This Is All (36 page)

From where I sit

From where I sit I see the moon.

Daytime.

From where I sit I see the moon in sunlight.

Night and day.

From where I sit in my mother’s chair.

Think of something else
.

What else?

What else is there?

My hand.

My hand on the arm of my mother’s chair.

My hand where my mother’s hand has rested.

No more
.

No. More
.

My mother’s hand in my hand on my mother’s hand on the arm of my mother’s now my chair.

And in mother in her hand in my hand on her chair.

How many mothers in my hand?

And my daughter’s hand in me.

No more
.

The moon.

In the sunlit sky.

From where I sit.

Try again
.

My room.

Seven metres by five by two-point-five by my life by night and day.

In and out.

How many times?

seem to write themselves; I’m only their secretary. Others begin as a single lonely segment, a phrase or a line, rising to the surface one day, another segment another day, and so on till I realise I’ve gathered a complete whole. If I grow impatient to be finished and invent the missing parts, the mope doesn’t work very well because the made-up parts are never as good as those that rise to the surface of their own accord. Worst of all is when only one segment bobs to the surface and I know after waiting a while that no more will ever appear, no matter how long I wait. Then I have to make up the rest. That’s the hardest work and the most likely to fail.

The mope I wrote that morning is special to me. It rose to the surface complete and ready for the page. I jotted it down in seconds. Even as I did so, I was aware that something different was happening. The first of my mopes I could allow myself to call a poem. But just as I didn’t know where its words and images came from, I didn’t know why it was a poem and not a mope or what it meant or why it had been given to me at that moment. I think I do now, but that’s now and I am telling you about then. All I knew was that it was a poem for Will, that it was about Will and me, and that it was about what we
meant
to each other.

seek me where

you would not look

find me in

terraces of the mind

let midnight rain

scour my body

carry me to a place

where owls cry

and the moon beams

before the sun burns

the heart

fill me with

How many hours in how many hours out is it worth figuring?

When I am out am I gone?

My mother in me in my room.

Inhabited.

To go is to stay.

To leave is to remain.

No more
.

Try again
.

From where I sit.

The moonstruck sky.

Silence.

Nothing.

Nothing will come of nothing.

Sea surge in my shell.

Pulse beat rise and fall in my breast.

Blood. Breath.

Moonshine.

Again
.

Here I sit in my mother’s chair.

Me.

Why? Why me?

Why not someone else?

Why at all?

Imagine nothing.

Being nothing.

And again
.

Afterwards.

Not I. Nothing.

Not imaginable.

No more
.

More
.

Try again
.

Only once.

No second time.

weaving light

bed me deep

in its embracing roots

beneath an oak

curl round its branches

brood on love

born in the soul

After the pleasure of writing my mope/poem, I wanted the pleasure of Will again. It’s often like that – after the excitement and release of making a poem, which is making love with words, I wanted the excitement and release of making love with my body.

Will stirred as I climbed onto the bed. I cradled him to me, kissed him lightly on his hot brow, on his small pretty ear, on his bristly cheek, on the curving side of his nose, on the closed bulge of his eye, while with my cool hand I stroked the valley of his spine. He turned onto his back and stretched like a petted animal. I kissed his lips, and drifted my hand between his legs, and feathered him with my fingertips. He crooned and purled. Lordy, but I did enjoy making love to him in his morning limbo more than at any other time! His sleepy mind, being silent, didn’t hamper his pliant body. His unguarded skin was keen to my every slightest touch. During our months together, I’d practised this art as diligently as he ensured we practised our music-making; by now I knew the repertoire that raptured him the most.

(I have to tell you that of all the glories of life, in my experience none surpasses making love with a beloved lover.)

Afterwards, we slept again till ten, when I was woken by Will returning from the bathroom ‘with naked fote stalking in my chambre’.

He nuzzled me and said, ‘Come on, Leah. Up.
Now!
Run, shower, breakfast, music.’

‘I hate you,’ I said. ‘
Liam!
’

No again.

Unbearable being not being.

Being a mother-to-be sitting in mother’s chair being me with the sunshine moon.

Life.

Enough
.

Not Mean, but Be (Part II
)

I’ve been trying to work out what Ms F-T means by saying that a poem must
not mean, but be
.
²
These are some of my conclusions.

My first conclusion is that I do not understand exactly what Ms F-T means, but whatever she means I do not entirely agree. This is why:

A poem is made of words. All words mean something. If they did not, they would not be words. The whole point of words is to mean something.

