#012 - Effects - Alan Jenkins

Online resource:

Alan Jenkins, “Effects”

I held her hand, that was always scarred

From chopping, slicing, from the knives that lay in wait

In bowls of washing-up, that was raw,

The knuckles reddened, rough from scrubbing hard

At saucepan, frying pan, cup and plate

And giving love the only way she knew,

In each cheap cut of meat, in roast and stew,

Old-fashioned food she cooked and we ate;

And I saw that they had taken off her rings,

The rings she kept once in her dressing-table drawer

With faded snapshots, long-forgotten things

(scent-sprays, tortoise-shell combs, a snap or two

From the time we took a holiday “abroad”)

But lately had never been without, as if

She wanted everyone to know she was his wife

Only now that he was dead. And her watch? –

Classic ladies’ model, gold strap – it was gone,

And I’d never known her not have that on,

Not in all the years they sat together

Watching soaps and game shows I’d disdain

And not when my turn came to cook for her,

Chops or chicken portions, English, bland,

Familiar flavours she said she preferred

To whatever “funny foreign stuff”

Young people seemed to eat these days, she’d heard;

Not all the weeks I didn’t come, when she sat

Night after night and stared unseeing at

The television, at her inner weather,

Heaved herself upright, blinked and poured

Drink after drink, and gulped and stared – the scotch

That, when he was alive, she wouldn’t touch,

That was her way to be with him again;

Not later in the psychiatric ward,

Where she blinked unseeing at the wall, the nurses

(Who would steal anything, she said), and dreamt

Of when she was a girl, of the time before

I was born, or grew up and learned contempt,

While the TV in the corner blared

To drown some “poor soul’s” moans and curses,

And she took her pills and blinked and stared

As the others shuffled around, and drooled, and swore…

But now she lay here, a thick rubber band

With her name on it in smudged black ink was all she wore

On the hand I held, a blotched and crinkled hand

Whose fingers couldn’t clasp at mine any more

Or falteringly wave, or fumble at my sleeve –

The last words she had said were Please don’t leave

But of course I left; now I was back, though she

Could not know that, or turn her face to see

A nurse bring the little bag of her effects to me.

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Online resource:

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