November

We all write memoirs or autobiographies, even if we don’t know we are doing so. We begin when we get an address book and write down the first name, and end when we add the last. The other week I suddenly saw my own, fat and tattered, in a different light:

This fat address book’s
More like a memento mori now.
Torn bits of paper fall out, the dead’s own confetti.
On each page friends one can’t bear to strike a line through
Mount up, and pull one back to a time before their catalogue of woes
Ended in a last, exhausted breath.
A is for Adrian, B is for Bernard, C is for Clovis
And so on and so on, till the numbers blur
And each old address seems an elegy,
Each postcode the co-ordinates we use
To fix them to where they no longer are.
BP