I lie beside him on the bed.
It has become a small ritual
since his last return from hospital.
Each evening I lie next to him
before I leave him to his great task,
his slow ascension up steep slopes to sleep.

The presence of pain inhabits the room again.
Its face is so familiar to us now,
it is like a third member of the family,
Many have children to tie up their unity.
We have this.

'Did you know,' he asks quietly
'that paim comes in different colours?'
We are not looking at each other.
We lie together like stiff effigies
of lord and lady lie beneath the yew and stone
and years of cold country churches in England.

Yet he holds my hand gently in his.
'There is the pain that is pink, he says
"It is the pain that is almost bearable.
And then there is the pain that is blue,
that suddenly flames with intense fire.'

He is silent for a moment as we lie there,
each of us holding the other by the hand,
He begins to say something more, and then
does not continue.

I think of a colour, absent and unspoken:
blue whipped to glittered white with cohort wind,
a shade that will grate and whistle at our glass,
white knife whetted to bone silvered light,
poised to sever bone and soul asunder.
And suddenly all being blunders, snowstorm blind.

I hold his hand more lightly, saying nothing,
His silence is a statement
to which no response but silence can be made.

Published in In An Empty Room (Five Islands Press, 1999).