PIECES.
From time to time some scrap of memory
gets stuck onto your fingers.
It was in your pocket.
Something.
How you try to turn the light on in the
darkness
by the string that isn't there.
It has a button on the bottom
in the flat you haven't lived in for a crowd of
years.
And she would hold a piece of puzzle
puzzling over it for half an hour on end.
Some piece.
But she could do large jigsaw puzzles
with the picture down
and, maybe more significantly, would.
It rained forever,
timbers numb with mildew.
Someone would be floating up the ancient lift
among the gloom of upper landings :
a dishevelled eagle in a cage inside a cage
within a prison,
in the hush and splash of rain.
She, crouching in her chamber
held up pieces to the window shaft
and hummed a slight, mad tune.
The way you dial a number
actually remembering another that was once
your own
and someone answers and says angrily
wrong number, no, wrong number,
no, wrong number, no.
She made an act of divination of that
infantile absorption.
Fumbling hands,
and under them the flat grey fragments
clicked from time to time into their places.
While the pictured castle, lake and swans
with all their clues
like dreams entombed in slumber you can
never reach
yet all day live in awe of
gazed face-downwards on the boards.