The Throb Of Damsons

So my portfolio 'Tales Of The Male Nude' has been sent off to my supervisors.  It feels like an achievement of sorts, though some of the poems in it certainly won't make the final collection and I've got a LOT more to write.  I included everything except my proto-long-poem 'Gilgamesh' (which may or may not come off) and a short love lyric 'Epithalamion', both of which are far too unfinished.  It amounted to 25 poems.  Even if they're no good the number in itself seems to be a statement of intent, or commitment.  It's an actual wodge of paper!  Almost enough to stop a door from closing, or whack someone across the head with!

My most recent poem, also not included, is 'Parachute'.  My recent (and continuing) stress at work made me think of how my ex suffered with stress and how I may not have sympathised with him as much as I should have done.  (But how can you ever know - or feel - what's going on in someone else's mind?)  He once told me how he'd had to pull into a lay-by because he'd felt he couldn't cope any more.  That image has always stayed with me, but my own stress suddenly pulled that image strongly into focus.  I also realised that a poem which uses this image, of a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, having a secret meltdown in a lay-by, would fit this collection well.  So I began work on it the weekend before last.  First thing I wrote was:

They'll just see the shadow of a man in an Audi

Maybe his hands showing pale on the steering wheel

Maybe...

I didn't like the predicatability of this rhythm.  I realised I wanted something more concentrated - very short, end-stopped lines, perhaps.  I've never explored short lines much and I wanted to see how comfortable I felt with them.  More importantly I wanted to fix the image in the reader's head by slowing down the reading process to the point of stillness.  I also wanted the minimum of 'schwa' sounds and more of a focus on dipthongs - the 'Audi' (thanks, Robin, for listing the names of executive cars for me!) and 'lay-by' not only giving the poem its physical setting but also something of an assonantal echo throughout.  So then I wrote:

Just a man in an Audi

in a lay-by

turning his headlights off.

Maybe his hung jacket

his pale hands

on the steering wheel.

Maybe the firefly of his cigarette

but not the cut of him.

Not the new plastic scent of the air.

Not the cold howl

gathering behind the full Windsor knot of his tie.

No, none of this.

None of this

as you speed past him, home.

(Again, thanks Robin for the sartorial detail!)  I wasn't sure whether to include the last line.  It implicates the reader, almost wagging a finger at him/her for not noticing these men amongst us who are trying to cope and who are secretly not coping at all.  But I like the way the grammar of the whole poem anticipates this last line, even though the verb which would make all the rhetoric click into place - "you'll see/you'll notice" is missing.  Why did I do that?  I suppose I thought that merely insinuating this verb would be enough, and that the poem might feel aptly un-secured (insecure) because of it.  In the second draft I thought that missing the verb was trying to be too clever - so I made it all more explicit.  The second draft - which is how it still stands - goes:

Lay-by.  Audi.  Killing his headlights.

Maybe his hung jacket.

Maybe the glimmer of his grip on the wheel.

Maybe the crumbling hot eye of his cigarette.

'Firefly', sadly, has gone, but I wanted the way I mention/describe the headlights, the cigarette, his hands, his jacket, to be suggestive of his psychological state.  Then the second stanza goes:

But not the missed deadlines.

But not the missed targets

tightening to a rabbit scream

behind the full Windsor knot of his tie.

Funny how disparate experiences are drawn upon.  In the first draft it was a 'cold howl'.  Then I got to thinking what the most horrid noise I've ever heard was - and it was the sound of a live rabbit being swallowed whole by a twelve foot python in Clem and Maureen's kitchen as I sat next door in their living room.  Recontextualising that scream suddenly made the man's pain seem, for me at least, more authentic and more acute.  Does this suggest that the older we are the better poets we're likely to be, since our store of memories is larger?  Or do we keep fishing up the same memories, time and time again?  The next five lines read:

Nor even the blood-globs in his temples

suddenly becoming the thud of damsons

caught in a bruised sheet,

one summer, one summer as he shook the tree.

(His dad stood by.  "That used to be a parachute").

The experience of collecting damsons in southwest France has been begging to be used for a while but I wasn't expecting it to materialise here.  But I needed to show what was inside the man's head - something more of what we DON'T notice as we speed past - so leaping off to another place seemed necessary.  I suppose I wasn't expecting to pair such a joyful image with such a negative emotion, but it's as if the image HAD to be catalysed, energised, by some of kind of emotion before it could be useful to me.  Perhaps the pairing came about because I was connecting the drumming of the blood in his temples with the drumming of the fruit as it hit the ground.  Just prior to writing those lines I was listening to a recent Kristin Hersh song where she sings - in that voice which always seems to fight shy of some kind of manic transcendence - "little green apples falling around me..." - so maybe I owe it to her...

Funny, sounds have played a huge role in the compositional process of this one.  When I began the first draft I was consciously imagining the doppler effect of traffic as it speeds past a lay-by at the same time as I was reaching for the words.  And this stanza fell quickly into place partly because I was consciously concentrating on onamatapoeic /am/ and /um/ sounds and trying to create in my head an imaginary tape-loop of the drumming of falling fruit as I wrote.  Once I'd got the damsons falling into the sheet, the sheet, again unexpectedly, became a parachute that I remember from my childhood:  a silk, German parachute which my mum's auntie had come by in the war and had embroidered with flowers - and which was kept in our garden shed for years until it finally rotted away.  As a child I always felt that it was a magical object.  And, though long gone, it obviously still is.  It appears here, associated with the man's father, almost as a symbol of safety and survival, of his fall being broken.  Which is why I've made 'parachute' the title of the poem.  But I have to say, here I'm interpreting AFTER the event - the sheet became a parachute with a father standing by instantaneously and actually, in that instant of writing, I was not intending any symbolism at all.  But it's extremely difficult to retrace the steps that the mind took, work out what came first and what came second - and what happened consciously, half-consciously or unconsciously.  It's like describing the choreography of a dance, when all you've got to go on is overlapping footprints in the sand.  There's only so much you can describe.  Only so much you can become aware of.  But I think the attempt is edifying.  I think the attempt can only make you a better poet.  Nevertheless, I think there's a part of the poetry-making mind which always wants to escape being brought into the light.  And that's also good - I put an optimistic spin on this.  Because maybe the attempt to MAKE CONSCIOUS - retrace steps/describe the choreography - will force that part of the poetry-making mind to escape further into the darkness, such that in future poems it's forced to dredge up deeper, more startling images...

Anyway, the whole poem looks like this:

Parachute

Lay-by.  Audi.  Killing his headlights.

Maybe his hung jacket.

Maybe the glimmer of his grip on the wheel.

Maybe the crumbling hot eye of his cigarette.

But not the missed deadlines.

But not the missed targets

tightening to a rabbit scream

behind the full Windsor knot of his tie.

Nor even the blood-globs in his temples

suddenly becoming the thud of damsons

caught in a bruised sheet,

one summer, one summer as he shook the tree.

(His dad stood by.  "That used to be a parachute.")

You'll notice none of this, as you speed by, home.

tags: deep image  kristin hersh  gender  gay poet  poet  poetics  poetry  writing  sonnet  masculinity  men  

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