Your Brushes

You took my body home in your car, 
the one with the broken headlights  

and the map, stained with grease, 
unreadable on the back seats, 
next to the wrench, 

the one you should have used to tighten 

the wheels, but which instead you used 

to hit the stereo so it would still play 

our favourite songs, long after 
we’d run out of petrol and taken 
to walking on separate sides of the road. 

You laid me out, in the kitchen,

the one I’d meant to paint, 

to make it nice for us to cook in, 

but which instead, 
I’d left a tattered memorial to the old dear 
we’d bought the house off, for a song, 
because she was dotty and liked your eyes.

I opened my eyes, to see the picture you’d painted 

across the fridge, it was something you did 

instead of filling it with milk, and cheese 

and vegetables, in the crisper, do you 

know that’s what those drawers are called 

at the bottom of a fridge, a crisper? 
It’s true, unlike perhaps this picture of you, 

which doesn’t touch, anything more 

than your whimsy and love of music 

and the fact your fridge is often empty, 

but lacks perhaps the colouring in, 

which you said you’d do, to that picture 

on the fridge, if only for the fact you’d left 

your brushes, near the outline of a body
somewhere on the high road.