I Steady My Nerves

It feels liked a dream - I've wanted to be a poet since I was eight, and on Monday I read my poems to an audience of approximately 450, and to Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke, with whom I shared the stage at Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury.

I'm not quite sure how I managed it, both the being asked to read by Anna Dreda, who is Wenlock Books and Wenlock Poetry Festival, and the standing on the stage in the spotlight.

I didn't have an ambition to read with Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke - that's because it didn't enter my head that it would be a possibility.  And I have never been to a show at Theatre Severn and thought, "I'd love to read my poems from that stage."  It wasn't a case of, as Abraham Lincoln put it: "I will prepare and some day my chance will come."  (We all know what happened to him in a theatre.)

I suppose the advantage of that is that the whole experience, from Anna suggesting it to the final echo of applause, was, for me, what Raymond Carver describes as Gravy.  Do you know Carver's poem Gravy?

Realising my luck, I wanted to honour the trust that had been put in me.  I wanted my sons, who were listening to me read for the first time, not to be embarrassed by me.  I thought hard about which poems to read.  I tried combinations out loud.  I asked my sons if it was okay to read poems in which they feature.

When I'd decided, I printed them in font 16 so I wouldn't need to negotiate my glasses (which I usually leave on the top of my head).  I glued the pages into a book, wrote notes for myself.

At about 4pm on the day, my inner child wanted to tear up all these ideas and start again.  I felt a sense of despair.  My poems bored me. I felt the need to write new ones.  "Who do you think you are?" asked my inner critical parent.

Fortunately, my inner adult has quite a loud voice, and she told me that I needed to stick with my decisions and get into my frock.  And my inner, nurturing parent said, "It'll be fine."

My younger son said, "I'll make you a cup of tea."

My eldest son said, "You look great, mum."  "How should I have my hair?" I asked his girlfriend, "up or down?"  "I like it down," she said.  "You look like a poet with it down."

Later, backstage, I listened to the growing murmur of voices in the auditorium as it neared 7pm.  The quality of sound piped into the green room was one of anticipation of pleasure - like a flock eager to be fed, but not ravenous.  They'd already had a chance to enjoy a wonderful variety of poetry being read in the foyer - it sounded like an audience that had been warmed.  The mood in the green room was relaxed, positive, encouraging.  I drank half a glass of white wine.

I won't describe the reading.  If you were there, you had your own responses.  You were part of an audience which radiated attention.  The mood on stage was one of mutual respect and support.  Throughout, I felt as if I was amongst an extended family of friends and relations who were saying, "Go on.  Go on, then.  Do your thing."

I Run A Temperature

I like idioms.  I haven't quite figured out why, but to me, they make complete sense as culturally acquired language.  They can be smooth and seamless, they can cause a stir  - they include metaphor, simile and cliche, often without owning up to any of these.

One idiom I've been running this week is a temperature.  Or the temperature has been running me, more like.  It's okay, I'm getting better, and it was sporadic and never very high, but it's stopped me in my tracks.  Or rather in my bed, my own bed, which I've had to make.

I've had to abandon all sorts of plans.  Two poetry readings.  My longest-serving friend's 50th birthday.  Most of some animation workshops I'd been looking forward to.  It's not been a big deal in comparison with what many people have to put up with, and amazing friends have brought me soup, made me tea, offered me chewing gum, cut me some slack, and have generally bailed me out and stood in for me: Anna, Nadia, Barry, Lucy, Cathy, Ian, Helen, David, Iolo, Kathy, Hilda ...  but I'll be glad to get back into the swing of things.

As I'm not contagious, however, I've ploughed on regardless a couple of times: to the graduation of a year's worth of social work students yesterday, for example.  I wanted to be there by hook or crook.  It's irreplaceable, that moment of witness, so I'd have been feeling even more out of sorts if I'd missed it.

I know the drill of graduation.  Its medieval pretensions, its echoes of Hogwarts - in many ways it's not my cup of tea and I worried about causing a scene by fainting -  but despite feeling washed up, by the end of the ceremony I was over the moon.

It'll take me a while to get back up to speed, but in the meantime, I am glad, that amidst the physical discomfort and psychological uncertainty that illness brings, I pushed my luck, and saw the Class of 2014 on their way out to take the world by storm.

I Unpick A Seam

When I walked into the sewing class with my son, the air molecules shifted.  It's strange how the reaction of a group can be felt as a frisson, a gasp, of atmospheric pressure.  Eighteen women recollected themselves, smiled, accommodated to the idea of sharing cutting tables, machines and space with a good-looking young man.  I stood up straighter.

My project for our six weeks of dressmaking classes is to make two pairs of pyjama bottoms; my son's is to make as many t-shirts as he can from a 4 metre stretch of wide black cotton jersey.

Having cut out my fabric, I predicted that I would complete the first pair of pyjama bottoms within the two hour session. I offered my son advice about cutting out. He, meanwhile, was unpicking the sleeves from an old t-shirt to use as a template.

When my mother taught me to sew, she showed me how to undo a machined seam by cutting through the tiny ladder of tight stitches using a Wilkinson Sword razor blade. Handling the blade felt dangerous - an adult secret.

One-and-a-half hours into yesterday evening's session I held up my work.  It looked like nothing; or rather it looked like a large replica of a diseased heart - a slack set of pouches with small tubes  protruding.  It looked like nothing you'd want to wear in bed, under any circumstances.

With my crumpled work in my lap, I watched my son as he draped black jersey over a mannequin and threaded a needle with cotton.  He looked confident, happy, fluent.

