Miss Cadogan’s Room

Some smells just do it don’t they.?
The limbic whoosh  that picks you
Up so fast and drops you back in time, so true
And real, it barely feels like memory.
Her room of course had not remained the same.
But one faint trail of polish,  chalk and, books
Structured my lost geometries of chairs, the board and desks,
Held me tight in symmetries familiar and unchanged.

1 walked behind the desk on which she sometimes
Perched. and wondered if she ever saw, in the corner where I sat,
An ardent  small entanglement of desires, or felt
Just once, the different desperations
From those who willed her rising hem to rise just
That final fraction more. Perhaps she never really
Heard the sighs from Thomas Reese
For whom, it was at times, just all too much.

For one whole year, a single lesson every day,
Then Friday’s glorious double, when we read out loud.
Drawing out my lines, inventing absurd
Inflections to give my voice space
And time to add a hoarse and edgy beat                   
That  would  belie my age
And somehow span the bridgeless space
Between her twenty four and my fourteen.

You read that quite beautifully she’d once sung
Then held my startled gaze forever.
Though my dark skin accommodates no blush, even
Now, certain she could not fail to note the tiny blisterings
Of skin against the choking nylon collar, see
The bitten nails bite the frayed
Weave of grubbed cuffs, and somehow understand.
But I guess, she never knew.

P E Parsons whom I kicked and gouged,
Burnt and beat, a thousand million times that year
Duped and stole then married her.
In the dreams that followed, he forever crushed
His spit-wet fat cigar into the clumsy card I’d made
Laughed slyly as my pencilled kisses parched.
I rose from behind her desk,
Drew in a  deepening breath and left the place,

Relieved to find after forty years,
No spiteful trace of scorched card and tobacco ash