The biographer’s lament by Tony Brignull

The biographer’s lament

The human truth

For Lucy Newlyn

I’m emptying the boxes in which I stored the exhumed bits of you, touching again the things you touched, a broken wind harp, a shard of hand-blown bottle crusted with brown sediment, some lines you crossed through with a scratchy quill that spattered ink. I’ve filed my notes cross-referenced for those who ask how I worked on you, with you; my book is closed. For the first time in a decade I dine alone

When I saw you as a boy skipping stones on lovely Otter, a young man crashing down Helvellyn in the dark scattering shale trying not to spill a trout, a grown man screaming when a surgeon picked hard turds out of you with a scalpel, an old man pillow wet with tears for a son you ’d knelt to bless one night of icicles, I thought to write your life, hoping to be worthy. You refused to be tethered. I tracked your balloon across so many fields and woods and cities learning to weigh the wind, and when winds failed, to make predictions with sextant, compass and known maps of your next landfall, to create

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a plausible fiction of your meanders. To those who ask, but is it true? I reply that in my love for you I was true to the human truth of you.

I’ve written enough poetry to know what it’s like to be blown-away in Grasmere by a gale, and write no more for what’s the point, it’ s all been said, our hopes for poetry fulfilled, but still it coaxes us and so, shame-faced, we tender little things, not best, but best that we can do, grateful for any brief resuscitation. When I slept and waked with you I wondered who breathed life in who.

I shall miss the questions we never answered and no longer ask, miss not so much the seer or the seen as the seeing, not the speaker nor the spoken but the speaking. I hope these boxes some other guest will entertain but never will I hear a voice like yours again, your ceaseless, probing, gleaming, urgent peroration: I shall miss the conversation.

Tony Brignull

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