Using form: unconventional couplets: Helena Nelson, ‘The Hill’
His heart is okay (it has been checked)
but not far from the top his pace is checked
and he stops. ‘Enough. Let’s go back.’
Mrs Philpott doesn’t want to go back.
If they get to the summit, they’ll see the view.
He doesn’t give tuppence about the view.
‘It’s not far,’ she says. ‘Too far,’ he says.
She doesn’t care a bit what he says,
she wants to get to the top of the hill. ‘Come on,’
she says. ‘Best foot forward.’ ‘You go on,’
he says. ‘I’ll wait here.’ So she walks on her own
and quickly sets up a pace of her own
not pausing and not once looking back
until for some reason she stops and looks back
and he’s quite out of sight, could be anywhere
and a sort of fear catches her where
head and heart meet. This stupid emotion is love
and because of that, because of her love,
if he won’t get to the top of the hill,
then she won’t get to the top of the hill
either. Anyway, a few drops of rain
fall on her hair and she knows he hates rain.
He might even have turned
and gone home without her. She turns
and half-runs down the path. He’s waiting for her,
sitting on his coat and waiting for her.
‘About time,’ he says. ‘Where have you been?’
She says, ‘Where do you think I’ve been?’
He doesn’t ask about the view from the top.
She doesn’t tell him she didn’t get to the top.
She might think, ‘This is the story of my life,’
but although this is the story of her life
that is not what she thinks.
She thinks something else.
*****
This poem comes from midway through Helena Nelson’s 2022 book ‘Pearls – The Complete Mr & Mrs Philpott Poems‘, some 100 poems (I haven’t counted) detailing their years of marriage, starting with a couple of references to their first marriages, through to their own noticeable ageing.
The book’s blurb asks: ‘Where did Mr and Mrs Philpott come from? The author has no idea. They popped into her head over twenty years ago and have refused to go away. Their story is one of ordinary, difficult, everyday love. And yet they themselves aren’t ordinary. Their dreams, anxieties and needs, their separate and difficult pasts, have somehow coalesced into mutual understanding–even sudden spurts of happiness–despite the rainy holidays, arguments and illness. The ordinariness of their love is magical and miraculous. Because ordinary love is a kind of miracle.’
Helena Nelson writes: “I didn’t choose this absorption with the Philpotts. It just happened, and it seems I really have stopped writing them now. But I’m terribly fond of them and often think about them. Probably one of my top favourite Philpott poems is ’The Hill’. Nearly all the poems have some kind of formal pattern underpinning them. Even when they appear to be free, the rhythms are deliberate. I don’t know if I could say any more about them. I feel as though they’ve gone off on their own now, for better or worse, and I’m happy about that.”
Helena Nelson runs HappenStance Press (now winding down) and also writes poems. Her most recent collection is Pearls (The Complete Mr and Mrs Philpott Poems). She reviews widely and is Consulting Editor for The Friday Poem.
Photo: “Day 40: Grey Skies” by amanky is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
