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Tony Curtis is professor of poetry at the University of Glamorgan. His many books include Album (1974), Letting Go (1983), The Last Candles (1989), War Voices (1995) and The Arches (1999). His Selected Poems appeared in 1986. He is a former chair of Yr Academi Gymreig. Faces This is the last the very last, the fifteenth, sixteenth. I dont choose to count: each face different and the same. The still-born, the late miscarriage, the tiny death in the incubator, tubes removed, the support switched off. Each imagined face I re-imagine for the almost parents - the Obstets people and the counsellors are sure it helps, fixes the grief, focuses the love. Each failed foetus, each shrivelled life I father-forth with paints. Are these portraits kept in private drawers for the special times, anniversaries, when the pain becomes unbearable, or are they mantlepiece, front-room wall displayed - a sort of shared conversation of pain? I have to stop, to move back to my own life and vision, for the ghosts I have conjured, float in my dreams, ripped untimely from me. These I never show my wife, my children. I feel some sort of betrayal is close. I dont want complexion, nose, hair to take anything from my own, these poor dead things. Leonids Gone midnight, I rise to view the promised Leonids. Nothing. Under a low cloud cover that blankets the sky at all points of the compass, nothing. Not a star, no moon, just a dullness, the street-lamps fuzzy in the thick dampness. Once every thirty-three years the meteors myriad sparks shower onto our atmosphere and dance light down to us in ostentatious display. It is calculable, predictable, but appears as random as chance. This year they strike and spark out of sight. Ill not see them now. The coincidence of this planets curve and that shining debris. With clocks and calendars we measure all the living moves. In Vermont and Pembrokeshire years ago, I remember seeing shooting stars - surprising and random they seemed. And cold. Back under the duvet Youve warmed a cave, my love, where dreams of flight unfold. |