Prose Poems by Mary Pomfret

LOVING

One night in the dark, deep and black, you whispered ‘you and me’ and then I knew it would be me and you because you breathed those three words into me and my world became you and me, and even though the poet said one thing he knew for sure was ‘life goes on,’, I say one thing I know for sure is ‘you and me’, even though you are gone and I buried you by the seaside facing east and planted daisies on your grave and visit you every day, it is still you and me, and our photos sit high on the piano you used to play for me in the evenings when the sun was setting and the notes would float around us as I sipped my gin and gazed out across the fields of wheat and grain and you sang the song you wrote about me and you, ‘You and Me’.



SHELVING

I was always nagging you to clean your house, to tidy your mess, to hang your wet washing outside on the clothesline instead of on an old wooden rack in the middle of the lounge room. When I first started to visit you, it didn’t bother me much that your mantlepiece was still decorated with last year’s tinsel or that you had last century’s newspapers stacked on one end of the couch.
But when I began to contemplate growing old with you (it was you who suggested it, after all) I realised I could never live with such cluttered disorder no matter how much I loved snuggling up to you in your warm bed on winter nights, or sitting with you in the sunshine on summer afternoons beside your weeping cherry tree.
I lived in hope that you would change your messy ways so we could live together in harmony, spend our mornings in the garden, our evenings by a cosy fire in a beautiful house with everything shipshape.
Come over, you said, one rainy Sunday. I’ve done a bit of cleaning up. Excited at the prospect of seeing all the work you’d done to impress and please me, I drove through the fog to your door.
But everything looked the same, dusty as ever, except for the shelf with the framed photographs I had given you to remind you of me.
The shelf was polished and clear.
The photographs were gone.
I dusted off the shelf, you said smiling from ear to ear.
Have you dusted me off, too?





RELEASING

Difficult to sleep, she finally settles and dreams, an un-extraordinary dream. A small girl sits alone on a park bench waiting —just waiting—her tears spilling down into a pond at her feet. 
Just before dawn, she drifts ghostlike out of her dreamscape into her kitchen.  Familiar cobwebs, crumbs on the bench.  A cockroach races behind the stove. 
Making tea is her first line of defence. The water begins to bubble and just as the old tin kettle lets out a low screech, she feels a thick sob rising inside her, slow and deep, trapped in her throat, so hard it hurts.  
She lets out a long loud moan, a sound that circles and hovers for a moment, then floats through tattered lace curtains fretting in the cool morning breeze and finally escapes like steam, through the open sash window to meet a golden sunrise and rests at the foot of the new day.