Ordinary
On difficult days, you reach for it, the calm of the ordinary:
ritual routine, white noise from behind the universe,
matter and non-matter emerging, disappearing.
And you remind yourself that no option
is painless, even those that web the sleeping heart,
or fall from forgotten books and the letters
you wrote without care, without thought.
You caress the stone from the beach,
and whistle without tune, through a gap in your teeth.
Ordinary gets you up and breakfasting, it carries you
through the hard choices, and drops you like river gravel
after the flood, shining in the bright sun.
Leading out the Poem
I pulled on its tether, but the poem baulked–
bull calf at the door, reluctant to face the light,
the strange audience, who watched and calculated
weight and value. So I let it be for a night,
in the soft-straw darkness and heavy scent of home;
the safe stall it knew, and the outside world too bright.
Then I tried to drag it, I was thrown–
and it floored me. So I filled my hands with rhyme,
cupped from a dozen memories I’d known,
only then did it follow willingly. Still I gave it time,
ruminating at the threshold,
until all its words had merged with mine.
Random Object from the Science Museum
Votive left foot
(200 BCE-200 CE in Roman Empire)
The body is infinitely divisible,
and every temple hung with parts,
graphic and unembarrassed:
a foot by a penis, a hand by a uterus.
What god can cure his dragging paralysis?
Shattered bones, a scutum
crushed on the battlefield at Philippi.
Asklepios, send down your grace.
His body, indentured twenty years,
a living wall set against
the Empire’s enemies.
Its failure – a begging bowl by the gate.
Mary Anning
Fossil Hunter (1799 – 1847) A Portrait BJM Donne 1850
They say I was the daughter of a lightning strike,
which hurled me into a new way of wonder.
The Undercliff roared and rolled last night-
a fair dishing of rocks across the strand
and the lias full of tumbled bones and shells.
In chapel every Sunday I pray for such a fall,
for rain and wind to do the work,
to make days in fret and mud worthwhile.
Poor Tray and I dug for hours and found
a long skull, which must surely sell.
I know this bone could remake our world;
the Bible is one story, but not the only truth.
This will break old sureties through Deep Time,
when its secrets are unfurled.
I shall send this one to Dr Thomas,
a kind gentleman, who has so far used me well.
Magic Mirror
Sylvia Plath 1963*
His face is everywhere, a judgement
rousing her demons. Her edges rubbed raw
against the jut of his jaw.
She is two people now: one who lives in the glass,
belittles and sneers, seeing only failure,
and one who is lost.
In the bright circle: her hare’s golden eye,
a snared future, which she resists,
spilling out tears and blood– poetry.
She cannot see him, but hears
his words on the air. The radio enacts
the cruel prophecy: an accident,
a dead hare beneath his wheels,
its body sold to buy two roses for his mistress.
This play has only one ending.*
*1963, Broadcast two days before the poet Sylvia Plath killed herself,
a radio play about her marriage aired on the BBC.
Difficulties of a Bridegroom written by her husband,
Ted Hughes, was about a man rejecting his bride
in favour of his mistress.
Girl with a White Dog
Lucian Freud Painting 1951
The man has a cruel eye for truth.
Kitty is as wretched as she has ever been,
her tender breast offered equally
to her future child and to the artist.
The dog knows nothing,
snoozing faithful in her lap.
A hand protects her from his gaze;
she can scent the other women on his skin,
at night, when he gathers her remains
under the sheets and inflicts more damage.
Two Cats
Painting, Suzanne Valadon 1918
My two cats are not happy.
They sit all day lost on the table,
shell-shocked soldiers,
paws tucked into their white chests.
From here the shelling is a distant rumble.
Although the mice are scratching,
their ears will only bend
towards the terrible concussions.
I too am ignored
as surplus to the time,
so I sit and paint their situation
with all the colours of my grief.
The Fall
It was always the same in Roadrunner movies:
Coyote would only fall once realisation arrived.
It was like that after her death, a long pause,
darkness, cold, no tears, even
when the earth hit the coffin– and I never went back
to tend her grave or leave flowers –and I am just
as numb all these years later. Perhaps I need
to talk to someone about it. Perhaps I am still falling
like Alice, but have not yet reached that pool of tears.
