‘Two distincts, division none’
– Shakespeare, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle Dove’
I heard it again the other night,
The owl whose call I used to imitate,
Ooh-hoo, when you were dropping off – shrieks
And giggles from you meant you didn’t hate
The silliness I could still provide
When so much else went down the tube
Marked ‘surgical waste’. (I should have tried,
I know, tried harder – drugs, contraptions, lube
And other stuff I hated. Here’s to marriage-lite!)
That owl, though: it was, in fact,
A wood pigeon, one of many that we heard
In trees they colonised behind the house,
So many that a different bird,
A blackbird, say, a robin or coal tit
Was a big event. Or pigeons croodling –
And how we loved that word, we loved it
Almost as much as I love Clapton noodling
And you love Morrissey’s man-of-sorrows act…
Now things we used to listen to, in
Theatres, concert halls, on my old hi-fi –
The symphonies for fuzzy strings
(The day you left, the speakers chose to die),
And Dusty, and Dylan – you of course
Know all the words: I can’t go there.
Instead, I sit and stare, or hit the sauce…
So suddenly to hear the ‘owl’ and not care
That it would leave me in bits, leave me a ruin –
How different was that, how new.
(Go with the pain it said; you can own it now.)
But I hadn’t reckoned on what I saw
Today, when I heard croodling from the tree:
Two turtle doves, perched so close on a bough
They were one; heads tilted glancingly,
Faces touching in the gentlest kiss.
What tenderness… Too much, too raw:
Life should be this. It should be this with you.
