[My mother, who died in September, was interested in death for much of her life. She wrote a number of poems on the subject in the 1970s, some of which were published by Chatto and Windus in a book called Treble Poets 1 (1974). This was intended to be the first in a series, each volume of which would showcase the work of three new or newish poets; the other two here are Stephen Miller and Kit Wright. The editor and sponsor of the projected series was the poet Dennis Enright, who worked with Chatto’s at the time (my mother got to know him at the University of Singapore).
Elizabeth Maslen was the only woman in this inaugural volume, and many of her poems are about women’s experiences, some hers, some those of eccentric friends and relations. In my mother’s lifetime women were, I think, far more closely associated with death than men, being largely responsible for the work and rituals relating to the passage into the next world, just as they were for the work and rituals relating to birth. One of my mother’s poems paints a picture of my Auntie Grace, who was a midwife but loved to pretend she could see ghosts or that she herself was dying or dead. Another takes its origins from memories of her father’s funeral in the early 60s; this was my favourite as a child, and I remembered it as I attended her own funeral. A third focuses on Yorick, the dead clown from Hamlet, about whom she later wrote a fine essay (‘Yorick’s Place in Hamlet,’ Essays and Studies 36 (1983), pp. 1–13). All have a rich vein of fantasy running through them, which gives me the excuse I need to put them here.
I love the theatrical vein that runs through all these meditations, too, the frequent laughter in the face of pain, and the sense of human life as alternating light and shadow, each complementing the other. The latter theme led me to include here one poem which is not about death – though it is about the death-bird, the owl – because I remember exactly the tawny owl in question. We often saw it from our kitchen window being mobbed by smaller birds in the daylight as it waited for the welcome return of darkness. The owl in the poem is also a man, who is drawn to darkness rather than sunlight by his disposition; and darkness has rarely seemed so welcoming, for me, as it is in the final stanza.
The picture I’ve put at the head of the post is one I drew for my mother after her death, featuring Saint Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, which could be interpreted as a fable about making friends with death.]
***
A Visit to Grannie
I love to sit and chat to her
– Her old wise head
Nodding and clicking
Bone on bone…
Swinging my bag at
Each leap of the
Churchyard stones,
Banging the door
Of the family tomb
– I’ve jerked her awake again
But she never complains –
Kissing her dear dead yawn.
I open my bag and pour out
What I’ve brought her
– The latest neurosis,
An ultramodern grievance –
And the light peeks through
Those honest eyes,
Through her kindly smiling jaw.
When I come away
I always feel better:
Grannie, you’re so much wiser
Than we are.
In a Folk Museum
Here is the skull
Of an old wise women
With holes for the eyes
Lips brain and nose –
They called it her cauldron.
Just a joke: because
She dosed everyone
With the lore she brewed there
– Sometimes she forced it
On surly folk – but they all lived
To thank her.
And when this soldier
– The photo over there –
Broke in to rob her
All she said was
‘I keep my valuables
In my head’ – you’ll notice
Where the bone has been shattered.
Of course he found nothing
Inside the hole – they caught him
Still scrabbling for loot,
Cursing and shouting that he’d been tricked
– They say you could have sworn
That the dead lips twitched:
She was always one for smiling.
But the children began weeping
Outside in the sun; and asked
Who in the world would help them,
Now she was gone.
Yorick
The clown of many faces
Stands at my elbow
And interprets laughing
Life’s moon phases.
Pain is parody, he sings,
As wings sprout and he hops
To chirp to the morning’s birth;
Heartbeats stop
And stand: but he’s still there
Grimacing at the grotesque
Farce of laboured air, shambles to where
The bones gamble, themselves
At stake, mocks at the losers.
No one collects, they toss the coin
To Yorick, still grinning lipless
Lidless, though the jest is not
As he chooses.
The clown of many phases
Disintegrates in laughter;
Only the grin lies unchanged
For some time after.
When Father Died
When father died the neighbours stood upon their heads
And sang strange songs they never sang before;
They greeted his corpse in fancy dress
And changed their faces as they came through the door.
It was exorcism in hallowe’en guise:
Change face, sing strange, death will unknow me –
Death must be mad to send year-patterns skidding –
A burlesque will comfort the family.
A business friend came as a necrophile,
He and the corpse grinned gaping affection.
Every death’s day he visits one, he says,
To gather grimaces for his collection.
A veteran lawnmower went gay about the box:
He didn’t know anything was wrong until
He saw a coffin knock at our front door,
Heard the curtain’s last rattle on the window sill.
Sisters and brothers tumbled in and out
Singing how much money, weren’t you with him at the end?
Singing poor dear Lizzie, remember all the rows,
The stabs at his serenity? – we tease you as old friends.
We were rather confused, we were playing it straight,
(The lilies gave the death-smell blow for blow)
This fantasy lifted the minds from our heads,
The corpse played grotesque – on with the show!
‘Stand in a circle, chant, chant, chant,
Catch a clod of earth and pop it on a plate,
Keep well covered and serve thoroughly chilled –
The result is excellent bait.’
When it was all over, we resumed our faces,
Stood decorously up, observed the rules.
Living is serious, solemn as a suburb,
Death belongs to fools.
Night Bird
They whisper to him,
Night and silence –
Glass in hand, smoke-hazed,
He hears lips half-imagined
Speaking more clearly
Than all those puppet mouths
Of sunlit prisms.
Twilight creature,
Dazed by the creaking mob
Of four-square starlings
Dragging their shadows
Carelessly over the ground,
Dusting them shamelessly,
Eyes on the lurid wax of a
Moulded sun.
But as it melts,
Smudging the evening trees,
Shadows
So much more eloquent
Tiptoe to meet him laughing,
Softly greet him –
These are his friends.
So stoically he sits out
The light, enduring it till it
Ends, till darkness blends
Into the fluid rhythms
Of the night.
Old Aunt
She is very old now.
She has died many times
Since I was a child.
I recall
Countless occasions
When she has played her big scene,
Ably stage-managed
By herself, the protagonist.
I have seen her yellow
Life-drained eyes rolling in hollows,
Carried up to die
On my grandmother’s old brass bed –
It has to be a bed of character for such a scene.
I have heard my mother,
Mellow-voiced, trying to reach her
With a favourite song –
She has always been deaf –
My other aunt downstairs
Thrashing the piano to greater efforts
To support the distant singing.
I have seen my grandmother,
Anxious, exasperated,
Not sure which reaction
Is justified.
(We, the audience, slightly ridiculous:
Is it farce or tragedy?
The conclusion holds the clue.)
So far she has always recovered,
Come down laughing shrilly,
Head wagging, jokes endlessly repeated
On a semi-sane theme,
Reassuring us as we realise
It has been a comedy again.
We find it hard
To define the play beforehand,
As she never shows us the script.
Maybe she doesn’t know either:
She always says, when old age is over,
She will be all right.
Which is either very profound,
Or not profound at all.
It will be very strange, shocking almost,
When our long-customed comedian
Tries a different role.
But perhaps
They will let her play it extempore,
Not worry her with painful conning
Of her part. I hope so:
She has so long parodied the life-death theme,
Has comforted us by being ridiculous,
That we should prefer her last performance
To be in character.