A trip to London brought the grief of losing my family flooding back

DARTMOUTH PARK

Sometimes we hang onto the memory of people, places or objects

To anchor ourselves in the familiarity of the space

In which we wish to dangle like a stuck bauble, glittering

In our barely changing atmosphere of dwindling oxygen.

My London drive of many hours delivered me to the point

Of unpicking the ties that bound me to Dartmouth Park

By closing down a house in one of three streets that had defined

The smell of home from home for almost the length of my life:

My ten-year-old self scrambling the lino stairs to a top floor flat

In Fortess Road; my twenty-five-year-old self sleeping

On the boyfriend’s mattress in Laurier Road; the two

Long-ago houses I’d sometimes lived in with my long-dead aunt,

In the same street as this building once owned by my long-dead brother.

So much anticipated – and sometimes disappointed – love

Accompanied decades of Tube trips and drives to a smudge of London

That has been empty of living connections for long enough to let go.

The neighbour opened the door to my last goodbye

And I stood, tears unstoppable for all those long-ago arrivals

That will never happen again,

And this, the final one.