The Journal Box by Elizabeth Smither

Author:Elizabeth Smither [Elizabeth Smither]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869406301
Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
Published: 2012-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

Heidi has mastered it

Cathedral voice

Swelling in its transepts

Cheeks like altar drapes

And ‘issuing through the eyes’

But how can I

Speak above the examiner’s head

As though he’s not in the room

Unless his ears are wired for sound

And his real eyes in the air?

The Larkin poem I was trying to master: my voice is too flat. Is it Larkin or you? Sister Teresa asks. I’m asked to say a few words about Larkin but I can think of nothing except he has a bald head and is the librarian at Hull. We go through the poem line by line and she tries to inject some enthusiasm into Larkin. It is flagrantly impossible. Larkin is like my father, constantly expecting the worst. Not surprised when it comes. But still hurt somehow. Why else would he write about it? I speak to the trees out through the speech-room window: totally indifferent in their beds of time-saving gravel. Sister makes a movement, hands in her lap or legs cross, I start. ‘How sensitive you are,’ she repeats. Damn sensitivity.

I have been asked to review some poetry by my contemporaries. I don’t know how I shall manage. I think the solution will be to try to hide. Strike a tone, not exactly ambiguous, any more than a good poem is, but avoid at all costs those plungings of needles into wax which so often miss the vital organs in any case. What they never fail to strike of course is the heart and finger ends of the needle-sticker.

How violently a spring day ends. All those optimistic things begun in the morning, by mid-afternoon there is a pall over the sun, the air turns damp, bitter. It reminds me of a snub. This morning a fat envelope with a scarf from Beth. ‘I flung it around my neck,’ she writes, ‘then thought it looked better around yours.’ Who says there is no such thing as a doppelgänger?

This afternoon, walking on the beach, I came across almost a double. The body of a young girl in a sort of partial cave turned over as I approached and sat up on a rug. We exchanged remarks about which way the tide was moving, a white froth was running up the sand in alarming spurts, it was almost time to move (as the tide is going out in this journal). I noticed the girl held a book and there were a few other comfortable objects that indicated she might be resourceful. It could have been a younger version of myself. The cave half-solitude and half-facing into the glare of sea and light.

After I’ve been writing my face is flushed and my hair disordered like a mare’s nest. A look reminiscent of sitting exams, the head swells with effort, with emptiness. On top of my writing desk (a mock useless thing, only good for writing cheques and filing bills, I still use the gate-leg dining table) a large Russian icon of the Virgin and Child. The Virgin is delicately flushed as well. The

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