There is a harsh, yellow light coming right in, right past the
drapes.
It is steady, like a searchlight but dimmer.
Hotter. You
came here along a cinder path, you came of your own free will,
and here you are.
Midge is mute in the rectangular room,
she can’t hear you, taking things out of the box, putting
things
into the box. Three nails, a book, and a folded scarf.
You call to her,
Midge look at me,
and she answers but it is like underwater, like at the pool when
you
are underwater and everyone is talking and laughing on
deckchairs. The box is blue, rectangular, with sharp corners.
The lid
is battered and won’t fit,
and the lock scratches your fingers.
Midge comes and licks your fingers and complains that they taste
of gasoline,
and you can smell it. You know this is not
the
right box, but you can’t say.
It is full of clouds. It is full of clouds
and peeling sunshine. Also the cries of children from outside,
and a backfire from an old car.
It is sick and cold here, and aching joints,
and all the time the television flickers. The shadows in the
room,
in the harsh yellow light, are hard, and they move.
They make a man’s shape, the seaside man, the man you know.
The
man lies down beside the box.
He nestles to it and shivers,
because
his back is bare, and Midge says
Look there, at how they criss-cross like tic-tac-toe.
The
man has scars and deep wheals
like the furrows in a ploughed field.
The man
has scars like dogtooth check. The scars are like rivulets of
tears,
running with rainwater, wheel-ruts, the mud sucking at
your feet.
There is a cold, cold mist in the fields, but not here in
the
rectangular
room.
It is still summer.
It is still.
It is summer. Dust is dancing
in the sunlight, though the sunlight never moves. The man
turns his face to you,
and
you know him because he has been on a thousand billboards.
He has laughed at you from magazines,
from the magazines your mother once bought for you.
He
is saying
Quick, come quick. Or go. Come with me or go.
But he isn’t moving. Lying there with one arm
round
the box, while
Midge is taking out the nails, the book, the folded scarf, and
putting them in a neat row.
You take them
and make the order go backwards;
a nail, another nail, another nail, a book, a scarf folded neatly.
She
takes them
and makes the order go backwards.
Backwards and forwards,
a neatly folded scarf, a book, another nail, another nail, a nail.
She
takes the scarf and knots it round her neck,
she stands upon a chair,
a black chair with a red seat and Arabic writing like a prayer.
The
man is laughing and Midge says
Goodbye, and goodbye,
there
is a sound outside like a single backfire from an old car.
You look from the light to the empty box,
from the empty box to the light. From the overturned chair to
the light, and always to the blue,
empty box.
__________
* There are dangers with imitating the style of another poet. Firstly that your product will be a poor imitation, secondly that it will be a parody – these two don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand, but that’s just for starters. A few years ago I was asked to write, as an experiment, a poem in emulation of Richard Siken’s ‘The Dislocated Room’. At the time I hadn’t come across any of his work, but I bought his 2005 collection Crush and read the poem. Siken is one of these poets whose work I don’t know if I actually like, but nonetheless I find it compelling. ‘The Dislocated Room’, like other poems by him, seems to convey a sense of unease; images, phrases, whole scenes seem to repeat, but from a different angle or with a layer added; there is the ‘familiar unfamiliarity’ of a disturbing dream, one which is almost but not quite a nightmare. It starts thus:
It was night for many miles and then the real stars in the purple sky,
like little boats rowed out too far,
begin to disappear.
And there, in the distance, not the promised land,
but a Holiday Inn,
with bougainvillea growing through the chain link by the pool.
The door swung wide: twin beds, twin lamps, twin plastic cups
wrapped up in cellophane
and he says No Henry, let’s not do this.
I’m a fairly good parodist, so in my experiment I had to try to avoid that pitfall, hence I used the word ‘emulate’ above, rather than ‘imitate’. However, I couldn’t possibly get inside Richard Siken’s head. What I felt I could do was get close to the unease, the disturbing images, the implications of violence in the original poem. I needed to get out of the dislocated room and into another place to do it, a place inside my own head with my own unease; and so what I think emerged wasn’t a Siken poem but a Marie Marshall poem with Siken harmonics, undertones, overtones.
I’m posting this for the simple reason that this morning I stumbled across a reference to Richard Siken on Twitter, and it set me thinking.
Marie Marshall 