engage in argument. Regrets were merely the way people those days decked out death with the accoutrements of intestacy. Nobody could fathom the precariousness of pantiles nor gauge their durability or, even, their providential provenance as landscape.
Myrtle gagged on tens of tanners. Gerry ran for cover. Another wartime story. With such aborted protagonists caught in world-wide webs of silver spew and crossfire. I was not even begun to be conceived, let alone considered ripe enough to construe this poem.
"Lest this be too subtle, his tone was unkind enough to drive at least his will to unkindness home. It did: she withdrew from the pocket her other hand in order to, self-protectively, fold her arms."
(from 'The Heat of the Day' by Elizabeth
Bowen)
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