[The Northborough Cottage into which John and Patty moved from Helpston, and where Patty was to spend the rest of her life]
Within a few years Patty even became known as ‘Widow Clare’,
so sure were the local gossips that her husband was ‘put away’
for good and would never be seen again.
Edward Storey
(from A Right to Song,
the life of John Clare)
Widow Clare
Words went out with the candle at night.
We’re a wedding of skin:
the smell of him dug in my fingernails,
his cough at my shoulder again
if I shut my eyes.
He’s written into me, this man I picked
bruised as an apple from wet grass.
He was my fire in a sooty corner
while the children slept.
I try making do with drizzle now I’ve tasted rain.
I blame words, worming inside his forehead
loosening his tongue: unspeakable things
scaring the children, until I gave him up
to the doctors. It takes a slow breath to say
it’s twenty years since I’ve seen him.
I used to hope he’d walk home after winter,
stroke the new lines above my eyebrow
without looking for another woman behind my back.
He’d give his name to the air beside my name,
as if he knows where I stand at last and who I am.
What more do you want to hear?
how he held a buttercup at my throat,
made me believe its tiny halo
caught the sun under my chin
that first morning.
Robert Hamberger has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and shortlisted for a Forward prize. His poetry has been featured on the Guardian Poem of the Week website and in various British, American and Japanese anthologies. He has published six poetry pamphlets (including Heading North from Flarestack Press, 2007 a sequence of 28 poems about John Clare) and three full-length collections. His fourth collection Blue Wallpaper is forthcoming from Waterloo Press. His prose memoir with poems A Length of Road - about retracing John Clare’s journey out of Essex - will be published by John Murray in 2020.
https://thefuturebookshelf.co.uk/blog/a-length-of-road-robert-hamberger/
No comments:
Post a Comment