My Life on a Wall

What are you looking for?

I don’t know.
What am I looking for?

What are you looking at?

At nothing, at thirty years.

That space four metres up and two out where
Now is
Nothing
Is where my firstborn
In the howling viscous dim
Saw the twilight.

That pink is what I chose for my girl.
That dip is where she kept her treasures,
A cupboard top.

That space there is where her small hand
Reached, pulled and spread out its fingers
Looking with its touch in the dark.

Where is the stain of where
My one rage broke the
Coffee cup, hurling it from
Four metres up and three along
Against the wall?

The peeling shreds of paper,
The adult room.
That space there is where
We stood side by side and looked,
Looked at our wallpapered adult room
We’re big now,
We’re adults.
We have authority.
We have wallpaper.

Is this what they call gestalt?
Looking for form and shape where it isn’t,
Not seeing what is now.
You cannot see the two together.

That empty space where I could now shoot
A thousand uninterrupted trajectories
Knife straight,
Was once a slalom body-known,
My legs and arms and hands and feet
Slipped neat
Around the furniture,
In the dark, no eyes, not looking
I could walk the length of our apartment
And never once slam a toe against a table leg.
(Where did it end?)

Those lines, those were not space.
Those were walls, limits, non-areas,
Non-existent nothing now gaping raw and sore.
What am I looking for?