Carol-Ann Duffy
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Carol-Ann Duffy (Britain, 1955)
Standing Female Nude (1985) [p] at you on someone else, but paler, then the moment when you see the next one and forget yourself. It must be dreams that makes us different, must be private cells inside a common skull. One has the other's look and has another memory. Despair stares out from tube-trains at itself running on the platform for the closing door. Everyone you meet is telling wordless barefaced truths. Sometimes the crowd yields one you put a name to, snapping fiction into fact. Mostly your lover passes in the rain and does not know you when you speak." The Dolphins "World is what you swim in, or dance, it is simple. We are in our element but we are not free. Outside this world you cannot breathe for long. The other has my shape. The other's movement forms my thoughts. And also mine. There is a man and there are hoops. There is a constant flowing guilt. We have found no truth in these waters, no explanations tremble on our flesh. We were blessed and now we are not blessed. After travelling such space for days we began to translate. It was the same space. It is the same space always and above it is the man. And now we are no longer blessed, for the world will not deepen to dream in. The other knows and out of love reflects me for myself. We see our silver skin flash by like memory of somewhere else. There is a coloured ball we have to balance till the man has disappeared. The moon has disappeared. We circle well-worn grooves of water on a single note. Music of loss forever from the other's heart which turns my own to stone. There is a plastic toy. There is no hope. We sink to the limits of this pool until the whistle blows. There is a man and our mind knows we will die here." And Then What " Then with their hands they would break bread wave choke phone thump thread Then with their tired hands slump at a table holding their head Then with glad hands hold other hands or stroke brief flesh in a kind bed Then with their hands on the shovel they would bury their dead. "
Dies Natalis "Then a breath of sea air after blank decades, my wings applauding this new shape. Far below, the waves envied the sky, straining for blueness, muttering in syllables of fish. I trod air, laughing, what space was salt was safe. A speck became a ship, filling its white sails like gulping lungs. Food swam. I swooped, pincered the world in my beak, then soared across the sun. ... When night fell, it was stale, unbearably quiet, holding the breath of the dead. The egg was in my gut, nursing its own deaths in a delicate shell. I remember its round weight persistently pressing, opening my bowel onto the deck near a young sailor, the harsh sound my cry made then. ... I talk to myself in shapes, though something is constantly changing the world, rearranging the face which stares at me." Selling Manhattan "Loss holds the silence of great stones" Miles Away "I want you and you are not here. I pause in this garden, breathing the colour thought is before language into still air. Even your name is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again and again, it will not stay with me. Tonight I make you up, imagine you, your movements clearer than the words I have you say you said before. Wherever you are now, inside my head you fix me with a look, standing here whilst cool late light dissolves into the earth. I have got your mouth wrong, but still it smiles. I hold you closer, miles away, inventing love, until the calls of nightjars interrupt and turn what was to come, was certain, into memory. The stars are filming us for no one. " Mean Time (1993) [p] Feminine Gospels (2002) [p] |
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