Learning to write

 

Learning to write

 

The house is fully furnished:

A mother, three kids and the TV;

The father is upstairs, attached to a guitar:

An intricate arrangement of strings and chords;

An intimate arrangement of bodies and words.

 

My hobby, he once declaimed,

Is not playing the guitar,

It’s learning to play the guitar.

Then he took himself off for a session.

A terse man, pithy under the skin.

Once, maybe twice,

He’d handed me the guitar

Like a baton, like a lesson.

I never learned. He never listened.

 

And so, only when the music stopped,

Was the poem written.

 

Now, sometimes, if I listen very hard

I can still hear the fingers at work:

The tiny metallic flowers blooming,

Filling the air; dandelion heads

Going to seed, wind-blown.

 

The time is always the same: too late.

This poem was initially inspired by Carolyn Kizer's Thrall. See the link below.

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/thrall-2/

The original of the picture above is by Regina Cassolo Bracchi.

For information about her see the link below.

https://www.gamec.it/en/regina-della-scultura/

Family Therapy

 

Family Therapy

 

Tell me,

 

Were you ready for this?

Being asked to undress,

 

The tone polite but stern.

The folding of your clothes …

 

Was it tea or coffee

That you dunked the biscuit in?

 

I could, I suppose, agree

That when they asked who did it -

 

Who started the fight,

Who committed the theft -

 

That you looked up right,

Or that you looked up left.

 

Are you looking up now,

As if you’d know somehow?

Still

It’s in a shoebox under the bed - still

 

She’s young here

a stranger to me

the photo

its moment of happiness

excludes me

 

Young and happy

the picture captures this

imprisons and endlessly repeats it

still as Zeno’s Arrow

 

Yet no one remembers it

this deictic moment this little death

 

It lives only in the image

and what I now bring to it

yet still the wound

the piercing of the heart

 

It’s all there is and then it’s gone.

The Slanting of the light

 

The Slanting of the Light

 

You left them sitting in a room,

Backstage, behind a closed door,

For years,

Waiting for it to open

And for you to come back in

Larger than life - spotlight, drum roll – ta-dah!

With an invitation to the reunion;

Or perhaps they were hoping

For something small:

For a supplicant’s tentative knock,

For something to rouse them

From the stupor of sour memory,

For some good reason to cross the floor,

To ask who’s there, to open the door,

To set the dust motes aflight,

To change the slanting of the light.

 

But no one ever knocked

And the light remained unbent,

Unbending.

And now the door is locked,

And the room is empty and unaired,

Filled with music - no one has ever heard -

To announce the happy ending.

Legacy

Legacy: Take 1

 

In the scheme of things,

I go first:

fall off, pass away,

drag myself out,

leaving you with the job

of grief, resolution, euphemism,

platitudes and clichés;

the coming to terms with ...

this thing we call love:

the failure that is wrapped

in good intentions,

ribboned with guilt

(you’ll have turned away first -

a sleight of hand, a slight -

into another life,

leaving me

blind-sided).

 

You’ll understand one day,

when in what you believe

is your own life

you slip from its fingers

and you’re caught out,

not waiting

for the impact,

not remembering

how it comes in

                            sideways,

then remembering,

                                as it does;

reminding you of me,

of us.

 

Touché, you’ll say.

 

And  smile ...

And ... cut!

 

Déshabillé

 

Déshabillé

 

Saying goodbye, he kneels so they are eye to eye,

And then pulls her close, holding her tight, claiming

The shape of her bones with clumsy, clammy

Returning hands: clavicle, scapula, pelvis, thigh.

His fingers travelling, needing that haptic fix,

Unravelling geography and geometry;

Love like L-dopa, memory – synaptic tricks -

Awakening, shores and shapes rushing in,

The topography stretching out, the moment elastic:

History, anthropology, a religion of lust and sin.

 

(We want to touch children, and animals:

It’s our first response – to reach out, to pet,

To stroke, to hold, to groom – prelapsarian

In its simplicity, uncomplicated by sexual

Tension and implication. The primeval set

Of genes from which love evolved,

A reflexive action, boundaries dissolved;

Yet so fraught with danger, so easily confused

That one can nearly share the sentiments of …

That one can barely tell the difference between…

The abuser and the abused?)

