Caliban

How I feel, at times, like a mad person, ungrounded, obsessional, checking, going over details, imagining. How I don't relax into the moment. The dead mouse in the black trap, instrument of death. Why not pink? The snap of the trap I didn't hear because I wear earplugs, but people say they do hear them in the night (that's all I need...) Now there is muted light and the sound of children's voices from the school playground. There is ink flowing from a pen, and wind funneling down a flue. And there are daffodils, large and yellow, their petals now beginning to curl and brown faintly at the edges. It's lunchtime for some though the taste of coffee and of strawberry jam is still vivid. Resignation settles on me as a man walks past with his hands clasped behind his back, the way he always walks. The man with short white hair and a sombre face who walks round here a lot. What is this immense sadness? We are tantalised somehow by the just unreachable beauty of life, like Caliban crying to dream again. I think of J whose mother has just died, and my own father dead 23 years. And of A now alive just that long - six months longer than my father has been dead. So much of it comes to me grimly. Death and separation and what is not. The ivy shivers on the school wall. The sound of an unidentified power tool. I am grateful. But these things can't save me. Cheerful A who came to measure up for a new fence, a log store and raised beds - his bounce and almost theatrical enthusiasm. He left me feeling briefly charged, excited, as though perhaps life could be a series of adventures and challenges.