I’m ten years away from the corner you laugh on
with your pals, Maggie McGeeney and Jean Duff.
The three of you bend from the waist, holding
each other, or your knees, and shriek at the pavement.
Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn.
I’m not here yet. The thought of me doesn’t occur
in the ballroom with the thousand eyes, the fizzy, movie tomorrows
the right walk home could bring. I knew you would dance
like that. Before you were mine, your Ma stands at the close
with a hiding for the late one. You reckon it’s worth it.
The decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh?
I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics,
and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Square
till I see you, clear as scent, under the tree,
with its lights, and whose small bites on your neck, sweetheart?
Cha cha cha! You’d teach me the steps on the way home from Mass, stamping stars from the wrong pavement. Even then
I wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello, somewhere
in Scotland, before I was born. That glamorous love lasts
where you sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine.
Carol Ann Duffy is a time traveller. Her poetry frequently steps to one side of an experience and redraws its ostensible shape, smudging away at any exclusive edges, so that the supposed fixity of an experience or relationship becomes more plastic,more malleable. I love this creativity in Duffy, this capacity for the ‘what if’ or ‘reframe’ in Carol Ann Duffy. For like all great writers, she is prepared to renegotiate experience and the past. She believes in resurrection through remembrance, and is prepared to play with remembrance(and I am aware of the seemingly dangerous and dismissive triteness of this term ‘play’ ) in order to discover the potential for reconciliation and even redemption.
One of Carol Ann Duffy’s recent poems as the new Poet Laureate is entitled ‘Premonitions’ which tries to rene
gotiate the shattering numbness of losing your mother, through a cinematic reversal of the progresssive destruction of a loved one through terminal illness. ‘Before you were mine’ is an earlier poem and celebrates Duffy’s mother from a very different viewpoint, though both deal with concepts of death in very different ways. The death before birth in ‘Before you were Mine’ and the role of writing to reanimate those lost literally to us through death.We talk about ‘going on’ but perhaps the direction of this platitude is more open to question than custom would have us belive. For where is the future direction and journey which will lead us ‘on’ tfrom the numbness of despair? Perhaps time travelling is the only secular resurrection available for an atheist like Carol Ann Duffy?
The poem above captures the daughter’s wonder at the time before she was born when her mother was ‘free’ of responsibility for her family. All the images and escapades fed into this tender, joyful portriat of her mother seem a conglomeration of most likely repeated family tales, ‘Marilyn’ all woven into this resonant elegy to lost time. The synasthaesia of ‘ I see you clear as scent’ underlines the delight and intimacy of this time travelling act of teasing love. It is as if one can remember what one has never literraly experienced but has stilled experienced vicariously through loving attentiveness to the details of another’s stories.
We are the stuff of anecdotes. Story telling is not a second hand substitute for ‘real’ life. It is the very stuff of life itself!