My Kitchen, 18.35

I want the poem to stop time

Dark outside the window and at the window too; need to make new curtains although I like the window like this, do not mind the dark like I once used to although mind it I still do, it is not as vulnerable here as say on a farm in the middle of the countryside as it used to be when the dark was at the window and I was aware the light inside the kitchen made me visible to each and every passer-by, if there had been such a thing on the farm at the end of a track; a dead end, in the truest sense of the word. Five years now since leaving there. Surely not five years, two countries, one city, two towns, three houses, two books, one prolonged sickness, not possible then for it only to have been five years. A child, only one when I left, now six, seems proof of these last five years and their duration but still, impossible to believe in some things. I want the poem to stop time, Nick Laird says through the speakers as I cut potatoes into cubes. Sometimes listening to a thing gives it new clarity. Sometimes not.

I hate this time of year. I hate the dark. I am scared of it. I am scared of how powerful it is. I am afraid of its annihilating power. As I teenager I was diagnosed with SAD. I told a writer this last year, light a candle and dance, they said, simultaneously undermining the seriousness of my condition and their authority to write on mental health. But this is the way of it, online, everyone’s an expert. No one asks for transcripts. Employment history. I tried lighting a candle. It didn’t work. This year, I have taken to long walks along the sea, through the woods, keeping my hands in clay, writing new things - not a cure, but better than before.

I want the poem to stop time, Nick Laird writes in the wake of his father’s death. There is a trick to time, to not stopping it exactly, but to holding it still for a moment, which is to be so absorbed in the task at hand that it passes, certainly, but the awareness of it passing is gone. I set to work and I could be working for five minutes but likely it is the same number of hours later when I emerge from my study as if emerging at the same time I went in. I have no knowledge what I did in there, if it is dark when I come out, I do not know where the day has gone or what I have been doing in there, and rarely could I tell you what I’ve written and if there were to be a malfunction with technology or papers were to mislaid, I could not tell you what it was I made during that time. Perhaps I am in a trance, or better still, perhaps I cease to exist in that time, perhaps the screaming baby ego is laid to rest, for a while at least, no awareness of my-self. The relief. But this, I think, is not what Laird is talking about here, he wants the poem not to suspend time, but to stop time.

I want the poem to stop time.

This is a different proposition.

He wants time to be stopped by the poem. Specifically, as the poet, he wants his poem to stop time. A power play. I have been writing elegies to you all my life he writes in this poem for his dead father, but now in the wake of his father’s death, the poem falls apart. It leaps all over the place, it fails to eulogise, it focuses not on the task at hand but on evading the task at hand for the length of the poem, until we get to the end, in much the same way Didion could not acknowledge the fact of Quintana Roo’s death until half way through Blue Nights, or I wrote and re-wrote the ending of The Last Days a good 20 or more times so I kept my mother with me, because there are some things you cannot say so as to not make them real, he needs the poem not so much to stop time as to undo time as we learn here: but I like the notion of the angel lightly tapping the baby in its soft hollow above the top lip, erasing all the child knows, all its regret, all its terrible grief, before it descends again fresh to the world.

Earlier this year, I hoped for this erasure. I hoped to undo time and the things I had done in it. I hoped for a different version of the last five years. I can not write poems, without it I had little to stop time. Perhaps so much time in my study had interfered with time outside it. It is not good to live for so long in a book, I fear. A friend warned me you are not the same person you are at the end of the book as you are at the beginning of it. A book acts as a sort of cataclysm, I have found. I thought this would only happen once. I was wrong.

We learn to play to our strengths. Writing poetry is not mine although aged 10, I was touchingly sure it was. I am not sure, exactly where mine are. Recently, on the page, away from here, I am aware of a new way of saying things. It is a worry to find yourself in possession of a new voice when an old voice has served you well enough. I do not say well, because everything is only ever well enough. I sent work to my agent with a note about this new voice and how concerning I find it to be. He reassures me that this is a good thing.

Today, as I listen to Up Late, it becomes a poem about time. But this is because I am thinking about time. It is nearly the end of the year. I am wondering if I have made the best use of time. Certainly, I have made less than I wanted to. It is a month until my next book is released. I am on the countdown to reviews; it is death that is implicit in the ticking. I overwrite the poem with my own concerns, as all readers do.

I thought for a while this poem was about death. Another time, I will read it again and it will again be about death. Time is death, death only a matter of time; time runs through the whole thing like quicksilver, one must negotiate the next moment. The mind will not stop and certain things are good to think with. Goldfish; carpet; clock.

Rinse my hands under the tap, see myself reflected in the window. Think again of curtains to keep out these coming months, although they like to say the light returns after the solstice. in practise, I struggle to believe this, January drags, March is a long time coming, it often snows on my April birthday, the eye adjusts, even to darkness, even to the presence of what overwhelms us. A poem, a truer thing to believe in that say a candle, a dance.