Poetry Jam, 16th. July

Jessica Maybury at Poetry Jam very kindly offers two prompts this week - sleeplessness and peculiar dress. Perhaps these prompts can be rolled up into one?

Pavor Nocturnus

Age-freckled, stooped, thin as an altar rail
Miss Ellis mounts the stairs with mounting dread.
For solace - biscuits and a flask of tea.
She takes from her chest of coffin-black regret
her wedding gown, full skirted, its flowered train
grey from the night sweats and her nightmare tears,
loosens her once fair tresses and her stays,
stands at her mourning mirror and surveys
the heron legs, the unfrequented hair,
puts on the unwedded dress again, and mounts
the narrow bed sunk to her shape since girlhood,
lies back and waits, patient unwanted bride
waiting for sleep, or morning, or the one
who did not come, but still comes to the dreams
she loves and craves and loathes and wants and fears,
comes to her bedroom door, her bridegroom in
his tall grey hat, grey spats and silk cravat.
Her faithless dreamgroom with his scarecrow face
sidles up to her bed,  casts off his shoes
and mounts her, crooning some lascivious tune,
plucks at her husks of flesh and bears her down
into their paroxysm.
                                         The baleful moon
shines on this consumation, on this torment
salvaged from the shipwreck of her hopes.
Miss Ellis sleeps sounder now, her terrors fled
while the moon creeps westward past the lovers' bed.

Magpie Tales#72

From Willow Manor comes a picture prompt which sparks mixed memories.

Wheat Field with Rising Sun, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

End Of Term

  I lost my virginity in a wheatfield. It had been a summer of sticky weather. I was seventeen. I needed to satisfy my curiosity. Urges came a poor second as I remember, and we all go through phases of not knowing quite what we're doing or why, don't we? The thing about losing your virginity, it's not like losing your credit card. You can't apply for a replacement.  When I trailed home afterwards Mum asked  what had I been doing and why had I bits of straw stuck in my hair. I think she knew, but said nothing direct.

  The girls' school called him Tonka or Tonker, either was appropriate, but those were nicknames.   He was Jason.  He was a great rugby player. First fifteen captain and put together like a brick shed. He seemed ideal and some of the girls had been very direct about his attributes, things I'd seen only as anatomical drawings in the toilets, some - I couldn't help thinking - massively exaggerated. One such, in the gym toilet was titled "Tonker's plonker."  Nothing ventured, as they say, and it was near the end of term, so I asked if he'd like to walk me home via a scenic route.  

  He seemed quite well up on underclothes and told me a joke as he went about it. Imagine. On your back, knickers round one ankle, bra unhooked, and I'm wondering what's happening down there, not much except it hurts quite a bit and he's telling me a joke about this farmer who set one of the lads to harvest the wheatfield with the combine. It would take him most of the day. 

  Not so for Jason, who seemed to have finished and rolled off me and stared at the sky, saying sorry, Luce, you smell so nice. I didn't know what to think. I had felt almost nothing. I mean, nothing pleasant, nothing like I made myself feel sometimes after I got into bed.  To cover our embarrassment I asked him to finish the joke.

  "Well, the farmer was pleased, but wondered why there was a small square in the middle of the field where the combine hadn't cut the wheat."  He threw the limp condom away.

  "The driver said he wanted to leave that bit as a memento of the spot where he first made love."

  I wanted to say something about love, but fastened my bra instead.

  "The farmer thought that was quite sweet. Then he noticed another uncut patch in one corner of the field and asked was that where they did it again?"

   I steadied myself, hand on Jason's shoulder while I hitched up my knickers.

  "The driver said, no, that was where her mother was standing."  He tucked in his shirt and zipped his pants and we pulled on our school blazers.

   "The farmer said, you mean there you were humping away in the middle of the field with her mother watching from over by? Actually watching!"

   We started toward the lane and our homes.

   "What on earth did her mother say?"

  Jason opened the field gate for me. I said "Well, what did her mother say?"

  "Oh, her usual. Baaa! Baaa!" and then, quite gently, he laid his arm round my shoulders and just for a minute I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

   

  

MaffickMonday #3

This week Alicia wants to know what life would be like if "birds ruled the world"

Birds Rule, O.K?

