What Poets Need
FINUALA DOWLING
Kwela Books
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For the women in my life
– Beaty, Ma, Biddy, Tessa and Cara –
who gave me the time
I know how poems are made.
There is a place the loss must go.
There is a place the gain must go.
The leftover love.
from Alice Walker
“How Poems Are Made/A Discredited View”
Saturday 10th August
6 pm
When you are not there, I don’t know who I am. The happiness of each day is poised around the arrival of your letter.
It usually comes at four in the afternoon. At 3.45 I start to make a tray of tea. This is a hungry time of day for me, and I used to make toast, too (a raisin bun, squashed flat and blackened in the toaster, fatly layered with butter), but Steve my computer guy pointed out the disgusting amount of debris wedged into my keyboard, so now I eat something in the kitchen and bring just the tea here. Though even that I spill.
The anticipation is partly the simple pleasure of the company of your words. To walk with you and your dogs in the shady wind-breaks of the farm, listening to their eerie whispering hum. To swim with you in the clay-bottomed dam among frogs. To feel the warmth of the enclosed space and smell the young buds as you walk into the tunnel every morning. To drink austere black tea with you. To listen to you saying wise, soothing things to Jackie or Liza when they phone about their latest man crisis. To sit with you on your stoep in the evening, thinking your thoughts with you.
Those thoughts are always plans of goodness. The truth is that ever since you got the prize for esprit de corps at Queenstown Girls’ High School in 1974, you have felt the mantle of perpetual devotion. Perhaps some wild child, son of friends of yours, needs expensive drug rehabilitation and you agonise over how to give them a big loan that they won’t feel pressed to repay. Or perhaps one of your rose-pickers is being abused by her husband: it falls to you to get her a new life. And then the perennial Frikkie, whom you first encountered being perambulated in a shopping trolley, has some fresh request. You’re always bailing out the needy, setting off their losses against your gains. Though sometimes I fear the purity of your thoughts, still I look forward to them. Saint Theresa.
But another part of me anticipates something else. Perhaps today she’ll write that she’s leaving Theo at last. That she’s asked for a divorce. That she’s coming to me. That he’s dead.
We no longer lie to each other. I don’t think we ever did. But there was a time when I didn’t say all the brutal things I thought. As I’ve just done. We used to leave things out.
I try to wait till 4.05 to log on. I want your mail to be there already. If Outlook Express says, Receiving message 1 of 12, then I think, Good, there are at least eleven chances that Theresa’s is one of these. When I see your name, the universe is benign. I quickly delete the spam so that you are not defiled by proximity to the rapacious beasts. I sink into your words. I’m bowled over by you afresh. I don’t even mind that Theo is not dead.
Theo says that the Isuzu’s engine is completely wrecked, pistons cracked, crankshaft driven backwards through some vital aspect, you write, and he has gone to Caledon to see if Dieselman Henry has a solution. Then I love you for being alone on the farm, for moving about in a world of pistons and crankshafts, for the phrase “vital aspect”, and for knowing or naming “Dieselman Henry”.
When it is not there (though it almost always turns out you’ve faithfully sent it, it has just got trapped in a cyber backlog) I am mean, I am vindictive. I take each one of the eleven spam inviting me to enlarge my penis, get cheap drugs, get rich quick and lose weight, and I click Properties, Message Source, highlight and copy and paste them into a mail which I send off to my service provider under the header Abuse. I used to imagine that this resulted in punitive action, spammers in Wyoming opening their front doors to a posse of cleansing police, who would confiscate their hard drives and wash out their mouths with soap. But Steve says I must be nuts; probably my service provider just deletes my whinges. He says Wyoming is a very beautiful state.
Today there will be no letter, I know, just spam. And the twelfth letter, which is always Ryno’s. I can rest assured that even if your mail is held back, Ryno’s will come through, like Ryno himself, hacking through some Malayan jungle or trudging in crampons through Himalayan snow. Ryno reporting to me in terse one-line e-mails from the land of real men. My friend has another side to him, of course; everyone does. But hacking and trudging are on the dust jacket.
Every year, as August approaches, I know that it will happen. You don’t mention it beforehand, don’t build up a picture of the preparations, the booking, or the packing, but I know that soon I’ll receive the one that begins: “This will be my last mail until September. Theo and I drive to Johannesburg tomorrow and stay the night with Jackie. Then our usual holiday in the Kruger National Park. I’ll miss you.”
I can’t bear it that you are going on holiday with your husband. Why do you have to go on holiday to the same place you honeymooned? Why this sentimental pilgrimage? I hate the way you are both interested in baobab trees. I wish that one of you were restless for a casino, or even an acacia. I hate the thought of your happy family reunions with your daughters. I hate your campfires. I am shut out, my nose pressed to the pane, dribbling with envy. I don’t even belong in the same room as a happily married couple.
Are you happily married?
Ways of Keeping
I have kept my love for you
like an unloved dog,
chained up in the yard.
You have kept your love for me
pressed between
pages of a well-loved book.
With a diamond you have secretly
etched your love for me into a glass pane,
showing me its hiding place
with a cupped hand.
One night, unable to sleep for thoughts of you, I got up and scribbled this down with a pale pencil crayon on a scrap of paper. I’ve just broken it into lines, choosing to put “pages” on a new line and omitting the definite article. I do take line breaks seriously, don’t adhere to the carriage-return theory of poetry.
There is definitely something still wrong in the last stanza. It still has the heavy sign-pointing of prose. You can even see that the second line is too long. Rather: “You have etched/your love for me into glass”, but that would take away the faint echo of “pain” in “pane”. “You have secreted your love for me/etched it in a pane”? But “diamond” is good. Leave it, they say, put it in a drawer and come back to it.
No, I know:
With a diamond you have secretly
etched your love for me into a glass pane,
showing me its my hiding place
with a cupped hand.
And maybe also make the tense less perfect:
With a diamond you have secretly?
You have gone away, and when you come back, you won’t tell me about your holiday. You told me once, just a little, about the game park trip. But I behaved badly. I raged about the campfires and the stars. I imagined Theo whispering to you to see the lioness and her cubs or some other rustling intimacy of the savannah. So