His Fridge Door Their Mausoleum by Paul Brookes

His Fridge Door Their Mausoleum

(I)
 
His Heart Is Where Their Home Is
he tells himself in bold.
They live in a four room home
which is his heart.
Left atrium his wife's bedroom,
right atrium her office.
Left ventricle is his little boys
toy box of tractors
right ventricle is his little girls
card making factory.
His blood keeps their house
lubricated and his steady rhythm
beats through their working day.
They work and play from home.

(ii)
 
Tentatively, she examines the hole in her black stocking
clocks the eyes of young men who try to look askance
while she remembers grapes, adds them to her shopping
list and her mother's pigeon feet walk Hadrian's Wall
in the photo she'd sent from The Great Wall in China.
 
(iii)
 
Peels off the tissue as if it was a religious relic,
as she always insisted he leave no ragged edges
on the toilet or kitchen paper and shows the world
he is not lackadaisical and is his own man.
 
(iv)
 
Opens his fridge door to inhale the perfume
of her petal that rises before him.
Sun rises and sets over its white curve.
An approaching buzz makes him hurry back
inside the door of his globule of water
as his boiling kettle sounds like the fall of rain
yesterday. A bees proboscis sucks up his home
as he grasps the stalk that rises like a chimney out of it.
 
(v)
 
Sits down between the rimples of a freshly ploughed field,
grasps his wooden oars and sculls the plicas.
Hopes the turned soil will not capsize because he can't swim
great distances. His broadcast seed fell below the surface
of the waves he walked as now his wife and child
bob up and down between these dry rucks.
 
His oars are tissue paper flower petals.
 
(vi)
 
Mother in law walks the walls of his heart
sends post cards to his late wife of boundaries
 
she has hiked magnetically pinned to his fridge door.
A post it note that has lost it's stickiness and flaps
 
on the kitchen floor reminds him to tell his mother
in law his wife and kids drowned yesterday.
 
Longiforum lilies attract askance bees to their sacred perfume chimneys.
 
(vii)
 
He sculls the ragged edged tissue paper of his heart's empty rooms.
His wife adjusts her stocking through the "I Love You Very Much"
purple words on the pale blue card held on his fridge door
by magnets featuring tractors in ploughed fields,
as water seeps out the worn seals of the defrosting fridge.
Soon his tissue oars will soak up all the water.