Shredding Philip

[Before he died, Philip Larkin had instructed his lover Monica Jones that

his diaries should be destroyed. Monica called on another of Larkin’s

lovers, his former secretary Betty Mackereth, to perform the task. Betty

took the thirty-odd volumes into Larkin’s office in the Brynmor Jones

Library at Hull University and fed them page by page into a paper

shredder – the task took all afternoon. With characteristic loyalty

and discretion, she did not attempt to read the diaries before destroying

them, “but I couldn’t help seeing little bits and pieces. They were very

unhappy. Desperate, really.”]

This afternoon in the library I took the bunch to shred

As Monica had asked: thirty little volumes

Where daily you’d written out your life, your fears.

And though it wasn’t anything that we’d read –

Although, when your subject was life in bedrooms,

We had to assume it was the two of us you picked apart –

I couldn’t help noticing words and phrases as I fed

The torn-out pages to the steely fine-meshed comb.

And it wasn’t joy you’d written out across the years.

I shredded in reverse, so destroyed back to the hopeful part.

What was it you once said? No, wrote,

as a comfort, that everything happened to occur.

You always were one to put on too fine a point.

You and I could have happened – to be in the same boat.

I could have been the woman you chose to make sure.

We humans stick to false roads, fake maps, we decide

To believe and then breathe in that to keep it afloat.

It’s not rocket science – it’s selecting what to fear,

What to accept as common and join,

When just to sit back in company and enjoy the ride.

I carried the puffed bag of shreds back to your room.

It was huge, looked to weigh a ton: a pinky bore its weight.

Slumped it in your chair, it creased like it had a waistline.

It was the bursting waistcoat of a piebald groom,

Who sits and waits, half-lit, for his new wife to boot

Him to his feet so he can drive her to her new gig,

Her house where she will live with him, his tomb,

Where she will pass glorious days he’ll call black night.

Isn’t this how you wanted us to think? Call out all pain

As if it were a joke? Pun on happiness until we gag?