He inhabits the corners of their lives,
his cry forever raised in them.
He is running into the yard or the sea.
His voice deepens, there is mud on his clothes,
tar on his boots, it happens continuously.
He goes into the army, he comes back and marries.
He lives far away, he still eats with them.

Wherever he is now he is the same
staring at nothing or holding still
for the camera. The son who dreams
looks from all the photographs, he hides
in the cupboard with old shoes.

The son who went off one day.
The son who has wife and children.
The son who works out of town.
The son who is in another country,
where it rains the same rain.

He’s in the house they made,
he uses the furniture and spoons in the drawer.
He’s in with the paint, always around
with the dust, he stares through the window,
he’s expected any moment, food is waiting.

Forever leaping through air, or waving,
or asleep in the shed.
His look is familiar. He is the son.
When he comes back he wonders where he is,
when they speak of him he wonders
who they are speaking of.

Everything is ready.
He wipes off his plate.
Now he wants none of it.

When you left home, did your parents maintain your presence by adorning their house with photographs of you? Or when your own children left home, was the emptiness so acute that you did the same?

Here, despite his absence, the son inhabits the corners of his parents’ lives because he is forever in their thoughts; they haven’t let him go despite the fact that he has gone. They imagine him as if he were ever-present, forever in the process of growing up. Photographs taken during various stages in his life perpetuate this. There are photos in cupboards with old shoes, there are photos of him “running into the yard or the sea”, there will be photos of him wearing army uniform, and of his wedding. He is all things at all times, and it “happens continuously” because the images that represent the disparate moments in his life are simultaneously on display.

His parents do not appear to engage with the real man that their son has become, who has grown beyond their photo-fed recollections. In fact, they don’t need him because they have the version that they have made up, and on which they feed their fantasies, who never leaves home.

If we look at old photographs we may no longer recognise ourselves; we are not those people any more. We might experience nostalgia at the passage of time, but the son’s parents do not suffer this; they regard each photograph as a current representation. It is easy to impose our ideas on individuals in photographs. All we require is an image and an imagination and we’re off. Icons are created this way; passion is engendered; longing is harboured; misrepresentation and myth are fed.

Photographs remind us of where we were and what we looked like once, but they are no longer “us” the second after they are taken; we shed our younger selves like snakeskin and they join the detritus that is evidence of our history. And so, when the son comes back to visit his parents he wonders who they are speaking of; he doesn’t recognise his parents’ version of him. He has evolved beyond the characteristics and qualities that his parents still attribute to him; it is almost as if he is remembered as one might be remembered after death.

His parents even “made” their house with the idea of him in it, and as a child he would have been, if it is the same house. That their lives appear centred not on him, but the idea of him, is a huge, unasked-for burden. He is their totem.

That “Everything is ready” indicates that his parents are prepared for him to return, and he has been “expected any moment” for years. But now he wants none of it. He doesn’t belong here; there is no room with all his previous incarnations occupying the picture frames and the minds of his mother and father. The images of his younger selves that remain contemporary for his parents are strangers to him now. When he “wipes off his plate” there is an air of finality about it, as if he wipes his parents out of his life also.

frieda.hughes@thetimes.co.uk

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