Stocking Stuffer

Dear Blog,

I bet you thought I would forget about you over the holidays. I bet you thought that what with my parents coming to visit and trying to find space in this small apartment for even a very small tree and trying to think of something, ANYTHING to get for That Guy (who is impossible to shop for, I tell you, IMPOSSIBLE), that I wouldn’t remember to get anything for you. Not so, blog! I have a poem for you.

Years ago, lifetimes and several other selves ago, long before motherhood, before That Guy, before cycling down the hill towards Ogasawara harbour and filling up with more joy than I thought was possible, before I had tasted sea urchin or read anything by Jean Rhys, before I had seen the Sistine Chapel or a single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, before I had tried and failed to write a novel and certainly before I had tried and succeeded, I found this poem printed in the Times Literary Supplement in the bathroom at my parents’ house. I cut it out (I did ask permission first… I think), and taped it on my bedroom wall. Eventually, I bought the collection of Carol Ann Duffy’s poems that this one appears in (The World’s Wife), and I don’t know what I did with the clipping. Maybe I still have it somewhere with all the odd little things I used to have on my wall and then carried around in notebooks when I was changing walls too often – the cartoon of Virginia Woolf with a landlord in a bare apartment (I just assumed it would come with a bed of one’s own, a desk of one’s own, a chair of one’s own…), the postcard of a man riding a giant fish through the night sky (He held on for dear life because he knew in his heart this fish was his), a Marilyn Monroe quotation (She was a girl who knew how to be happy, even when she was sad. And that’s important – you know). Or maybe I don’t have any of those things anymore, maybe they got purged on one of our many moves. The book is still on my shelf, though, and here is the poem, which I have loved for years now and I hope you will too. (I know it’s Christmas, but we’re going Old Testament with this one):

Delilah (Carol Ann Duffy)

Teach me, he said -
we were lying in bed -
how to care.
I nibbled the purse of his ear.
What do you mean? Tell me more.
He sat up and reached for his beer

I can rip out the roar
from the throat of a tiger,
or gargle with fire
or sleep one whole night in the Minotaur's lair,
or flay the bellowing fur
from a bear,
all for a dare.
There's nothing I fear.
Put your hand here -

he guided my fingers over the scar
over his heart,
a four-medal wound from the war -
but I cannot be gentle, or loving, or tender.
I have to be strong.
What is the cure?

He fucked me again
until he was sore,
then we both took a shower.
Then he lay with his head on my lap
for a darkening hour;
his voice, for a change, a soft burr
I could just about hear.
And, yes, I was sure
that he wanted to change,
my warrior.

I was there

So when I felt him soften and sleep,
when he started, as usual, to snore,
I let him slip and slide and sprawl, handsome and huge,
on the floor.
And before I fetched and sharpened my scissors -
snipping first at the black and biblical air -
I fastened the chain to the door.

That's the how and the why and the where.

Then with deliberate, passionate hands
I cut every lock of his hair.



Merry Christmas, blog, if you are into that sort of thing,

Catherine