WOMAN’S HEAD AS JUG
WOMAN’S
HEAD AS JUG
Jackie Wills
2013
Published by Arc Publications Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK www.arcpublications.co.uk Copyright Š Jackie Wills 2013 The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. Copyright in the present edition Š Arc Publications 2013 Design by Tony Ward Printed by Lightning Source
978 1906570 83 5 (pbk) 978 1906570 84 2 (hbk) 978 1908376 29 9 (ebook) Cover image: The Five Sisters of Suduireaut by Jane Sybilla Fordham, by kind permission of the artist. This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.
Editor for UK & Ireland: John W. Clarke
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the editors of the following publications in which some of the poems in this collection have appeared: Agenda, Dark Horse, Molossus World Poetry Series, Poetry Wales, The Echo Room and Warwick Review. My thanks go to Jane Sybilla Fordham for the title, ‘Woman’s head as jug’ and for her prints, drawings and paintings that live within these poems. Her work has never illustrated mine, my poems have never been about her work, but we have been writing and drawing together since 2006 often using the same sources, so we are true collaborators. Thanks also to David Parfitt for encouraging us. I am grateful to Moniza Alvi, Martha Kapos, Christina Dunhill, Kate Smith-Bingham, and Susan Wicks – my London lifeline – who’ve read many of these poems, as well as Maria Jastrzębska, Robert Hamberger, Lee Harwood, John McCullough, Janet Sunderland, Bernadette Cremin and Robert Dickinson – the Brighton gang, or as John O’Donoghue calls us, the Beach Generation. For reminding me what it’s all about, as always my thanks go to Brendan Cleary, Catherine Smith, Lorna Thorpe and Michael Hulse. I am indebted to the Royal Literary Fund for Fellowships at Surrey and Sussex universities. Finally, I would like to thank my mum Sheila Alcock and my children Mrisi and Giya.
CONTENTS
I
A lone leaping woman / 13 Owner of a mangle / 13 Feather-wife / 14 Saturday girl / 15 Grace-wife / 15 Herring girl / 16 Dorset buttonmaker / 17 Blacksmith / 18 Corset-maker / 18 Fripperer / 19 Boarding house keeper / 19 Ale-wife / 20
II
Forest choir / 23 Words for women / 26 Woman’s head as jug / 27 Cliff / 28 La Fontasse / 29 Calanque / 30 Fireworks on the Feast of the Assumption / 31 The seals’ goodbye / 32 Mackerel shoal / 33 Her year / 34 Translations from the silence of colour / 38 Canopy / 41 Balance / 42 Moults / 43
The change / 44 What she became / 45 Female ancestor / 46 Five aunts / 47
III SWEATS
Elephants / 51 She wants a baby / 51 It’s unclear how much of a man she needs / 52 A woman without a man / 52 When she finds herself at the top of the stairs / 52 Libido / 53 Clots / 53 Four professors at the menopause symposium / 54 Her beard / 54 Spiders have placed a cataplasm of webs / 55 Smear / 55 Hypothalamus / 55 Superannuation / 56 Her mirror face is spinning / 56 Veins / 56 Her troubles / 57 Her heart / 57 Trace / 57 Atrophy / 58
IV
Return / 61 Imagining my great grandmother / 62 The air on Lewes Road / 63 The kitchen floor / 64 Dirty business / 66 The day before he left / 67 Landlord visiting the student quarter / 68 Sandwich man advertising pizza / 69 Recovering you / 70 Stolen identity / 71 Sheepcote Valley / 72 Gyratory / 73 Funeral horses / 74
Biographical Note / 77
ALE-WIFE
He turns on a gulp, his mouth opening once too often, and I’m the strum, venturer, a night-worm for his empty palm. But this one talks to me as if I’m a girl in a field he rowed to under bridges glimmering with a canal stopped at midsummer. He puts each coin on the bar so carefully, sliding me the gold of a day he replays and replays.
20
WOMAN’S HEAD AS JUG after a title by Jane Fordham
Today she pours the Water of Life – green walnuts picked in June, beaten with a pestle. Tomorrow, Melancholy Water tasting of gilliflower, damask rose, musk and gold leaf. She steeps pounds of rue for Plague Water, and to clear ‘mists and clouds of the head’ infuses peacock dung and bruised millipedes in spirit of lavender. Bending over a bowl she might empty a reservoir, reveal the valley it invaded. Her head is fired from the same earth.
27
FIREWORKS ON THE FEAST OF THE ASSUMPTION
The sky’s turned to water, the day-old sturgeon moon stays the same. But what are the tides of air doing and what’s in the gunpowder that makes jellyfish surge towards us over the maquis – absorbing me, enthralling you? Me under the vine and you next to the young olive tree.
31
ATROPHY
She crouches and tilts a magnifying mirror to examine the fissures that have appeared in her flesh. Unlike the moon, whose rilles were magnificent rivers of lava, she is eroding.
58
RETURN
The third time I wake, it’s light and shouldn’t be. Someone outside is grunting – regular, timed breaths, he’s jogging uphill, balancing two shovels on his shoulder. I know him by sight, his eyes show only the run, a Death Valley marathon. He trains in boots. The definition of his arms, the shine on his head come from sweat – like the trophies my grandfather won in nine, ten rounds in so many provincial boxing rings. And so it’s Thomas Harte who comes to mind when I stare up the road at this man’s back – the name I go online for, searching Irish Censuses repeatedly, scanning for a shoemaker in Dublin, who will step forward and identify himself as the father of my mother’s father, holding his awl, a skiver, his leather knife, who’ll last the family’s halves together, peg her present to his past, sole to hide.
61
IMAGINING MY GREAT GRANDMOTHER
My mother’s hair – so thick her eyes deep set, unpierced ears and small, square fingernails, big toes pointing north-west, north-east, a weakness for clairvoyants. She has my mother’s need to push her hands in soil, believes in hauntings. She wears scarves in navy and green, a knotted rope of pearls. What do I call her? Will she hear her name if I list what’s in this window – sycamore, dog rose, nettle, pigeon, the damselfly hovering round the stream?
62
DIRTY BUSINESS
Jam-jars of screws are thrown into the van, Barbara’s sewing machine, John’s car manuals, half an exhaust pipe, swivel chair, three rusty saws. With each crash I want to run next door. Four lads and a girl from Dirty Business are tipping the house into the garden. Paper, wood, metal, glass – as Barbara did when words went missing. On this forecourt every summer, they aired the trailer tent. The street listens to a mallet shatter mirrors, bolts fire from a tin – and a wind picks up the inventory.
66