Maggie Smith passed while I was in London last week

I saw Lettice and Lovage on the West End in 1988. Maggie was 54. I was 18
& I thought she was old. Had never read a Peter Schaffer play. More jazzed about
Phantom with Sarah Brightman because it hadn’t opened in the US yet.
Our professor also required us to see Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theater.
I vaguely recognized Anthony Hopkins & wasn’t impressed with Judi Dench
& I went clubbing at the Hippodrome the evening before where my roommate,
MaryBeth swore she saw Rick Astley so we never gave up
on waiting for him to sing on the neon stage. This was our first time seeing
a Shakespeare play & we wanted to like it, but it was three hours long
& we couldn’t quite stay awake & I wished it was Hamlet because I read the SparkNotes
for a high school lit. class. I thought the painting of Ophelia in the water
at the Tate was totally cool, along with William Blake’s drawing
that sort of looked like a superhero, the Dali with the two people
eating each other with spoons & the larger than life oil of a red-headed girl in a boat.
After that matinee, we took a black cab to the Hard Rock Café,
stole the menus, saved the paper napkins for our scrapbooks, wasted
most of the film I had left in my Kodak Ekralite
& the next morning we went to the British Museum & I sobbed
over handwritten manuscripts of Austen & Brontë & Woolf & Keats
& I think the Magna Carta & the 1st Folio & some Beatles lyrics were there too—
& I didn’t want to leave because I had never loved words more.

& I thought about messaging MaryBeth on Facebook to tell her I am here
again & thinking of teenage us & how so much has changed & if she remembers the plot
of Lettice and Lovage & how we touched the rocks at Stonehenge
& how those books were open & in front of us daring us
to turn a page. But we haven’t talked in thirty years so I leave it that way—
& Maggie Smith was 89 when she died & I am 55 & not thrilled
with my seating for lunch at the Shard, or the crowd taking selfies
around Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott, or my swollen bunioned feet
for not letting me walk across Abbey Road without limping.
& they’ve built a new Tate where they moved Autumnal Cannibalism,
where it’s no longer on display. & the Hippodrome’s now a casino
& they’ve resurrected The Globe, added an Eye, covered the Tower’s moat
with a manicured lawn. Phantom’s still going strong, I saw it again
on Broadway a few years back & it left me completely underwhelmed.

Departure

It’s almost time to check out
& you want to make the most of your last day,
but there’s so much still left to pack.
& your parents have returned from breakfast,
or the dead & no one can remember
what time the flight is, or where you’re going,
or why they’ve left everything to you,
or how no one is ever ready
& Mom falls backward on the cloud glass tile.
Water breaks her fall & she’s now immersed
& you see the sky or blue eyeshadow
in the crepes of her lids & there are no bubbles
as you heave her up & try to remember
how many years you have traveled without her,
& Dad reminds you to make room for the Hummels
& the Waterford crystal goblets & the grandfather
clock in your lead-heavy baggage as he searches
for them in the cracks of his recliner that Mom
donated after he passed back in 2013.
& you have already wasted so much time
& you are stuck in what might be Mom’s
apartment you cleaned out after she died—
the one where you reduced a life down
to a few carry-ons and a marble green vase.

Victoria Nordlund is the Poet Laureate of Glastonbury, CT, and lead master teaching artist of The Nook Farm Writers Collaborative at The Mark Twain House & Museum. Her poetry collections Wine-Dark Sea and Binge Watching Winter on Mute were published by Main Street Rag. Visit her at VictoriaNordlund.com