May, 2006
Poetry Thursday: Sharon Olds # 2
"Write hard and clear about what hurts"
~ Ernest Hemingway
This is the only poem I can offer today as it is the one that provoked such an unexpected reaction. I was casting around for something suitable, something that put into words how I was feeling, and then I read Sharon Olds’ New Mother. It might seem like a peculiar choice as I am not a mother and am not likely to become one in the foreseeable future, but reading the words tears came. For me this poem is about what I lost, what I might not have had, and what I might have yet. It is about a man I want to kiss so desperately it has been torturing me this week.
New Mother
A week after our child was born,
you cornered me in the spare room
and we sank down on the bed.
You kissed me and kissed me, my milk undid its
burning slipknot through my nipples,
soaking my shirt. All week I had smelled of milk,
fresh milk, sour. I began to throb:
my sex had been torn easily as cloth by the
crown of her head, I’d been cut with a knife and
sewn, the stitches pulling at my skin – and the
first time you’re broken, you don’t know
you’ll be healed again, better than before.
I lay in fear and blood and milk
while you kissed and kissed me, your lips hot and swollen
as a teenage boy’s, your sex dry and big,
all of you so tender, you hung over me,
over the nest of the stitches, over the
splitting and tearing, with the patience of someone who
finds a wounded animal in the woods
and stays with it, not leaving its side
until it is whole, until it can run again.
~ Sharon Olds, Selected Poems
For more poetic inspiration, go here
* the photograph is the first portrait I took of my goddaughter…
May, 2006
Portrait of a 33-year-old
Every morning I look in the mirror and see new lines on my face. I have the misfortune to have a sky light in the bathroom, so every line, every crease, every blemish is illuminated with forensic clarity – every visitor I have runs screaming from the bathroom after a few moments in front of the mirror of truth. When I was studying photography, all those years ago, I took hundreds of self-portraits. I’ve never particularly liked having my picture taken – I’m not the most photogenic person, and catch me in the wrong light the plains of my face meld into new contorted shapes that I just don’t recognise. But in my college days I was on a mission. I had the idea I could investigate the female condition through pictures of myself – a lofty ambition for a 21-year-old! Looking back at those pictures, the first thing that strikes me is how skinny I was. It’s incredible that for so long I was unhappy with my body, yet judging by the photos I was half the size I am now – I just couldn’t see it. Most of my self-portraits were nudes – I never felt self-conscious showing the pictures to others as I didn’t see the body on the paper as my own (how very revealing that statement is).
I have very few photographs of myself from this last year – it’s only recently I’ve wanted to start recording my life, with photos of friends and family, and places I’ve been. I took the photo above the other day to send to a new treasured friend, and looking at it again last night, I was struck by how my face has changed. I’ve always carried an image in my head of who I am and what I look like – for the longest time it was the face of a fifteen-year-old girl, and as I’ve never really looked my age (sure to be a blessing in my 50s) I would look in the mirror and see that same teenage face. But now I look and I see something new. I mentioned this to my counsellor the other day, how the lines are new, the bags under my eyes heavy, the eyes themselves a darker blue than before. She told me that it was to be expected that the past year is now recorded in my features. And surely the vineyard of wine I’ve drunk and plantation of cigarettes I’ve smoked hasn’t helped either, but it’s the grief and loss that’s etched on my face. That my lover will never look at my face again is something I still have not come to terms with. I don’t even know if he’d recognise me now – I have to wear glasses to read and work at the computer, after I discovered the headaches weren’t just from tears but my weak eyes too. My hair is blonder, my wardrobe has relaxed; but most of all this is no longer the face he looked at.
Today I’m working on my six chapters, polishing the old words and inserting new ones. I’m remembering what he looked like, and how he saw me. I’m remembering our first night together, and how I learnt the melody of his snoring. Bittersweet memories, like scenes from a film – I just don’t recognise the girl in that picture anymore. I only know who I am now.
