Title: Sharp Poem

Author: Virginia Were

In: Sport 8: Autumn 1992

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, March 1992, Wellington

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Verse Literature

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Sport 8: Autumn 1992

♣ Virginia Were — Sharp Poem

page 39

Virginia Were

Sharp Poem

I

Where the man was is now an empty space.

I have cut him out with scissors,
says the woman.
I followed the sharp contours of his elbows,
his hands, the space between his legs
where you can see grass and flowers.

I have cut the shape of the man from the photograph
and stuck him between the pages
of a book, she says.
It will be dark in there with only the
words for company, the black shapes
of spooked horses clattering across
the page.

The bits around the man fall to the floor,
curling and peeling away from the essential
shape, the well known outline.
These are the bits she doesn't want,
here a building, there a cloud, here a rough patch
of grass covered in twigs.

But it's really the man who cut
the woman out, inexpertly, so that bits of the
background still clung to her.
He cast her into a wastepaper basket
along with bank statements, bus tickets
page 40 and brown paper bags, the things he didn't
want to keep.

You don't see me as separate from yourself,
says the woman.
She is laughing from behind wire-rimmed
spectacles, standing in front of a tree.
And it is true, part of the man,
his body, is grafted to her side.

During the session she resolves not to ring
and pour her bitterness out of a chipped
jug.
Anger is healthy, says the psychiatrist.
The man receives her anger silently
on the end of the phone.
He is patient, she is the patient.
I don't hate you, she says.
When she is empty and dry she says
goodbye and hangs up.

The woman takes her time. She searches
the house for a pair of sharp scissors.
She sits down in a good light
and takes her time, she wants to know
exactly what she is excluding.
First she examines each detail.
The expression on his face—
is he happy or is he sad?
His eyes, are they green or brown?
Or brown with flecks of green, a mixture
of both?
He is both happy and sad.

In the photograph he is turning away.
Perhaps the thought was already in his head?
page 41 A sharp thing he meant to keep safe, a secret
until he needed it.
Could she have forseen this? A faint clouding
where her face appears alongside his.
The way the bark peels in long, filmy
strips from the smooth, hard trunk
of the tree.

Could she have averted it?
From the photo it is possible to sense
the wind, the way their hair streamed,
the way his coat spinnakered.
She reads a line in a book of poetry—
Each day takes me further away
from your death—and puts departure
in the place of the word death.
Each day I have lived is a triumph,
she writes.

At Xmas she traces the shape of the excised man
onto two sheets of paper.
Black for death and white for the landscape
into which she will be reborn
—a landscape of snow and ice,
clean and pure and strong, a land
devoid of memory.
The paper is folded many times
so that when she opens it out
there are many men.
She strings the men across the window,
across the empty walls so that her small
flat is filled.
She waits for the phone to ring.

page 42

II

Here is the inside of the woman's flat:
its walls lined with black and white
photographs of her departed lover—intact
and glossy, drawing-pinned
to the wall.
Also photographs of the sad woman herself,
smiling at an invisible other, biting into
an apple.

The walls are damp with grief,
and the woman's voice, telling of the
empty days stretching ahead,
drips down the walls.
She tells of that other time.
She and her lover lay on the candlewick
bedspread.
The indentation, the slight warmth
they left there would soon be gone.
Loss was already with them—something
subtle, something cruel,
something they couldn't
talk about.

She tells of that other time.
Two different people inhabited the same
body of light, the same body
of shade, the same bathtub,
the same telephone.
And then the woman asked the man
not to use her towel, to please
remove all his possessions from her flat,
down to the very last nail,
the very last hammer.
page 43 The rest, the things left lying
in the bottom of the wardrobe,
on the far side of the bed,
the things which slyly revealed
themselves over time, these things too
must be got rid of.

The woman wants reassurance that
she has a real body with arms and legs
and hands and feet,
and a particular way of walking,
which her friends, seeing her at a distance,
will recognise.
She wants to know that her shoes flatten
blades of grass.
Where she walks, a twig snaps.
Sap oozes from a stem where she
breaks off a leaf.

She reads a book in which
the poet says—I want to write as simply
as I pick a blade of grass.
She says, I want to forget you as simply
as I pick a blade of grass.
Later I hold this piece of grass
between my thumbs.
I blow on it—something
to cherish, something to make
music with.

Steam from the kettle surrounds her,
steam from the kettle clouds
the window so that she can
no longer see out.

The pattern of the bedspread is large.
A pale landscape with yellow flowers.
page 44 Stalks bend and tremble
and scatter their seed.
She is sown with sadness,
the seeds of loss.
Take root, she says, there will be
plenty of rain. The wind the wind,
how it grazes everything in its path.

A collage of traffic and the hard
glitter of a river running
through it.
A river of tears.
She tears the last little bits
from the background.