Auntie Mabel
‘Let him smell his way to Dover.’ King Lear
She died in an Old Folks Home which was notA home - a school converted on the cheap . . .A smell, like a doorman which greets us -A smell which lingers and betrays.We have no words to convey its truthNo more than youth can be told of age,Or the bright-eyed fit can imagine decay.In wheel chairs, crippled or bed-riddenWe meet the shades who cannot walk awayTo smell something new under the sun.
‘No man is ever going to come for you.’Two sisters gone from a cold, stone houseOn a windy-wet northern moor.Men enough for them left over fromThe war to end all war,But for Mabel, the mill and the churchAnd a hate-filled aunt who taunted her:‘No man is ever going to come for you.’How Regan would have smiled to hearA sister had survived the centuries run.
Like bags left on a stilled airport carouselWaiting for a plane which will never come,Good or bad, frigid or once on fireThey are now dumped around a t.v.But Mabel smiles when my wife smiles at her,A maiden aunt, all of a piece.‘What is the point of . . .?’‘The scent of the flowers she’ll remember,’She says, annoyed at my meaningless take.‘And the cloying, nasty smell will have gone.’