There had been a man in this bath
It measured the volume of you when you were
gone,
red smears above red smears, broad water
lines
like rock and crystal strata,
what came before and after. The picture
caught a calm pool where before there was
the spider of your four limbs flailing out,
four carers arms
pushed in searching for control in the
maelstrom of
water as if all we felt we needed was a
stillness and
not a chaotic sprawl of a situation,
clarifying, defining
creating actors, witnesses, narrators,
disbelievers.
I watched your spasms building shaking you free of your core.
And
the water out of control, elusive, lying to us.
I wanted to spring you from this calamity,
not record
your curious black eyes darting at every
shocking new
crush, your bashed frame twisted, twisted
more,
knotted you, split you eventually snapping
your power,
a shower of red sparks stained
the white of your eyes.
Somewhere deep a thud
in the pit of your stomach,
a dropped weight opened
emergency doors, emitted
your red-brown juices into the foamy water from which
you tried
to rise but then bombed when your heart
finally gave out
and so did ours, in part. We lifted you we
raised you up
gargantuan wet dead spider of a man on to
the rubber sheet.
The two of us, professionally, spoke, of how
we would hold your absence and recall the
clicks and suck,
the tick of your mouth. The rhythm of your to and fro.
We washed you, more carefully than I would
have thought,
and you were taken. Left, I took photographs
I wrote
evidence. Now you are back there in the
crumbling shale
remains of the bath, in the thin layers of fissile memory.
Your
spring of life, rasp
of your breath, breeze of your voice;
your shy softways glance of
eyes.
James Bullion 28th March 2013