 

He pushes his nose in under her jaw,

Wanting the smell of her to claw at his nerves;

Nothing unique, the stink of child, undeserving

Of the scented disguises that adults can flaunt.

He stands – needing again that height, that stature -

Turns and leaves. The air screams! The fabric tears,

Ripped at the seams down years and years…

Lives undressed, stripped; Oh the hate! The rapture!

Touched

 

Touched (by intention) - an extract

Her boyfriend’s tongue,

Tipped with promises,

Penetrates her mouth,

Loosens, unbuttons,

Unbuckles her being;

She slides off the edge

Of herself.

 

She moves through the cinema

Of the world,

Where strangers faces

Matinee porno movies,

Eyes panning like sleamy hands

Running amuck amongst

The folds and fissures

Of her undressing.

 

Her husband has an access

To her body she denies herself:

The piercing and eating

Of her flesh;

A gift, a right, she believes

She has freely given;

An invitation to ...

A movable feast,

A candle-lit supper,

A take-away dinner,

Finger food.

The napkin of her skin

Glistens.

 

One day,

He’ll push the plate away.

Learning to swim

M and Me Swimming

Learning to Swim

 

I take you into the shallows,

back into the loose

embrace

of water,

and

release you;

 

Year after year.

 

Time is the treading of water,

the dancing of limbs:

that sculling of hands,

that scissoring of feet

to the rhythm of trust and faith

(a mimicry of drowning,

of prayer);

a simple belief in buoyancy

that keeps you afloat,

and waiting for the right wave

to carry you forward,

and just

out of

reach.

 

But the water always gets deeper

as you get further from the shore,

and the gap never closes

on the distant horizon

(about three miles of eternity -

enough to last a lifetime).

 

Still, you step into the water’s mouth

and allow it to swallow you whole.

And I release you

(Or is it that you struggle free,

welcoming the current?)

and you drift away;

 

then with strong,

clean

strokes

you begin to swim.

 

Your feet will never touch bottom again.

Click here to read about the artist Michael Andrews and his picture 'Melanie and Me Swimming'

Click here to read about Graham Swift's story collection "Learning to Swim".

A poem for The Dead

Sorrows

He weighed six stone -

The size of my daughter, aged ten -

The skin baggy on the bone,

The meat of him gone.

Death reduces, like a good sauce.

A scrawny thing, a corpse -

Carries no weight, no remorse,

No apology, no applause.

And memory, eaten at by worms,

Claws at skeletons, at the marrow;

And grief struggles to find a form,

Scraping and picking and gnawing

At sorrows.

A poem about family life; something dropped

Splinters

To begin with, you are perfect, unsullied,

A pristine exhibit, kept behind doors,

Held under glass in the museum of us;

Kept at arm's length there are no visible flaws.

Yet soon, there are scratches on the surface,

Scores in the glaze that has become your skin,

As you are slowly cooked in the family kiln;

And you’re no longer saved for Sundays’ service.

Later, you are a chipped part of the set,

Casually treated, knocked about a bit,

Used inappropriately, as an ashtray,

Or a receptacle for items gone astray

(Unidentified keys that fit no locks,

Buttons that will never be sewn back on,

Foreign coins from holidays never taken);

Or simply slipped, unregarded, under a plant pot.

Finally, you’re dropped by careless fingers,

A cause of curses and invective, an upset,

The pieces pushed aside, swept under the carpet;

Yet there will be blood, pain, insidious splinters.



This poem comes from the offcuts of the previous one, "Plasticine". Some lines didn't fit and later developed a life of their own.  If "Plasticine" deals with parents who are controlling, overbearing, seeking to shape the child into their own image, eventually to reject it, "Splinters" shows the turning away to indifference, neglect and another violent rejection.

Click here to watch the film on youtube A note on style

If the earlier poem, "The Beauty of it", was freer in style, looser in arrangement, it was because of its narrative elements.  "Plasticine" and "Splinters" were an attempt to create a more 'formal', precise yet general, image of parenthood, employing a  slightly variable rhyme scheme within four line stanzas.  I believe that rhyme in poems is sometimes important.  I certainly enjoy the discipline and challenge it brings to the act of writing. 

