We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
your second, your third,

look for your small xx,
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,
their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.

POETRY
I couldn’t see Guinness
and not envisage a nun;
a gun, a finger and thumb;
midges, blether, scribble, scrum.

A crescent moon, boomerang, smirk,
bone; or full, a shield, a stalker,
a stone. I couldn’t see woods
for the names of trees- sycamore,
yew, birch, beech
or bees

without imagining music scored
on the air- nor pass a nun
without calling to mind a pint of one,
stout, untouched, on a bar at the Angelus.

Duffy neatly captures the process of association here. She allows enough apparent whimsy or looseness to suggest the natural idiosyncracy of 'free association'. And just as our association goes one way so the next moment it may go another; in reverse! The poem also 'proves' the power of anchoring and the ways we may intervene and redirect our association. Richard Bandler is a fan of 'spiralling' where the feelings can be sent spiralling elsewhere, away from an individual so that the emotional  effects are diluted or rendered comic. Oddly enough and yet not so oddly as Art illustrates so many NLP theories( as it should) this poem seems to spiral away and then back again for me.

This was life in the slowest lane of them all. Thirty six aisles of monotony peopled by these spectres without any trace of courage at all. Duty and ties married to these pieces of magnetised plastic.

The man lifted his basket high over the angry child's head and took down a bottle of Talisker. He threw in another. They had paid him well this time and no one, but no-one could stop him now.

''And if you feel like you are spending your life running from dragons, isn't it nice to know that you're never more than one thought away from peace?''

http://www.geniuscatalyst.com/

Michael Neill's site is one of the most transformative and inspiring on  the web. His tip of the day is invariably astute, good humoured and humane. AND most of the site is FREE!

CAROL ANN DUFFY (1955–present)
In Mrs Tilscher's Class

You could travel up the Blue Nile
with your finger, tracing the route
while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.
Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswan.
That for an hour, then a skittle of milk
and the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust.
A window opened with a long pole.
The laugh of a bell swung by a running child.

This was better than home. Enthralling books.
The classroom glowed like a sweetshop.
Sugar paper. Coloured shapes. Brady and Hindley
faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake.
Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found
she'd left a gold star by your name.
The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully, shaved.
A xylophone's nonsense heard from another form.

Over the Easter term the inky tadpoles changed
from commas into exclamation marks. Three frogs
hopped in the playground, freed by a dunce,
followed by a line of kids, jumping and croaking
away from the lunch queue. A rough boy
told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared at your parents, appalled, when you got back home.

That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity.
A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot,
fractious under the heavy, sexy sky. You asked her
how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled,
then turned away. Reports were handed out.
You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown,
as the sky split open into a thunderstorm.

This afternoon I attended an end of year show by my daughter's whole school where the year 6 play was especially thoughtful offering a superb allegory relating to Darwin's theory of natural evolution and leaving school. I thought of Duffy once again and in this poem she expressly positions the reader within the momory 'you'  whether it is literally shared or not. It is a very special trusting. imaginative space this world of Primary education and my mother kept smiling at the enchantment of the painted stage and the sense of community that perhaps is never found again in the vast corridors of secondary education.

There are short story writers and then there is William Trevor. A simple yet devastating truth. Reading his story 'Friendship' from his 1996 collection 'After Rain' just now, I just shook my head at the sheer knowingness and acuity of a writer who can move a story from an opening prank committed by two children against their father involving cement and a golf bag, to the ending of a life long friendship because one woman knew too much about the other, resulting in the satiation of an inflexible husband's pride through sacrifice.


Trevor's writing wears its recognitions modestly. It is not 'weighty' in terms of tonality and compression and yet seems to say all there can be to say on a subject, so that the story has to mean finally what is means. Once known, once filtered out into the world through language, experience has to be experienced within the shapes by which it is birthed and then governed. Having said this, Trevor's story does not render 'life' as some non-optional, ill fated strait jacket, yet the enclosure of Trevor's words vividly delineates the parameters by which we greet, acknowledge and even silently hate each other. How perfectly Trevor captures the subtle, gladiatorial combat between a wife, a husband and a best friend here:

'Margy's going to make us her paella,' Francesca said, and Margy knew that when Philip turned away it was to hide a sigh. He didn't like her paella.He didn't like the herb salad she put together to go with it. He had never said so, being too polite for that, but Margy knew.'

