(so I was lying about going straight to bed... I had to get this down before I lost it)

I thought I had forgotten you.

But driving home tonight,
I heard Joan sing the opening bars,
"I am not in love..."

And there we were again,
in the back seat of the taxi.
Darkness kindly lending us stealth,

Your hand on my hip,
and Joan is singing,
"but I'm open to persuasion"

I knew then it was over;
no more swift and stolen kisses.
In the darkness I closed my eyes

Not wanting to see you
for the last time.
I will not cry;

I am not crying now.
I do not miss you;
I do not miss your laugh.

There are probably hundreds of women
right now,
listening to this song and leaning their heads

against the car windows
to catch the tears
that they're not crying.

"Sing me another love song
But this time
With a little dedication"

By morning I'll have forgotten you again.

What with it being my birthday tomorrow, I felt I had to finish Poetry Month with this.

The Birthday Present

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

'Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!'

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,

The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!

It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.

Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small.

Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,

The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.

I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified

The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,

A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.

I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,

No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.

If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.

But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.

Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million

Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine-----

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,

Must you kill what you can?
There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.

It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center

Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.

Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.

Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death

I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.

Sylvia Plath, September 1962

On first reading, I thought this was a suicide poem, but re-reading it tonight, I believe it's more likely that she was asking Hughes to tell the truth about his affair and end their marriage. "Let it not come by word of mouth..." - I thought that was metaphorical at first, but it's a perfect and literal line in the context of adultery.

Just a very quick entry as I'm very tired tonight.

Another one for National Poetry Month which we damn well should be having over here instead of letting the americans hog it >:-[
Anyway. I intended to post another by Harrison tonight, but my fingers fell on Wendy Cope instead.

I Worry

I worry about you -
So long since we spoke.
Love, are you downhearted,
Dispirited, broke?

I worry about you.
I can't sleep at night.
Are you sad? Are you lonely?
Or are you all right?

They say that men suffer,
As badly, as long.
I worry, I worry,
In case they are wrong.

-------
A simple, unsophisticated but satisfyingly bitchy piece which perfectly suits my current disenchanted-with-men mood.

OK, it's actually evening.

Update... I have had to private-ise some stuff as Pat is very touchy around confidentiality issues, so here's a bare bones update.

Pat and I are undergoing a trial separation.
We are still living in the same house, because I have promised Simon I will not leave him.
I have moved into the spare bedroom, and Pat has moved his computer stuff into the double bedroom, where he is sleeping (and smoking - which won't be doing his asthma any good at all.) I have retained my separate office downstairs.
Money situation hasn't really changed as I am still supporting the household, seeing as I earn 80% of the household income.
We are still going on holiday next month... I told Pat I would prefer it since otherwise I fear the attentions of the beer-swilling sad sacks who'll be thinking "Fat single mum on her own, bet she's gagging for it, eh lads?"

That's basically it in a nutshell. We have had a couple of absolute screaming matches but (touching wood) it's been all okay and civilised for the last week or so.

And now a poem for Poetry Month.

Timer
Gold survives the fire that's hot enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn.
An envelope of coarse official buff
contains your wedding ring which wouldn't burn.

Dad told me I'd to tell that at St. James's
that the ring should go in the incinerator.
That 'eternity' inscribed with both their names is
his surety they'd be together, 'later'.

I signed for the parcelled clothing as the son,
the cardy, apron, pants, bra, dress -

the clerk phoned down: 6-8-8-3-1?
Has she still her ring on? (Slight pause) Yes!

It's on my warm palm now, your burnished ring!

I feel your ashes, head, arms, breasts, womb, legs,
sift through its circle slowly, like that thing
you used to let me hold to time the eggs.

Tony Harrison

This poem still makes me cry when I get to the end. The voicing is perfect in the transition from reflective, to the indulgent affection for the father's request, the clerk's voice (which I always hear in my head as Sybil Fawlty), to the breakdown at the end where the emotion overtakes the search for the correct name for "that thing". Also worth noting is the change from "mumsy" clothing items in the third stanza to more ageless feminine elements in the last. Add the hourglass theme to the evocation of the body parts and, well, you can't ask for much more from a poem, can you?

I've always loved Harrison since I first read him and having recently picked up a secondhand copy of his Selected Poems edition, I have another in mind to post tomorrow, if I get a chance.

Another poem for Poetry Month.

Act of Union

I

Tonight, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independent shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.

II

And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.

Seamus Heaney

I first read this aged about 15 and remember thinking "Metaphor - ohhhhh, NOW I get it!" For me, this is the definitive poetical metaphor, and it surely is one of the definitive political poems (for me, anyway.) What I really enjoy is the separation into the two stanzas, which neatly divide both the act of procreation from that of giving birth, and the political decision from its inevitable fallout. And of course the title itself is playful. Great stuff.

The UK doesn't have a National Poetry Month but I'm participating in the meme of posting a favourite poem anyway.

The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


As pessmistic and foreboding future visions go, they don't come much better than that.