To see my and other poets' work click here

Nature and Nurture, a poem about parents and children

"The thoughtlessness, carelessness and cocksureness with which children are brought up is frightful to see: and yet everyone is essentially what they are to be when they are ten years old; and yet one would find that almost every one bears with them a defect from their childhood, which they do not overcome even in their seventieth year ..."

Kierkegaard, The Journals

Plasticine

My plasticine baby,

You have properties, chemical and physical,

Self –contained: the essence of what you are.

And in the sky there is your very own star -

Should anyone care to look for the mystical.

But plasticine is what you are: face fair,

Soft as putty, and you can be moulded,

Swaddled, coddled, groomed and folded, 

Shaped even by our very breath of air

That oh so gently presses in on your skin.

And you coo and we coo back to you.

Our voices are your echo, listen, listen.

We watch and our watching presses too.

Your love is blank, but we’ll fill it in

For you; cross the t’s and dot the i’s;

Tick the boxes for all that applies,

Make multiple choices, carbon copies, sign.

We wait and our waiting bears a weight;

Our thinking will become your thought,

A soft pushing this way and that:

We’ll make you square, or round or flat.

And our fingers, clumsy with wanting,

Might squeeze a shape misshapen in us;

And you’ll be a question, a puzzle, a rebus,

A conundrum beyond answering or solving.

So one day you too may feel misshapen,

As if parts of you are not you,

And the you you thought would happen

Will always be out of true.

And you thinking that’s what you are,

And you thinking you were made that way,

Crammed into the kiln and baked in clay,

Put onto the stage and told to star;

The mould cast, the role not chosen,

The shape pressed, and the lines written,

And what can you add but some flaws

And fluffs of your own? Effects a cause?

You’ll think you can escape the nurture,

Then find yourself twisted like a helix,

Find the faults we had secreted into the mix:

Do Not Admit that this is in your nature!

Oh, my plasticine baby,

Soft dough, kneaded with love and lust,

Baked in the hot oven of your mother’s womb,

Rising with the yeast of me, then dusted

With sugar, sweetened, ready for home;

And you’re a crusty loaf on a silver salver;

A cake, a confection, to be cut and sliced;

And we’ll all want a share, a piece, a bite.

The mouth waters, fills with saliva.

We’re gonna eat you up and spit you out.

The taste is obscene; you’re plasticine.

click here to watch the film on youtube

A childhood poem, The Beauty of it

             

             

What we learn of life as children is absorbed one way or another, and then it seeps into our being,both consciously and unconsciously as we get older.  Sometimes we are aware when young of what we perceive to be wrong, not just childishly unfair but actually wrong; a small outrage to a morality we cannot define. This may, perhaps, enable us in later life to prevent its reoccurence in our own behaviour.  Not pass the baton on, for if we do, what we have and what we give is a life less lived.

The Beauty of it (continued)

A six-year-old walks a line

That may or may not exist,

Always teetering on the edge

Of ordinary temptation, nothing original,

Over a safety net sensed by instinct.

The fall brings knowledge,

Something not seen from above –

Not a test you were born to fail,

Nor an impulse you could never resist –

That being caught is a kind of love.

Not being caught is not knowing.

You can spend your life falling.

It’s not much of a life –

A life less lived.

Made to stand in the hall,

And told to strip,

His fingers fumble at button and zip –

Undoing himself – his body rocks;

His mind’s seismograph has stalled,

Cannot measure, has no scale -

The piss leaking from his toy cock

Puddles shame and fear on the floor.

He bends for the strap;

Then the shock tautens his frame,

And something gives, rips, snaps …

(“Catch me!”  She closes her eyes, drops…)

Flaps raggedly in the wind,

A twist of cloth caught on a fence crossed:

Something snagged, lost, left behind -

A hole around which his life is stitched.

His daughter picks at the threads;

Sews kisses, offers insteads.

Arms and legs wrapped around tight,

She whispers in his ear, “I knew you would.”

Still he wonders if he could,

And for how long he’ll bear the weight.

But the blue blue sky is a blanket.

Isn’t that the beauty of it?