John and Helen

John, while my left leg lay beneath me
like a broken twig, and I lay underneath
the apple tree I’d tried to prune, entwined
in the ladder I’d assumed would hold me,
told me how he’d climbed his fir tree,
forty or fifty feet, and how he’d clawed
and hacked and ice-axed up a mountain.
John was seventy-three. At his funeral tea
I talked to Helen, fellow climber. Yes, she said,
we did. But not again, not now. And she,
like the Nivea-covered leaf, never crumpled,
never cracked, now never seems to age.



This happened, but not quite the way it appears in the poem. John Espir rescued me the second time I did my leg in. But he did take my mind off my snapped patellar tendon and shattered kneecap by telling me how he climbed his tree to prune it, and how he still went ice-climbing. He died of prostate cancer a little later and Helen invited us to the funeral tea. She's one of those old ladies who can't stand the fuss of make-up and hair-dos. She has her white hair back in a bun and gets on with life, as an expert in oriental porcelain. She still writes, researches and lectures on it, and never seems to get any older.

I want to be like her when I grow up.