They'd want to know which Squadron I would join.
"Choose from this catalogue but do not keep
our trigger-happy Flight Commanders waiting.
Note that there is a waiting-list to join
the Birds of Paradise. The State does not
do Paradise. You girls are all the same,
fancying your own fine feathers. All this
prinking and preening never made fine birds. "

I'd ask them not to rush me. How about
a lammergeier?  "A splendid choice," they'd say.
"You carry bones aloft and let them fall
like bombs to shatter on the rocks below.
Great sport, particularly if they were
the bones of some sworn Enemy of State.
You'd swoop and pick their scattered shards for marrow."

I'm spoilt for choice. A raptor seems ideal.
Something I can get my talons into,
rip singing birds to bits to feed my chicks.
Better the sparrow hawk than the wee sparrow
in aviaries where the strong prey on the weak.
That is the way in bird dictatorships
where eagles dare not gainsay parrot-speak
from the high branches where the cockateels
perch, laughable in their 'who's-a-pretty' plumes
with drivel squawking from their raucous beaks.

Maffick Monday, 27th.June

If There Were No Fear

If there were no fear I'd say "I love you,"
but fear I'd see amusement in your glance.
Or, telling you to music, hear you say
"You love the dancer, child, less than the dance."
When in the fearful rush of days we met
I don't remember, yet that day is still
locked fast in my heart's most secret chamber.
I love you, and I fear I always will.

Thanks to Alicia at MaffickingMonday with her prompt
"What if fear didn't exist?"

Magpie Tales#70

Tess Kincaid's photo prompt this week is a family portrait.

Julia

   My sister was born at home, on my birthday, when I was eight.  Gran came to stay even though Mum said she'd be alright, she'd manage, and when I came in from school Gran said "Well, Lucy. You have a little sister. Come and see." She took my hand and led me to the small bedroom that would be the nursery and we stood by the crib, looking down at the sleeping baby. I learned later, much later, that what I felt as I gazed at this mite, my eighth birthday present, my new sister, is called 'falling in love.' I knelt by the crib and stroked her baby hair and her tiny fingers and asked Gran what she was called and Gran said something so amazing I couldn't believe it. "Your Mum and Dad said because she came on your birthday and is a sort of twin, you can choose her name."

   So I asked could she be Julia, because there was a ballet dancer in my reading book called Julia, but a sister  was better than any dancer and Mum and Dad both said she would like her name and I wondered if I would ever tell her how she got it.
   Now when I look back, her early years telescope into a handful of memories. Her first word is "Oosy." She holds my two hands and I go from room to room, backwards, helping her toddle. We become "Jucier and Looly." Some nights at bedtime she brings Sydney, her toy panda and stands by my bed, meaning can she come in for a cuddle and we pretend we are poor waifs lost in a dark wood until Sydney rescues us and we fall asleep. She shows me how you wiggle a loose tooth and gives me the first when at last it comes out. Yes, I still have it. Mum says sometimes when I am at school she lies where the sunshine comes in through the bay-window in the afternoon, and moves round with it till I get home, and then we make lego towers or houses till tea is ready and I watch her hands, so careful, and see her concentration, and I gulp with love for her.

   When I was fourteen, nearly, I became a woman. I told her what was happening and how sometimes my tummy would hurt. She asked if this happened to Mum and Gran and was wide-eyed when I told her this happened to all women and then she forgot about it, as children will. She was nearly six. But she gave me Sydney. She was “too old for him now, Loola. He can keep your sore tummy warm.”

   She had her friends and I had my boyfriends and then all too soon, the same month she became her school’s triple-jump champion, she too became a woman. The school taught the mechanics. I told her about joy and yearning and heartbreak, how to be careful and that she could always talk to me, and then one day, out of nowhere it seemed, there she was, my bridesmaid, sixteen, poised and lovely, grown taller than me. I didn’t throw my bouquet. I gave it into her hands, Julia, my beautiful sister, and we began going our different ways.

