Jeff Guess

Last night I dreamed of Christ Church
again. The fabulous nightmare
of a cathedral school, the hard flagstones
of the lunch yard, the solemn half-lit
cold benches of the chapel for morning
devotion, the dark cassock of a solemn priest,
the smoking pomander and the bells.
Where I shrank shivering during those long
           
interminable whispered incantations of ritual
and prayer. And never wept once.
To morning break with my regulation
blue floral drawstring bag beneath a leafless
           
English Ash. The sweet sharp zest of mandarin
in the slight fingers of a child lost in
the lachrymose of loneliness where then I cried
as a child cries, in the schoolyard.
           
And all that remains now is the unaccountable
smell of mandarins. Wanting my mother:
knowing even then there was nothing else here
that really mattered.