'Oh, good,' Philip said.

Margy's point of view privileges her insight into the unspoken tensions between this small group of three. However her innate fairness also preserves the autonomy of both Francesca and Philip. We may all recognise the placatory bridging 'gift' of Francesca's justification of Margy's presence through the promise of the paella. She is a wife who has become accustomed to shaping strategies to preserve the status quo, yet we also sense her vulnerability and the strong possibility that Philip is not the man she should have married, nor the man she will ever love enough to feel anything other than temperate care.

The quiet, possiibly complacent irony of the word 'good' reminds me of an alligator in waiting! The mask of polite detachment adopted by Philip seems cold enough for secret cruelty and the intelligence of Trevor, prevents this being a sexually charged combat for Francesca's love, fought over ( like James' Wings of the Dove) by Philip and Margy. This is more ordinary, more carefully and unexplosively entrenched, yet still, by the end of the story, nonetheless isolating and upsetting, for the coldness of Philip contaminates everything. The simple repetition of the pronoun 'he' subtly emphasises the phallic precision of Philip and his anti-playful view of the world, which confines his wife to a life of feminine apology, opposes Margy's bohemian offering of 'her paella' and outrages his sons into imaginative and practical anarchy!

Reading may confirm things that we have known or lost or hoped for. We  come across a parade of arranged words and something magical may happen, something that we hear and  feel as much as read. This meeting of the senses transforms a moment into something more plastic, more stretchy, more alive and we are changed by this encounter, having the words  here. to recognise who and what we are and can be. It is as if the very 'pulse' of certain writers anchors us to another way of knowing, another 're-sourcing' of ourselves.

Years ago, after starting at Liverpool University by the back door ( via the ring and beg late admissions' system) mySpanish teacher Mrs Wyness (who was by far the most intelligent and firm of all my sixth form teachers ) told me to read Garcia Marquez because he was special and because she thought I needed something new.

At some point I did read his Autumn of The Patriach and felt it rather bloody, hyperbolic  and crazy and it was a good while later before i started to read him again and found Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. I also read many of his short stories and here, as with D H Lawrence, I found the best of Marquez without becoming exasperated by his art which with the longer pieces sometimes feels like trickery: too flashy, too self conscious, too knowingly brilliant.

So here in 'Death beyond Constant love' the terminally ill Senator  Sanchez on his yearly pilgrimmage for votes, finds the woman of his life and what we hear and feel as we read, is the rhapsodic irony and desperation of this meeting.

Death has taken all the familiarity out of his world and rendered it alien. the world goes on, indifferently counting time to his death when it will carry on without a tear. Yet right in the middle of his final tour he finds a woman whose beauty makes him sabotage even the remaining respectability of his normal happy life before his terminal  prognosis. Marquez makes us sympathise with the Senator even when he seems shoddy and even violating,  because the narative mirrors and matches his awareness of his own collusion in his own destruction, his own desire to live more than he has ever lived; dangerously, desperately and finally:

'Then she laid his head on her shoulder with her eyes fixed on the rose. The senator held her about the waist, sank his face into woods-animal armpit, and gave into terror. Six months and eleven days later, he would die in that same position, debased and repudiated because of the public scandal with Laura Farina and weeping with rage at dying without her.'

The world of Marquez always involves the relationship between sexual desire and smell. Here the senator knows he is alive because his sensuality tells him so. The body is not sanitised nor removed from the earthy realities of aliveness. And it is this earthy vitality that triggers the first direct expression of mourning for his decaying self. 'weeping with rage at dying without her.' Sometimes as I posted somewhere else on this blog site, only rage will do.