Mother is in Paris for the spring collections.
She flies there and back within the hour.
In the kitchen, Father impatiently shakes out
his paper, scanning the business pages.
Outside the clouds air their linens
briskly; mother’s laundry billows
into flower; the roses sway
in April’s warm pastels.
Faces ring the catwalk. She is their centre.
Flashbulbs almost break her concentration
but she focuses ahead on a point the size of a coin
and spins triumphantly on one spike-heel.
Her mind winds the spool back thirty years
to a beach in Spain where a girl poses stiffly
in a swimsuit of dark green, her arms
stapled to her sides. She struggles
to free them, jumping back as she slops tea
over the mug’s rim. Father tuts
and lays aside his paper.
Her head is in the clouds again.
1996
Every day God pats my head and calls me
angel, his little broken woman
and gives me flowers as if I hadn’t had enough of these
and I choke back my rage and he mistakes this
for distress as I stand there shaking
in my little sackcloth dress.
Had I ever had the choice
I’d have worn a very different dress,
slit from breast to navel and far too tight
and I’d have smoked and sworn and been
out of my head on drugs, not grief, and the flowers
would have been a tattoo around my ankle,
not an anchor to drag me down, and as for
being a virgin, I’d have slept with both men and women.
I would never recommend a shallow stream
and what was no more than a daisy chain
as being the ideal way to die.
It was far too pretty but I had to improvise
and I was a poet, far more so than him,
who threw out every word he ever thought
as if that might have kept his sorry life afloat.
I didn’t drown by accident. I was a suicide.
At least let me call my mind my own
even when my heart was gone beyond recall.
Today, a car crash might have been my final scene,
a black Mercedes in a tunnel by the Seine,
with no last words, no poetry,
with flashbulbs tearing at my broken body
because broken was the way I felt inside,
the cameras lighting up the wreckage of a life.
That would, at least, have been an honest way to die.
2001