Skip to main content
Read page text
page 16
of American poetry, or hearing Jeremy Prynne as he paced the floor, allowing us all to share Aristeas’ vision of nomadic tribes and their purity we all believed in – at least as he spoke of it. Less innocent intoxications: London days, floating in wanton drift away from home, listening at Better Books or drinking in pubs on Charing Cross Road with Andrew Crozier – beautiful boy, and effortless lyric poet – the litter of whose lines aroused my own. Long gone, those days. And now, my bushy hair. I go to buy a woolly hat against the cold and a glamorous wig from Notting Hill. Once there, I stare through the glass window at shelves of plaster dollies with tiny features, each face as splendidly null as Tennyson’s Maud. Even before entering I hate them all. I refuse to think beyond the months of treatment to come. A curly white fur now covers my head. Some like it. I’m not sure, though I’ve junked the wig, and today coming back from the hospital in sunshine through Regents Park, I watched the branches of bare trees catch November gold and was suffused with extravagant happiness. 4 the clinic, memory: new and selected poems
page 17
Mirror Talk Is that my mother now behind the glass, looking dark-eyed and weary, as if doubting whether I can be trusted to count pills, check blood sugar, or put lancets into a sharps box? She is reproaching me, a child too often lost in songs and stories. I know mine was to be the life she never lived, the one she imagined as a gentle girl, a rich man’s daughter in an office job, with older brothers at university. She never dared to flout her crabby father as her sister did. My father loved her smile, she loved his working-class ebullience but they married late, and I was their only child. Mother, in middle age, you explained unhappily (I wanted a brother) how Rhesus-negative blood made you miscarry, and later babies died and left you ill – there could be no children after me. I turned away from your shyness and delicacy – so slender-wristed, slim fingered, all your shoes size three – not seeing the stamina you needed to live alongside my father’s euphoric generosity, his drama of disaster and resilience or how his laughing indulgence stole my love while you read school reports, met teachers, dabbed my chickenpox at night, feeling it was always to him I turned in adoration. new poems 5

Page Text

View plaintext

of American poetry, or hearing Jeremy Prynne as he paced the floor, allowing us all to share Aristeas’ vision of nomadic tribes and their purity we all believed in – at least as he spoke of it. Less innocent intoxications: London days, floating in wanton drift away from home,

listening at Better Books or drinking in pubs on Charing Cross Road with Andrew Crozier – beautiful boy, and effortless lyric poet – the litter of whose lines aroused my own. Long gone, those days. And now, my bushy hair. I go to buy a woolly hat against the cold and a glamorous wig from Notting Hill. Once there, I stare through the glass window at shelves of plaster dollies with tiny features, each face as splendidly null as Tennyson’s Maud. Even before entering I hate them all. I refuse to think beyond the months of treatment to come.

A curly white fur now covers my head. Some like it. I’m not sure, though I’ve junked the wig, and today coming back from the hospital in sunshine through Regents Park, I watched the branches of bare trees catch November gold and was suffused with extravagant happiness.

4 the clinic, memory: new and selected poems

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content