"Can I borrow your unpicker?" I asked him.  He chucked it over, smiling.  These days, I use a purpose-made hook with a sharpened edge to cut through my mistakes.

"Thought you were being a bit optimistic," he said, drawing long white stitches up the side seams of his new design.  Then, "You can't use pins in conjunction with an over-locker, so I'm doing tailor tacks."

"Ah," I said.  "What about the neckline?  It looks a bit ..."

He turned to me, grinned.  "It's in the Brutalist style," he said.

I Make A List

Potatoes
Leeks
Celery
Bread
Stilton
Milk
Syrup
Scissors
Zip
Will
Picture Frame
Badminton Court
Cheque
Post Office
Tights

I Mourn My Mother

Some poems I wrote for my mother - they are all quite old now.  She died 25 years ago today.  I loved her deeply and am grateful for all she was.

This, you implied

In duty, without complaint, rise early,

take dawn’s sheen to the day.

Dust particularly what is unseen,

sweep up any flakes of ingratitude,

stitch loose threads into purpose, and

cleanse from your mouth the unspeakable;

do this quickly, before is added

tarnish to steadfastness, loyalty.

Unwrap, slowly, the gift of evening,

soothing the uneasy earth with music,

surrender yourself to laughter,

catch the sparkle of late-night exchange,

dream of the eternal and possible.

Live full, not fast.

The Days do not Admit your Face

The days do not admit your face,
your image somehow fading in the light.
Yes, there are the photographs,
the chair on which I drop my clothes.
Sometimes there is even a look of you
in my son’s dimples, when I put up my hair;
but there is also the end-to-end claim
of the present, the squeeze of the young.

 

So yours is the half-wakeful space,
the small-houred time where,
dreamful, I drift amongst
fragments of your story:
I strive to place them, piece them,
fit them together.

This final autumn

It is fitting, this blazed-red end,

this final heave of summer heat

sustained into your fraction of a season.

The earth is giving you all the glory

of the autumns you are owed,

saving its most till your last.

It is the trees which know best,

gold-framing the bedroom window

where you lie, opening an eye

to greet them; these trees which have

marked your life in so many quarters:

bare, green, broad and shedding.

Now, most innocent you,

fetched up high on the drugs

we have fed you,  remark,

wistfully, on the teddy bears

ambling, picnicking in the branches;

untethered now, you join them.

Kept

If I opened this tin,

if I opened this tin again,

this tin, which was yours and is mine;

if I were to grasp, twist, slide, lift,

reveal the ribbons, clasps and bands

which held your lovely, lively hair;

if I, reckless and wanting,

were to open this tin again,
I would breathe in the last fragrance,
residue of the smell of you,
captured, kept, for a time, in this tin
which was yours and is mine.

Sally Lefroy - 1937-1989

I Pay To Be Waxed

I dreamed last night that I am going to die soon - in the next few weeks if the people I assumed to be experts were to be believed.  The strange thing was that I felt perfectly well.  I was pretty upset about the prognosis because I love being alive and, amongst other things, I have a party to look forward to.

It was a relief to wake up.  I checked my body for signs of imminent demise.  None.  I mean, there are many imperfections, but most of them aren't, as far as I'm aware, fatal.

In the past, the things I don't like about my body have stopped me from living fully.  I remember being 17 in a heatwave in Sweden and refusing, despite my Swedish friends' incredulous protestations (it was Sweden for goodness sake!) to wear shorts.  I spent two wonderful weeks of blue skies, islands and boating trapped in dungarees in a strange closed-circle of self-consciousness.

Since then, I've learnt to look at my body square-on, to experience it for what it is.  It's been a sort of existentialist awakening - taking on board what Sartre calls le vécu,which is something to do with the validity of lived experience as a form of knowledge.

So, on waking this morning to find that I am (as far as I know)  perfectly healthy, I thought about whether to keep my appointment at the salon.  Reason argued that subjecting myself to pain in an effort to reach a constructed ideal of female beauty would be a trivial way to spend half an hour of the time that remains to me.  Experience has taught me that acting on the knowledge I have about what gives me the confidence to take my clothes off leads to a freedom to engage with life more fully.

I may go for a swim later.

I Consider My Height

I am five foot ten.  And maybe a half.  I can't be sure because I haven't measured myself for years (I've been too busy measuring envelopes) but I seem to be about the same as I was when I last looked.


My above-average-for-a-woman height seems to be, judging by the comments I get, the first thing people notice about me.  That's if I'm standing when I meet them.  If I'm sitting, and then stand up (because I was brought up to do that) it might be the third or fourth thing. 


My sons are both taller than me and now in serious competition for tallest place.  They delight in patting, and then resting their chins on the top of my head.  Friends or strangers feel free to remark on their heights. What is a bit different, however, is that above-average-height-for-a-boy seems to be regarded as an achievement.


I've found that it is useful to be a tall woman for some things.  Examples are: the Goal Keeper / Shooter positions in netball, getting things off high shelves for people who are afraid of tall men, and wearing extra long skirts that have been reduced in the Monsoon sale.


But it can be a social disadvantage to be a tall woman.  Consider the market for websites devoted to the phenomenon of 'tally-smally' celebrity couples: a couple in which the woman is taller than the man is regarded as somehow 'freakish'. 


I find I am attracted to people because of the depth of their souls and the warmth of their hearts.  Sometimes they are taller than me, sometimes shorter.


I wish, as with all defining characteristics, my height could be seen solely for what it is: a genetically determined fact about which I can do nothing.  Though on reflection, I'm not completely powerless .... I could buy some high heels and break the six foot barrier, and a few toes into the bargain.