Water and Stone

We're water and stone,

Rising up against each other,

Inclement weather regardless,

The violent drops of sharp rain

melt upon our surface.

The Heft of You and who came before

Your head in the crook of my neck,

How you tried to hold it up,

My hand on your back,

The softness of your hair,

The weight of you transferred from within,

To where I would carry you

Until your own legs would

along the rocky ways,

Where stumbling stones

always impede your path.



When you were born,

The snow lay deep,

Up to the tops of our bins,

No doubt even higher,

If you went higher up.



Full moon bright,

The Midwives expected lots of births that night.

The sound of the hum of the helicopters,

Soft as the murmered concern amongst us,

Safe in our beds with our newborns,

Grateful not to be arriving by air.

In praise of my breasts

I never had the kind of breasts that I could hoik up and squeeze together to form a pleasing cleavage.

My oldest friend once described my body shape as Maori, which I've relished ever since. 


When I was young, the thing was to be thin and that preoccupied most of my girlfriends, though most of them never achieved that aim, loving food too much and probably not being so convinced of the goal itself deep inside. Not enough to forgo the food they were so justified in loving; chocolate, cake, chips and all kinds of other calorific things.

Me, I got into the idea of abstinence. I learned to love the empty feeling in my belly. It felt triumphant, defiant. It possibly echoed the emptiness I felt deep within that part of ourselves we tend to label soul.

I'd seen alot of things on tv. War generally. The documentaries about concentration camps in the War  and news reports on the famine in Biafra in particular. I couldn't understand the spectral figures of the children walking on their sticks for legs. They looked like some conception of an alien to me and my heart hovered between broken and astonished at how we are sculpted by what we are allowed to consume and what we are denied.

I never wept. I never do at the things that affect me most. It goes too deep.

Like when my Mum kept watching the terrible disaster when the coal slag heap fell upon the little school in Aberfan. I watched in silence as the village kept vigil and brought the childrens' tiny bodies up so tenderly from under the rubble. My mother sobbed. It was probably the release she needed desperately from all the troubles she had endured herself as a child. 

I learned to fast and control my intake.

I learned to take tablets to give me diarrhoea if I wanted to get rid of things I felt I shouldn't have ingested. And they were many.

One day, dragging myself up a hill to my hovel of a bedsit squat, I felt as if I couldn't go on. I went to the doctor and I suppose he misdiagnosed me, for want of accurate information.

There were years ahead of me in which I would allow myself, if not to fully understand, then to come to some arrangement with myself in which, my Maori-like breasts would feel beautiful to me.

Our lives, the film and the colours it would be, 

from white to vivid technicolor and the whole palette

in-between.

Those days when the sky was a flat grey, 

no lights to seek out depth in pavement

or highlight the grains of variation in the red

and orange brick behind

the sharp edged privet hedges.

Our window looms,;

a black square as we push the gate open on it's tight spring. 

Only the faded pastels of the Hydrangea's dried out flower heads 

lend a gentle tone to soften the suburban chill

of a late November afternoon.

Cake

I baked a cake for if you come,

but if you don't I won't be sad,

As long as you are truly glad,

Your happiness engenders mine,

As long as you're good,

Then I feel fine.




A mother's love runs long and deep,

It doesn't always show.

She tries to let you live your life,

And he tries to let you go.

She tries to let you go

much sooner than you'd know,

you know,


that's the way she works,

this love that's not on show.

Bagatelle

They're playing bagatelle, it's a made up game about making up stories;

Who are the characters ? She says.
You make one up and I'll make one up, he says.
A man with a gun, says she.
Okay, I choose a person who's come in disguise as a tree, says he.
No way ! says she - choose something like another man with another gun.
Why ? he asks.
Because it's war, she replies.
I choose a person who's wearing a tree costume, he says.
Why ? she questions.
Ingenuity, he says.
Ingenuity won't win your character this game, she says. My character's got a gun.
Ah but there's also this character with the ability to resemble a tree.
Bullets will rip through and obliterate tree costumes she says.
Is that the kind of world you're going to make up ? he asks.

