“I lost a world the other day…”

I remember… I remember… I remember an inn Miranda and a highwayman who came knocking at its door, under a new moon shining wi’ the twinkle, twinkle little stars that looked down on a land where the Jumblies sold sealing wax and cabbages and kings asked queens, who asked the little serving maid, not to go down to the end of the town for marmalade and a bier, which great lords will carry…

Oh where, oh where has my childhood gone? With its breathless words of verse and worse that tumble and fall in rhythmic joy, like a comb through the tangled curls of memory. Whose lines are as knotted as the memories that weave new poems about a childhood I imagine I lived; and perhaps I did. I will never know, for what is memory except imagination labelled real.

The Scissor-man went Snip! Snap! Snip! and daddy was gone. That most definitely happened, exactly like that. There is proof in artefacts, in death certificates and the gap where he should have been.

Or the glorious technicolour holidays which my sisters and I piece together in a tapestry of conflicting times and places and people and words. And somewhere, beyond the cracks, enough consensus lurks to say—I lived this. The ski-jump and the corsets, the oompah band, the crowded train and puppets on a string. When for me, earth had nothing to show more fair than Michelangelo’s David, or the Milky Way stripped naked by the desert air.

But what of the Sandman, trusted to care, who woke me to strange and terrifying games that played hide and seek in my memory for thirty-five years until, in fragmented snatches, they flashed back in technicolour cinemascope? What really happened to a terrified child, who left her body and thought she was dead and gone to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who had repeatedly failed to bless the bed that I lay on. Who is to know, now he is dead and gone and there can be no consensus to agree upon?

I so needed to be healed and meditation was the weight of pleasure that held me like a dream in a world of imagination lived real. A time when the inexplicable was inscribed on the soul as indelibly as a stylus scars wet clay.

And later, when somewhere between the heart and the need, God was elided by other lovers and became an apostrophe; did I simply imagine that I loved them and they loved me? Was that live-long minute true to me, all that heaven allowed? And when it altered, as it alteration found, did I forget with one what I remember with another, until the past has become a thing of chance?

And what of all those forgotten moments that have created me? Can leaps of faith and imagination span the gaps of my identity and make of me some fragmentary whole? Can other people’s words, in lines of poetry, fathom the unfathomable where past and future memories resonate in an eternal present? Or is it, that like all time, I am unredeemable?

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