by Sarah Howe
Last night I dreamt about the Fellows’ Garden –
I’ve not been back for maybe fifteen years.
Chagrined, I suppose, by the whiff of privilege.
We’d broken in, the way we sometimes did
as undergrads, stumbling out of hall or bops:
God, was that really what we called them? My friend
would mastermind these antics. I won’t say his name.
I recently resolved never again
to make a poem from another’s pain.
I can’t remember if he’d pinch a key
to the slender iron gate that’s hidden
round the eastern side. Or did he somehow pick
the lock? A rusty shriek, and he would cross
the moonlit sill like Adam leaving Paradise
in reverse – brandishing a half-full bottle
of red. I dreamt he led our drunken posse
in a here-we-go-round the mulberry tree . . .
they called it Milton’s mulberry, though who
can really know? It’s said the budding poet
drifted off beneath its raft of unripe
fruit, and when he woke, he wrote an elegy
for a friend, a fellow student, dead too young.
Or have I made it up, the bit about the nap?
We all gripped hands and stumbled flushed
around the spinning tree. Even at nineteen
I was such a square, a stickler, too anxious
to derive pure joy from the rush of flouting rules.
Of course, the Porters must have known. Did they
watch our greyish ghosts cavort across
the monitor in the lodge, and turn away
like disappointed angels? I went to visit
him at home soon after I first heard
the news. It had been a while. These days he’s still
the same old jovial Evangelical, but now
I think he reads the Telegraph. I was shocked
how thin he’d got, his yellowing skin.
Chuckling, he asked if I would like to see
his scar: I caught his little girl’s expression
as her daddy tented up his T- shirt
showing off the puckered ridge, stitches fresh,
an uneven slash that ran beneath his ribs.
It’s not just in my gut. That’s the problem.
Bouncing his boy from knee to knee, he winced –
the toddler oblivious to his father’s pain,
the way he hunched. Just then I longed to
prop him up somehow, like the stakes that lift
the mulberry’s exhausted boughs
sprawling from its grassy burial mound:
a silhouette so frail it seemed a miracle
each spring when at last it sprouted buds.
The first draft of this had some awful line
about the tree that ‘let in suffering to the world’.
I can hardly bear to think about it now.
When they sat down to eat I made to leave
not wanting to outstay my mealy-mouthed
excuse for dropping by – a cup of tea.
No talk of death within a year or two.
As we hugged goodbye, I thought his tired
face betrayed a flicker of the teenage him,
lit-up grin, the one he wore those nights –
the walled garden spilling doubtful shadows,
his one white shirt unbuttoned at the neck
black tie nonchalantly slung. His feet were bare
and wet with dew in the slowly gathering light.
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