Writing What You Know by Meg Files

Author:Meg Files
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allworth Press
Published: 2016-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

For just a little longer

I choose to stay small.

Just as the child in the poem chooses the images that keep her mother alive for her, the poem itself preserves, through those private images, the heartbreaking time of self-protected innocence. Clark said that she turned to poetry first because it allowed her to stick with the images and look at the experience sideways rather than confront it head on.

Later, returning to the material, she wanted to tell more of the story and explore just who she was in a way that created a fuller picture. As she wrote “With These Hands,” the process of writing the essay, just for herself without considering publication, called up more and more details.

Here is the opening:

When my mother laughs, her laughter is like smooth round pebbles falling through clear water. She sits in the dark passageway of our ancient house, Bakelite telephone to her ear and listens to careful secrets spilling from its heart. We cannot hear what she is talking about, but the secrets swirl down the passageway like smoke, patterning the cool air and sliding into the tattered books crammed onto the shelves near the bathroom.

She has been baking cakes today and they cool on the wooden table, stacked on wire racks, waiting to be stowed in round tins that fit under the cupboards. One tin is Wedgewood blue with a white lace trim, another holds a faded photograph of a slim queen in blue on a horse that strolls across a cobbled courtyard. The tins echo when they’re empty; they clang together as if demanding sustenance, like children who clamour for cake, more cake.

Usually there is a tray of apple or apricot slice dusted with white, cloudy sugar, sometimes a chocolate cake, plain because icing is a luxury, and always a mountainous pile of biscuits—golden crisp Anzacs, gingernuts as hard as toffee that have to be dunked, cinnamon crisps that crumble and melt. She fills the echoing tins and closes their lids with a firm and satisfied hand, and the smell of glistened sugar and golden syrup lingers in the air all afternoon.

The cakes are for my father, who wakes before dawn to herd sleepy cows into the concrete yards where they’re milked by machines that slurp and suck creamy streams through shining steel pipes. My mother also milks cows, bending to tie leg ropes and ducking sly kicks from cows still grumpy from being woken. Later she fills buckets with warm milk and feeds the calves in the paddock, soothing their loneliness with mother’s food and allowing them to avidly suck her fingers as they search for the answer to un-nameable need. Once a calf sucked her wedding ring off her finger and swallowed it, gulping and drinking and wandering away to play with the others. For days we walked around the paddock with long sticks, sifting through brown calf dung, hoping to see a flash of gold, but to no avail. Her hands remain bare—her square diamond-chip engagement ring has long since worn through, its slim encirclement thinning to nothingness.

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