With some surprise, I balance my small female skull in my hands.
What is it like? An ocarina? Blow in its eye.
It cannot cry, holds its breath only as long as I exhale,
mildly alarmed now, into the hole where the nose was,
press my ear to its grin. A vanishing sigh.
For some time, I sit on the lavatory seat with my head
in my hands, appalled. It feels much lighter than I’d thought;
the weight of a deck of cards, a slim volume of verse,
but with something else, as though it could levitate. Disturbing.
So why do I kiss it on the brow, my warm lips to its papery bone,
and take it to the mirror to ask for a gottle of geer?
I rinse it under the tap, watch dust run away, like sand
from a swimming cap, then dry it – firstborn – gently
with a towel. I see the scar where I fell for sheer love
down treacherous stairs, and read that shattering day like braille.
Love, I murmur to my skull, then, louder, other grand words,
shouting the hollow nouns in a white-tiled room.
Downstairs they will think I have lost my mind. No. I only weep
into these two holes here, or I’m grinning back at the joke, this is
a friend of mine. See, I hold her face in trembling, passionate hands.
Carol Ann Duffy situates her poem in an ordinary place: the toliet! This setting sets up a naturally paradoxical or even semingly oxymoronic context for the introspective ruminations of the poet’s speaker as she turns the female skull around in her hands. How far, or ironically near are we to Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn? The very process of balancing the skull and exploring its messages generates the poem itself- as in Keats’ Ode of course. The process of creation appears before our eyes, ironically as it explores the end of creation – death.
The intimacy of this connection with the ‘small female skull’ is palpable. I feel the verb ‘balance’ acts as a tender, anchor , suggestive of the precariousness of the skull’s situation in the speaker’s hand as well as the transience and ephemeraility of life. For the poem seems unsurprisingly about mortaility and the way we may visit our inevitable end before our inevitable literal end!
As in so much of Duffy’s work, the idea of the ‘breath’ comes up. We are so often aware of the ‘pulse’ of life in a Duffy poem, a pulse which maintains the rhythm of the poet’s thinking and which changes as the poem approaches its finale. Being out of breath as in Wilfred Owen’s war poetry is synonymous with suffocation and extinction.In some poems of Duffy, the poet draws our attention to breathing reiforcing idea of resurrection. In Duffy’s poem here, the breath through the holes of the skull are without effect. The hollowness of the skull even a reflection of the hollowness of any avowal of ‘love’. For everything according to the atheist Duffy, yields to the emptiness of this residue of life; namely the skull itself.’Papery bone’ All our ‘weight’ of living through thoughts, aspirations and memories become this…
After initially externalising a reflective process about mortality, Carol Ann Duffy allows the poem to slip between external and internal focus. The skull far from being ‘without’ becomes the within. Why afterall is the speaker seemingly stranded alone on a toilet? What or who is she seeking refuge from? And why the reference to the ‘scar’ gained through ‘love’ and ‘treacherous stairs’? Grief has destabilised the speaker perhaps and the stairs may be a metaphor for a fall from love, or alternatively a ‘fall’ from childhood innocence perhaps? For it is quite possible that the stairs are the stairs of life..so that the ‘fall’ is a metaphor and thus the ‘braile’ represents the human urge to make sense of the folly of life?
What is the answer to this strange encounter then? The poet’s speaker italicises ‘love’ and this ironises the response? Is life a search of a meaningful dialogue which may never arrive or which remains a conversation finally spoken in a ‘white room’ with death itself? All our grandioise ‘grand words’ become erased, or deemed ‘crazy’ by others, emphasising the essential solitariness of existence. And like Macbeth’s final revelation in his play, life is full of ‘sound ‘ and ‘fury’ it may be told by ‘an idiot’ and it may signify ‘nothing’ except a hollow joke on behalf of this ‘friend of mine’
The final image is one of infinite tenderness to self/other and conveys the infinite fragility of life!!