Tug Dumbly - Dry as a Pom's Towel

Dry as a Pom's Towel    

He wanted to go

but my job to keep him on,

to drive the husk of his body

from his house, to beach and park bench            

to feed the birds, to see the sea,

scenes he could no longer frame with any joy

from the four corners of his walker.

He just wanted home

and the Bermuda Triangle of his ageing –

bed, breakfast table, lounge

and back to oblivion of sheets.

He just wanted to sleep, and sleep.

I’d coax him to the crossword

over his rhubarb and yogurt.

He’d sometimes play along.

Funeral speech. Six letters: Eulogy.

But to force him to any activity,

the rudest scaffolding of life –  

shower, dress, toilet, food – 

seemed a Sisyphean cruelty.  

I’d wheedle, bribe, bully and plea

to oyster him from his ‘settee’,

blast the Toreador Song, from his

beloved Carmen, to get him up

and keep my contract with his family.   

No dignity in ageing.

What did he care?

It was the sheer effort he bucked,

the exhaustion of just contemplating

this gnattish stuff.

I counted it a victory to clean him up,

to change the sodden kilo of his pads

or shave his crenelated face.

To dab and scrape at each sallow gulch

of stubble, to rinse the razor

of his white neck tufts,

was the gloved agony

of saving a ruined painting.  

Stark ears jugged to parchment skull

he was Dobell’s Joshua Smith,

only shrunker, more caricatured.   

His skin wept and bruised like turning fruit,

his teeth a shipwreck you tried to escape.  

Then the weekly battle of the shower

and his howl at the scald of tepid water.

Though once seated he’d give a pleasured moan

as I soaped the dunes of his backbone.   

After this, I’d say, we’ll go for a drive.

But why? he’d say. Why?

I don’t want to go anywhere.

Go to see what – more cars, trees, streets?

Oh goody! …

As I drove him to sarcasm I privately agreed.  

He was so fucken polite it hurt my heart

with questions of where a shoulder ends

and a neck starts, or a mountain,

and when is the climb not worth the while,

and why? And once again why?

I loved him, and he might have loved me,

his companionable torturer.

Hard to fit the remnant I knew  

with the man I met at his White Lady funeral.

The program pictured a stranger’s face

fleshed in vigour, buoyed on food and drink

in Ibiza, or some other brightly bronzed place.

They extolled the orthopaedic genius,

the philanthropist, the carpenter,

the farmer, husband and father. 

His daughter thanked me. I felt a fool

for how I’d treated like a child

this surgeon and sentient being,  

with all his precision, feeling and history     

packed liked dominos inside.

I lined up, put a rose on his box

and apologised. Then filed out

to the tearjerker Time to Say Goodbye.

He got his wish and now he’s gone home  

to his farm in Wales,

to his friends, to his wife,

to his whole other life.