There is no point in making up a world,
she says
when there's already a real world.
There's the world and there's the truth about the world.
You mean there's the truth and there's the made-up version of it.
No, the world exists and stories are made up.
And whoever makes up the story makes up the world.

Try to welcome people into the home of your story, that is, give your characters the same benefit of the doubt you'd welcome when it comes to yourself.


A slightly adapted conversation from Autumn by Ali Smith

I am well

thank you

I am well

I am well

though some time ago I was not well

but I have got better.

One expects to get better until

until one feels the grip of Death.

You can, of course, untangle you from His taloned grasp,

you can slip, so sylph-like if you are slippery like that

and shiver away from His icy clasp,

His unwelcoming embrace, but

you have this feeling

this growing feeling like a sunset, that,

one day, he will come with a warm cloak instead,

and wrap its warm and welcoming softness around your whole being

and then,

only then,

will you sink

deep and low

into the depths

of

His

cosy nest.

More Ghosts

They stare at you sometimes don't they and you, you stare back, but blankly, not understanding. Or

maybe, not feeling the need to understand, yes, that's more like it, but perhaps holding your gazes

just slightly too long for polite conversationalist situations.

Then you're asked if you know their name and you say, no, I didn't ask ( thinking that actually would

have been impolite, it wasn't that kind of situation and what is anyway )

but

but then

but then you start thinking about that somewhere,

somewhere out in the seas of your

it's not memory

is it ?



All the thoughts, the sublimated feelings that come from your physical experience here,

here

here in this world

this life

they're not memory

are they ?

Ghosts of Autumn

One day, if you're lucky,

you may, as I am now,

approach Autumn in your Autumnal years

and feel its full blown beauty as

if for its first time.

And, feeling like part of

some long novel; a protagonist of

some kind,  though,

not

not the only one.

And glad not to be because

All the mists who appear like ghosts

you know are not forgotten, lost or lonely,

They are remembered and live amongst us,

Walking gently, kindly to remind us.

Breakfast in the Rain

He's a face in the wilderness,

She's a beautiful tree,

He's been painted by genius,

She was captured with love;

One painting,

One photograph,

Hanging in different rooms,

Connected by an untold story.

But there's more;

Go a bit further down the corridor,

you'll find the photographic portrait gallery.

Faces upon faces, rows of people,

Some look familiar,

All look so the longer we look at them.







Cut to a hotel restaurant.


The rain is pouring down the old bay windows,

Framed by the Wisteria's pendulous lavender racemes,

The table set for two,

The curved walnut backs of the Queen Anne chairs

polished, their golden yellow cushions plump,

their legs low and spread wide to accommodate your crossed ankles.

You can see yourself now,

Sitting, watching the rain, waiting.

You take your cup and sip,

The tea is delicate,

It's fragrance lost in your dreaming,

As you watch the rain falling.

Love is

We must all think about it because it's so much a part of us.

I think we either seek it or avoid it, possibly oscillating between the two states throughout our life.

We sometimes wonder if it's real, even when we think we feel it.

We can worry it's going to dissolve into thin air even when we are sure we feel it.

It can be as if we feel unqualified, undeserving, distrustful of this thing itself,

As if love is the whimsy,

A floating, filigree, flimsy flittering, vacillant sceptic.

We project all our doubts and objections upon it.

You make us weak ! we wail. I hate you ! Go away and hide yourself under this cloak of cynicism.


But I know it now.

That is, I know it for myself,

Which is, after all, the only way we can know things.

It is the sum of all my life,

It's contained in a well that I can draw from.

The well replenishes itself, however much I draw;

And I can elaborate and extemporise on this image and metaphor,

But I know the understanding at its core is true,

And the mistake can only arise from my inability to communicate it

to you.