Crush
The older she gets,
the more she awakes
with somebody’s face strewn in her head
like petals which once made a flower.
What everyone does
is sit by a desk
and stare at the view, till the time
where they live reappears. Mostly in words.
Imagine a girl
turning to see
love stand by a window, taller,
clever, anointed with sudden light.
Yes, like an angel then,
to be truthful now.
At first a secret, erotic, mute;
today a language she cannot recall.
And we’re all owed joy,
sooner or later.
The trick’s to remember whenever
it was, or to see it coming.
What a perfectly imagined first stanza! Carol Ann Duffy glancingly captures the exposing vulnerability of memory here. I always feel that Duffy is wonderful when she seems to write almost carelessly, and her choice of image in the opening stanza communicates the fragility of remembrance and the way we fear its dilution through conscious recollection. I find it fascinating that Duffy moves from metaphor to simile here; this movement expresses the burgeoning consciousness and need to somehow cement the memory before it disappears.