Searching For Autumn
By Laura Griffin
I saw your name today.
Out of the blue.
A nudge to buy a card to celebrate a date
that lies crumpled and forgotten between us now.
A date I have no right to remember anymore.
A cold black November night,
strangely fresh from the rain.
Car heater belting out a shadow of July warmth.
And before I can find my voice to bid you goodnight,
after an evening of brushed touches on the edge of a fingertip,
you’ve collided against me,
your soft lips dancing against mine
as I try to keep pace in a treacly dream of ours.
Just the pair of us, daring to be alive
on this audacious autumn evening,
with the rain beating a thrum in the background
and my mind barely keeping pace.
My heart whispering,
is this finally my life?
To be clasped in both of my tattered, touch-starved hands?
I can’t see your name the same way in the cold light of afterwards.
It has echoes now.
Sunday coffee with fried green tomatoes and poached eggs.
Fresh linen sheets slowly shifting like prosecco waves on a beach
as I reach to kiss you again in the soft morning sunshine.
Rainbow-soled trainers and queer ideas on our tongues.
Sunflowers in a Van Gogh blue jug.
It’s not the same now I hear it.
It has too much of you to belong to anyone else.
Too much of you to be just a name to me now.
It has the music of you in it,
and the song is too much for me to bear anymore.
It was a song I wanted to sing forever.
It was a song you couldn’t let me into.
My heart beats differently now.
Broken things always work differently, after all.
I know, even though it works again now, that it couldn’t
survive that song again.
Not again, no matter how much I wish.
I know that I can buy my own sunflowers, and watch the petals fall.
I know that my Sundays are just as caffeinated and peaceful as before.
And yet.
Despite my best intentions.
Despite my angry tears.
Despite tearing up the sheet music into a million pieces,
the song can still be picked out on my heartstrings.
Even when broken, its memory is still long.
My tattered hands and cracked heart have to be kept busy and out of trouble.
Away from the siren song that still is your name.
Away from the summer love of ours that burnt itself out,
amongst the taste of oranges and the smell of an impending storm.
And maybe, just maybe, I’m stumbling towards an autumn love.
At long last.
A love with cosy nights and cooler mornings
that hug me like my favourite jumper,
where the harvest is brought in
and the world comes alive in reds purples and yellows.
And maybe, just maybe, after a year of growth and learning
I’ll see your name
and just see a name.
A name of a long-ago chapter
from a finished book by my autumnal armchair.
Concluded, silent, and safe once more.