A Woman Clothed in Words (16 page)

Payly is mending his fishnets when Mako floats on by still singing to herself. He catches her in his net. She struggles trying to get free.

Payly – Gotcha.

Mako – No you haven’t. You just think you have.

Payly – Admit it. I gotcha. I caught you fair and square. Now you’re mine.

Mako – Let me out of this – this...

Payly – Fish net.

Mako – Mesh of lies and deceit.

Payly – What d’you mean?

Mako – You underhanded mean...

Payly – What could be more honest than a net? Anybody can see through it.

Mako –
(still struggling)
Get me out.

Payly – It’s a fish net and you’re a fish. A big fish. A beautiful fish.

Mako – No.

Payly – Admit it. You are a fish and I have caught you – in my net.

Mako – NO.

Payly – No what? You are not a fish or I haven’t caught you?

Mako – Oh you’ve caught me alright. But not in this net. This net is just string and ingenuity. There has to be something more than that. To be caught. To be caught up in...

She takes a knife and begins to cut the strings of the net.

Payly – Stop. I’ll let you out. It took me days and days to make that net.

Mako – And all you caught is me. You were after something more...

Payly – Edible. Delectable.

Mako –
Desirable? There are more fish in the sea than...is that it?

Payly – Perhaps.

Mako – And there are more things to knives than cutting nets.

Payly – You wouldn’t.

Mako – You want to bet on it?

Payly – Not really.

Mako – Well untangle me then. Or I will be your last catch. Your last...

He untangles her slowly, lingering over her hair, her breasts and so on. Meanwhile they carry on their conversation.

Mako – Hurry up. I’m not going to hang about all day.

Payly – I’ve always loved your hair. So fair. So stringy. So draggly.

Mako – What do you mean?

Payly – So beautiful.

Mako – That’s better. And?

Payly – Wavy, like kelp.

Mako – Like kelp. Seaweed?

Payly – Algae.

Mako – Slimy you mean?

Payly – Silky.

Mako – That’s better. That’s what they all say.

Payly – Who?

Mako – The men.

Payly – What men? I don’t see any men.

Mako – Well if there were any that’s what they would say.

Payly – You women are all alike. Fishing for compliments.

Mako – What compliments? What women for that matter.

Payly – All women. All of you ladies.

Mako – What ladies? I don’t see any.

Payly – There must be a place...

Mako – ...full of handsome young men, with muscular arms and bronzed backs with...

Payly – ...full of beautiful women with...

Mako – …legs like tree-trunks and eyes...

Payly – ... bosoms like boulders and...

Mako – ...like golden agates. And they...

Payly – ...thighs like tree-trunks.

Mako – Hey. That was my line.

Payly – No, mine.

Payly skilfully draws her in on the last strand of the net and kisses her. They fall laughing beneath the water.

Untitled statement for
Grain

“Is not every
child who dies a natural death slain by an angel?” So says William Blake. If an angel informs my poems then it is just such a one as this. Not at all the simpering coy creature who adorns so many greeting cards.

Yes, an angel sat on a window sill, beckoning with flaming fingers, encouraging the young poet to fling herself headlong. An angel, of course, is not god and therefore cannot command but may indeed cajole and deceive and flash as often as he/she wishes. An angel may even get behind you and push you off a cliff, perhaps taking the form of a mother pterodactyl teaching her offspring to fly, or at least to soar on the upward draft of the wind of the mind.

What does the poet need – what are in fact these wings composed of? One is the intellect, the other the imagination ... or one is language, the other meaning ... or ...? The important thing after all is that they beat together, that they are a pair and, if not perfectly matched, then at least in some way balanced; otherwise the soaring spirit will suddenly stop and spiral down to the death of the poem. Sweet is the poem and terrible its fall. Poor limp thing can it ever be revived, or will it survive as a mere zombie of a work?

To those of us whose curiosity drives us to read all about the imagined worlds of physicists and astronomers, how poetic indeed are the many ways these scientific minds construct our universe. But then what is this universe constructed of – or with? Stardust? Speculation? Deduction? The universe, I may say my universe, could be expressed as one single poem, but one read by innumerable minds: a universe therefore as repetitive and various as the thorns on a bush, the fins on a shark, the blots and curves of the inimitable Mr. Mandelbrot’s set. A fractal, a poem, a dream – do we get a choice? I, of course, being a maker, choose the word.

(1998)

Golden Rat

It was, as I remember, a
Tuesday evening in late spring, as I was driving home through the city traffic, when first I noticed the young girl on the bicycle. She was, I suppose, about twelve years old, a bony little person, pedalling away, struggling through the traffic as best she might, the determined set of her head telling of both anxiety and anticipation. But this was not what had attracted my attention: no, it was the piece of russet fur which hung around her neck like a choker. A child in shorts and
t
-shirt with a fur collar, did that make sense?

After that I passed her almost every evening. Always she seemed the same and the fur collar, though it shifted around a little sometimes, was certainly the same short-haired glowing pelt.

One evening we chanced both to be stopped by the same red light, I with my foot ready poised over the gas pedal, she balanced on the toes of her runners. Now I was able to get a good look at the fur-collar girl. She wasn’t, of course.