May, 2006
Sunday Scribblings: First Love
My first love was called Jim, and he had no sense of smell – he was born that way. It would always make me sad to think that when we split up, as we so painfully did, he would never catch a memory of me on the air as another woman walked past him wearing my scent. We met in a nightclub three days into a new decade, in 1990 when I was sixteen and he was twenty-three. Precocious teenager that I was I chatted him up, on the edge of the dance floor, Pernod and black in my hand. He had long dark hair and a goatee, and the kindest eyes that had ever landed on me.
Our first proper date was a trip to the cinema to see When Harry Met Sally, and from that afternoon we saw each other every day. I was still at school, supposedly studying for my A levels, but I would sneak off to the bus stop before class and go to his house instead. Within six months I decided – with the wisdom of a child who wants to be grown up too soon – to leave school and move in with Jim. My only goal in life, back then, was to have a boyfriend, the legacy of an absent father. In my hurry to be grown up I found myself at seventeen living in a grotty bedsit with an unemployed labourer, permanently damp towels hanging over the wardrobe doors and two pet rats. Oh the glamorous life!
Despite the damp, I decorated our home with the standard issue hippy fare bought during trips to Glastonbury, our Mecca. I delighted in shopping for our groceries in the local street market, coming back home with bags full of vegetables and soya mince (we were vegetarian, of course, with rings in our noses and psychedelic swirls on our clothes). Weekends were spent dancing all night in chemically enhanced swells of joy, with occasional days spent with my family (despite the fact that Jim had stolen me from them, my mother and sister loved him). I had wrapped my needy arms around him so tightly I’m sure he couldn’t breathe, yet gradually we started to follow our own paths – me to art college to study photography, him singing in a local band. I loved Jim passionately and jealously, but the new world college opened up to me soon lured me away from him. I realised that I had outgrown my unemployed labourer, and one day, after listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue non-stop to bolster my nerve, he came home from band rehearsals and I told him I was moving out. Looking back on that day now, I can’t believe how heartless I was, but I was only nineteen. I had no conception of real emotions, real pain. I was selfish, and I was cruel, but I knew no better. Jim, understandably, was crushed. It was the first time I had seen him cry, and remembering this makes me feel so ashamed.
The months that followed were messy, with us getting back together only to part again. While I became caught up in new love stories at college, Jim got together with a friend of ours and last I heard they had a baby together. The irony is not lost on me that he is, one hopes, now settled with a family and I am here, on my own and grieving. It’s curious how things turn out, where the paths we choose take us.
For more Sunday Scribblings, go here.
May, 2006
I heart London
On Thursday I discovered the perfect antidote to the stressful week I’ve had. It was Anna’s birthday and to celebrate we went to the Lucky Voice karaoke bar in Soho with her Canadian cousin Trevor and his business partner John, and sang ourselves hoarse. My friends, I never thought in a million years that I would be comfortable singing in public but within thirty seconds of the opening bar of the first song I had the microphone in my hand. Highlights of the night included Anna and I giving a forceful rendition of Electric Six’s Gay Bar, and Trevor and Anna’s impassioned version of Kung Fu Fighting (see above pic). I am now officially a karaoke convert.
The four of us ran around central London like teenagers, bar hopping and ending up in the most peculiar club I think I’ve ever been to, in the middle of the dreaded Leicester Square, filled with drunken waifs and strays – and us. Finally Anna and I rolled our bedraggled selves out of the cab at 5am, beyond tired, but still smiling. It was just what I needed for my heavy heart – friendship and fun, the perfect combination.
Each time I go back to London I become a little more seduced by my old town. While memories still haunt every street, a new life is being explored there too. As my confidence grows, and my sadness becomes more manageable, I can walk through the streets and the previous narration of sorrow – there’s the restaurant where he said… there’s the street where we… – is fading a little. It is always a relief to return to my home by the sea, but curiously, yesterday the flat seemed too quiet when I walked through the door.