Also, when words are put together in groups (e.g. phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc.) they mean something as a group. That is, they mean more than they mean as individual words. And the whole point of putting them together is to mean something and to communicate this meaning to other people. (Of course it is possible to combine words in a way that makes them make nonsense.)

Poems are made of words, grouped together, and therefore they
must
mean something. They cannot help it. Unless they are put together deliberately to make nonsense, which is pointless, except as a joke.

I said the above to Ms M. She agreed, but then said I should try what she called ‘a thought experiment’. She said I should think of myself as a poem and see if this helped me to understand what Ms F-T was getting at.

At first this seemed silly, but I tried in order, as usual, to please her.

‘Hate with love is love without hate.’

‘O no,
please, please
!’

‘D’you think that’s true?’

‘I’ve no idea. Who said it?’

‘Me. I just made it up.’

‘O god! Leave me alone. I want to sleep.’

‘No you don’t. Come on. Arise, bright angel.’

By the time we’d got back, showered together, had a long jokey breakfast, and practised our music, it was one o’clock. Will had to help his father with a funeral that afternoon and play at a gig that evening.

We did everything a little too intensely that morning, a little out of control, a little over the top. And we avoided the topic that caused our manic behaviour – Will’s departure for college in two weeks. Fourteen more days, fourteen more nights before the separation that would end these ten months of love-making. Sometimes we’d said that his going away wouldn’t change anything between us, but I at any rate secretly feared it would. They say that the one who leaves is the one who smiles, the one who stays behind is the one who cries, and I think that’s mostly true.

That afternoon, as I entered her classroom, Ms Martin was standing in front of the open book cupboard, her bronze hair gathered back in a knot held by an elastic band, her neat small body draped in the same sleeveless blue dress she’d worn the day before, her legs, like her arms, tanned and bare, her feet in clumpy trainers – the private Ms M. again. She sneezed as I closed the door, and looking round with watering eyes, smiled and said, ‘There you are. Dust. Sorry. Allergic.’

‘Would you like me to do that?’

‘Would you? Shakespeare on the top shelf, poetry next in alphabetical order of author, then plays ditto, followed by novels.’

The kind of job I’d have grumbled about doing at home

I began by asking myself, ‘Do I
mean
or do I
be
?’ This sounded even sillier than thinking of myself as a poem but I couldn’t think how else to put it, except as follows:

Am I a meaning or am I a being?

The answer was obvious. I am a being. I am a human being, which is a particular kind of animal. I am a female, which is a particular kind of human being. I am a female human being because of the particular way I am made out of the raw materials that make all life. But the raw materials have been combined in a way that is special to (a) human beings, (b) female human beings, and (c) this particular female human being called Cordelia Kenn, who is living at this particular time in this particular place on this particular planet in this particular solar system of this particular universe.

Conclusion: I am a being because of how I am made, and when and where I was made. O yes, and by whom I was made, which was my parents (who were made by their parents, who were made by their parents, and so on back to the very beginning).

Question: Do I mean anything?

Answer (after a lot of thought): Yes. I
mean
what I
am
. I am Cordelia Kenn. I am my life. My life means me. To understand me properly, you have to know who I am.

If a poem is like that, then it is a poem because it is made of words put together in a particular kind of way in a particular time and a particular place by a particular person (who is the poem’s parents).

Question: But surely prose is also like that? If so, why is poetry poetry and why is prose prose?

This is a very difficult question, and to be honest, no one I asked gave me a satisfactory answer. They all waffled.

Ms M. refused, saying the point was that I should answer the question myself. She really is infuriating sometimes. (But I love it that she is so strict with me, because otherwise I just duck out of trying.)

but tackled happily for Ms M., who set to with pins and Blutak, fixing pictures and posters and sample work to the display boards. How self-contained and self-confident she is, I thought as I regimented the books, and wondered if I would ever achieve such balance, and also thought how I too had two personas, one for home and one for school, so I shouldn’t be surprised that she had. At home I could be sulky and petulant and volatile and lazy and all over the emotional shop whereas at school I was always well-behaved and reasonably diligent, called by the chavs when we were in junior school a teachers’ pet (I did rather suck up, I must admit), and later a swot (which I wasn’t, not like Will, who got by without abuse because he was athletic and male and good-looking – the chavs lusted after him – as well as studious. I did like studying the things that really interested me, e.g. Shakes and poetry and music, but I wasn’t a real scholar like Will – someone who enjoys studying for its own sake and is meticulous).