Isabelle, sa soeur

I remember you coming to me in Charleville
on a furlough from your first husband,
the architect, the high flier, when I was still
a student studying Arthur Rimbaud.

I remember the tallest of wire fences
surrounding your father's large self-built house
as a sort of enclosure around your girlhood
to keep the Ardennes' wild boars out.

I remember you dousing your breasts with wine
to make them grow for me, so that I'd want you
and the list of rules your father sent me
with the timetable of his daughters' bedtimes.

I remember your tallness, a curved spine,
your sloping gait, your feet, bigger than mine
so when I greeted you and we made love
on our feet, it was like facing another man.

You joked that you were no longer a child
while I still was, the roles were reversed
and you made me another chocolate cake
in your mother's kitchen, pretending it was for yourself.

I remember your unimaginable life
your incomprehensible letters, I still have them
in a cardboard suitcase, the one I carried
with a bleached photo of you I developed at school.

I remember meeting you in a supermarket
on Belle Ile, still scruffy, a sort of nervous arrogance
while your boisterous, ill-dressed daughter
demolished a stack in the adjoining aisle.

I remember hearing of your death in a car
on your way to work in the mountains of Grenoble
where you were a psycho-motrice for children
carried away by a snowdrift, a small avalanche.

Paradoodle

The best writers take people and things as they are
not having any particularly
harumphing idea of culture
to sit back upon
and following as they do
their exploratory lines
across an unmapped but always
undefined experience: undefined, that is
until the moment it's done
and then mainly for others
they never really seem to connect
with the conceptions that dominate their times
except they do: they're commenting on them
as you say, but only tangentially
and whilst there’s a politics
they're following, perhaps of the acceptable,
of what they are allowed to say
it's not what you and I might prefer
to call politics
and the best of them, although they must possess
as much Machiavellian intelligence as anyone
(even a chimp)
seem only to be observers, recorders of their impressions
which they're not being too precious
about either
just getting it all down
dead centre, the way it's meant to be
the way nobody had quite seen
or managed to tell it before -
too hedged
in the sense both of
running between dense screens
and of a caution that wouldn't
allow us to invest
so heavily in apparent, unimportant meanings.

Anti-Heroes

Imagine that Pope had dedicated himself
to obtaining fair play for hunchbacks;
that, as the most intelligent of their kind
he had tried to 'represent' his tribe
and find a literary analogue for their condition.

Perhaps he could make his verses mis-shapen,
listing, asymmetrical, a bit like himself.
He could make them limp a little, too
and play for sympathy. He didn't though.
He didn't. That's why we've heard of him.

Each crack is at the end of the whip.
And even then they said his satiric bite
was only the bitterness of a cripple.
I expect they were probably right.
They are usually, these fountains of opinions.

He certainly asked for their advice on women.
He acted the lad in letters. How sitting
between the glowing misses Blount
he had trouble 'to keep myself in my skin',
and they jumped out of theirs in a kind of delicious fright.

How he could place everything in order –
grasshoppers, swine, elephants, and men
arraigned, arranged; yet their order's
mocked, turned upside-down, provisional:
a day, a play on which the curtain falls.

Mrs Pope died at Twickenham, still unaware
they say, of the reasons for her son's fame.
A caterpillar repeats thy mother's grief,
her gardening undone by its infernal chewing
in an aphorism Blake flung down anywhere.

Copyright © John Muckle, 2002.