What I had taken for a fur collar was simply the pelt of the small animal she kept coiled about her neck. As I looked closer, I saw that the creature was nothing less than a yellowish rat, his pointed snout up against her left ear as she bent her head towards him, for all the world as though he were speaking and she was listening attentively to his words.

What could a rat be saying to a girl? It was a question I needed the answer to, and so I determined to follow her home. I slowed to a crawl, and always a hundred yards behind her, I turned all the corners she did: never approaching closer, ready to give the excuse of engine trouble should anyone challenge my abominable pace. I need not have worried. Soon we had left the streets and even the highway behind and were journeying in the country from this dirt road to that. All was lonely and deserted until a grey board cottage became visible ringed with a small thicket of trees. I parked the car in a patch of scrub on the roadside and followed the girl on foot for the last two hundred yards.

It was almost dusk, and suddenly a lamp was lit in the house. I crept in amongst the leafing poplars and stared into the lighted window to see what I could see. Apparently this room was the dining room. There was a long table covered with a white cloth, and the girl in a flowered apron was busy putting dishes upon the table. The dishes, although they were all of the same size, were of many different colours and contained many different kinds of food. She arranged them on the table and cried “Come. Come.” Then she sat down on the only chair in the room, spread a white napkin upon her knees and waited. In no time the room was full of rats of all colours and sizes. They leapt up on the table and each stood before a dish waiting. It was only when the girl dipped her spoon into her own plate that they began frantically to devour what was before them as though they were starving. She had barely taken three spoonfuls before they had finished their supper and disappeared into the dark corners of the house, squealing their thanks as they went.

And all this time the yellow rat sat upon the girl’s shoulder, apparently directing everything.

Of course there was more to be seen, more questions to be answered but I was so horrified at seeing the child surrounded by what seemed to me a horde of horrid creatures that I turned tail and ran back up the road to my car.

I don’t remember how I found my way out of that tangle of dirt tracks back to the city, back to my home, to my angry wife wanting to know why I was so late for my dinner.

To my job, to my daily journey to and from work, which always took me past the place where I once used to see a young girl on her bike bending her gentle head, listening to, no doubt obeying, the words of the yellow-brown rat on her shoulder.

Another Conversation

BACK and FO
RTH

BACK – It was a dream.

FORTH – You said you never dreamed. You said it was years since you had a dream. You said all that had stopped years ago.

BACK – Years and years ago.

FORTH – And now you say...

BACK – It was only one dream. Anyone can have one ... dream.

FORTH – When?

BACK – In my sleep of course. When else?

FORTH – It could have been a daydream. I used to have daydreams. I used to think I could have been someone else, someone in a far country, someone in another time. Someone walking home at noon to a house with fifteen windows and all of them on the south side.

BACK – Wouldn’t that have made it rather hot?

FORTH – Yes. It was hot. Very hot. I had to move to another house, one with windows, in the North.

BACK – The house was in the North or the windows were in the North?

FORTH – Both.

BACK – Then it must have been very chilly.

FORTH – And dark too.

BACK – An island was it?

FORTH – You guessed it. An island with a cloudy sky.

BACK – I know the one. It has...

FORTH – How can you know it? I made it up. It’s part of my...

BACK – ...bare windy hills and deep forests in the valleys and...

FORTH – ...wide swift rivers and...

BACK – ... water meadows.

FORTH – How do you know that?

BACK – You think you can keep everything for yourself? I’m entitled to at least...

FORTH – No you’re not. It’s my place. Stay out.

BACK – How can you be so selfish. No-one needs a whole island to themselves.

FORTH – All right then, but keep to the other shore. I need my solitude. Keep to the rocky part.

BACK – While you lie about on the sandy beach in the sun I suppose.

FORTH – I told you. It’s cloudy. And chilly.

BACK – Well then, perhaps you’d like to get invited.

FORTH – Invited. To what?

BACK – A fish dinner.

FORTH – What are you talking about? What fish?

BACK – Fishing is good from the rocks. Rock salmon, rock crabs...

FORTH – We’ll need bread. I’ll bring the bread.

BACK – And a bottle of wine. Wine goes well with crabs.

FORTH – But I’m not staying the night.

BACK – Why not? We could build a fire. We could...

FORTH – ...make love and go to sleep and you could have another of those dreams. The ones you said you had finished with. The dreams you promised you would never have again.

Untitled

red with the
acid (violence of my spittle)

God has a passion for the sun and is always overheating the house

Earth lover the taste of your anger is apple seeds

In the first garden there was a tree, and in that tree a boat caught in its branches. Like a moon on a postcard

The small sailboat overturned by the wind held there by the fingers of twigs

We are all of us longing for Africa though we don’t know it

Carrying the Stone

From anywhere you look across this Earth you will see on the horizon women walking, a long line of women, a never-ending line, some walking young and tall, some shuffling old and bent, most doing the best they can with their burdens. There goes a little girl with a big jar of water on her head, and there a mother carrying two children, one on her back, one in her arms, and following slowly behind, a grandmother with a great bundle of firewood slung on her back. Look again and you’re watching a healthy young woman, head up, striding along. Striding somewhere on a woodland path in Europe, perhaps arm in arm with a handsome young man. Free and happy you say. Free and lucky? What burden is this one carrying?

The year is 1945–46. The young woman is myself or someone very like me. The burden is the stone I carry.