   My marriage was four years old and less than I had hoped it would be when she visited one day and told me she had been pregnant but had miscarried at the first trimester and had things to tell me. She looked wrecked. She didn’t want tea, or a drink. I went to the bedroom and came back with Sydney, and she knew what I meant. We lay down. I held her and let her cry, and that’s when my husband came in. He called “Hi, Luce,” from the hall and Julia said “Oh, My God!” He came into the bedroom and looked at us on the bed, and began shouting about what he’d always known. How I thought more of my fucking sister than I did of him and how we were a pair of lezzas. I got all of what was wrong with me and with our marriage, while Julia hid her face and sobbed until I said “For God’s sake shut up, Zack! She’s just lost a pregnancy.” He just said “Julia?” and went very still.
   How could I not have known? Why did I not guess? She’d had things to tell me! Next thing I was screaming at them out of red caves of rage. I rolled off the bed, hauled my tall sister to her feet, called her a fucking bitch and punched her, punched my beloved Julia once, right where their baby had been, so she doubled over, retching. When they had gone I sat on the bed for hours, sometimes silent, sometimes wailing. Zack phoned first. I asked him not to come back. I was leaving him. I heard him begin to say something about Julia before I put the phone down. It was three days before Julia phoned. All she said was “Lucy, I betrayed you. But I’m not with Zack,” before I heard her phone go down.

   That was four years ago. She never writes, or calls. But several times a year, and always on our birthday, I get photographs by email. They are often mountain scenes; in the Cascades, Yosemite, the Chilean Andes. And recently, pictures of Save the Children projects in Africa, and at last, at last, one showing Julia, tanned and lean, wearing shorts and a big hat, reading to a group of rapt African kids. Love is a verb, not a noun. I email back – “Come home, Joo.” And her message says “In a while. How’s Sydney?” so that I cry, properly cry at last. It may be a little or a long while, but some day it will be the right day, when she truly feels she is forgiven as I now know she has forgiven me, and we are ready, both of us, to accept the other’s forgiveness, and can learn to be sisters again.

Magpie Tales#69

Tess at Willow Manor prompts writers this week with another picture . . 

The Sea Beneath Our Feet

  Heading for Tesco I saw twenty, thirty yards ahead, two guys, in yellow dayglo jackets, workmen. Each carried a slender metal pole, shiny,  shoulder height.  Every so often they would stop and rest the end of the pole on the pavement and . . this was the intriguing bit . . put their ear to the top end of the pole as if listening to something.        Who could resist finding out more?  I came up behind them, and as I got closer, saw that the poles had something like a very small tabla drum on the top end. And they weren't putting the end of their poles on the pavement, but down through the holes in the square metal lids that cover fire hydrants and stop-cocks. I guessed - they were listening for water leaks!  And I thought, "What a brilliantly simple idea!"

  "Excuse me!"

  He didn't hear me at first. "Excuse me! You're finding leaks in the water mains?"

  I figured he'd be only too keen to talk about his job, and when he'd shown me the resonator - the drum thing - and explained how you did a test, he handed me his pole. Oh WOW!  Now I'm a council water leak tester and all!

  "Like this?"  I poked the end into the next hydrant cover along the pavement. I felt it contact something hard.

  "That's the water main. You're close to the stop-cock. What d'you hear?"

  I put my ear to the top of the drum. 

  "Oh wow . . "

  "What you're hearing is the water running in the mains. It's like - "  He seemed to be waiting for me to say "It's like the sound you hear when you hold a sea-shell to your ear.  It sounds like the sea!"

  His mate came up and started jossing him. "Get run in for pickin' up in the street, Frank."

  Frank said, "Get down to the next hydrant, Les,  and do your party piece." And when Les moved off, Frank said, "Listen again . . ?"

  "Lucy" I said, and put my ear to the resonator again, and noticed that, ten yards off, Les seemed to be blowing onto his resonator, his hands cupped round it.

  "Oh my Goodness! Whale song! Coming through the pipes! And the sea sounds. But it's beautiful - rising and falling, so many different notes. How does he do it?"

  "It's a waterman's secret, Lucy.  On a good day the lads up at the pumping station say they can hear him." His face was mock serious. I grinned and handed him back his pole. "Thank you so much. By the way . . what does a leak sound like?"

  Frank just said "That's another secret. Must get on."

 And so I got on as well, to Tesco by way of slow grey rolling ocean wastes through which huge creatures moved with leisured grace, talking, piping, singing, courting each other in the seas beneath my feet.

Onestop Poetry - "Octains"

Luke Prater, hosting OSP this week, seeks poems in Octain form.

High Octane Highs

Once you poured Tigers in your tanks.
(A sixties ad. you may recall)
You floored the pedal! What a ball!
A bigger thrill than blinds-down w**ks,
that exhaust boom, that throaty vrooom,
those handbrake turns and wheel-spin pranks
hit three wee girls and killed them all -

Great stuff, those Tigers in your tanks.