Mortality My Mistress

My declaration will be absolute

I wrote this piece while staying at Cliveden House, in the south of England by the river Thames, a place infamous for illicit sexual liaisons in the time of Charles the Second and his close friend, the Duke of Buckingham. The tradition carried on into the nineteen-sixties with the Profumo affair and the first meeting there of that government minister and Christine Keeler. And it was all of a piece with the conversation I was not supposed to hear between an anxious, furtive couple while shielded in my high backed chair  supposedly concentrating on my book.

It set me to thinking about all the parallel illicit liaisons we carry on: those secret relationships that we keep hidden from the light of day; most especially our rocky relationship with death - our own unspoken lover - who always secretly accompanies us.

MORTALITY MY MISTRESS carries the knife edge understanding of our own fleeting visitation and disappearance. Life as the lover, husband, wife, who appears and then goes no matter the depths of that love nor the years we spend together, and then our own selves as that lover: the intimate knowledge of our own mortality, our own eventual going, almost like a secret inner compass line, a hidden relationship with our own going, driving much of the beautiful sanities and insanities of our attempts to love and be loved in the mortal world.

Photo: © David Whyte

MORTALITY MY MISTRESS

Silence,
the quiet of centuries
in the ancient room
and the sense of others
here before us
as if everyone now
is waking to the same morning
all the others discovered,
looking out
as they did to
the geese flying
north
or south,
the Thames below
feeling
its way
to a distant sea.

And their mortality
is like my mortality,
a hidden lover
with whom we have woken,
someone we
refuse
to acknowledge
to those outside,
looking in,
a secret
we keep
from the waking day.

But today
I know
I will announce her
and walk with
her and show affection
in the public room
and
this declaration
will be a testament
to the hidden but suspected
in others,
an example
and a surety to the unspoken
and above all
a proclamation
to the unfaithful
who carefully bide
their endless time.

My declaration
will be
absolute.

An arrival
in the here
and the now.

Then
there will
be little else to do.
I will have become like
the madman running
to see the moon
in the window,
the hawk
I saw tracing the cliff edge
above the river.

I will be the man
I have pursued all along
and finally caught.

I will be
all my intuitions
and all my desires
and then I will walk
slowly down the steps
as if dressed in white
and wade into
the water for
a second baptism.

I will be like
someone who cannot
hide their love
but
my joy will become ordinary
and everyday
and like a lover
I will find out
exactly what it is like
to be the happiest, the only one
in creation
to really
understand how much,
I'm just
a hair's breadth
from dying.

   from River Flow: New & Selected Poems: Revised Edition