Fishing for Birds

This poem harkens back to a time, around 1993, when I was agonising over whether to give up, once and for all, on the man I’d been half living with for almost two years.

It wasn’t a straightforward decision (is it ever ?). What made it hard was that, paradoxically, I was very fond of him … or rather I was still very fond of his best side. Unfortunately the more established we became, the less I saw of that good side … and the more he chose to regard me as a full-time audience for what I now realise to have been his intense self hatred.

Of course, being me, I just wanted to mend him … to make him feel better … to help him to be what he always managed to be for others when we weren’t alone.

Good natured … fun … a source of support for me as well.

Feeling I was getting nowhere with the awful decision about whether to part from someone who was unfortunately liable to drag me down with him, I sought the advice of a close friend. …A very out lesbian friend, as it happens, who’d suffered what seemed like just as much anguish from her women friends, as I was experiencing now.

We spent a lot of time comparing our experiences. Was it different ? Or did lesbian partners endure just as much anguish from each other as heterosexual people did ?

I knew what I wanted. I understood that people were often attracted to me because of the emotional strength which they perceived. Maybe I was attracted to them by the complementary sense of being needed. There’s something very desirable about a “little boy lost”. The snag was that there were also lots of times when I wasn’t in a state to be their mummy substitute; times when I needed a daddy substitute of my own. Someone whom I could lean on. Somebody who could take over sometimes and provide a space for me to let go for the time I needed.

How did that sort of role exchange take place between two women? Was it a gender related thing ? If so then maybe I was on a hopeless search for my ideal man. Was it the case that people were fixed in either one behaviour or the other … nurturer or dependent ? That seemed unlikely, because my very problem stemmed from exhibiting both behaviours myself.

I can’t say that my friend was altogether objective in her answer either. We knew, and I acknowledged, that she wanted me to be more than just a friend. So I’m really not sure if her answer to my question wasn’t tinged with a little bit of wishfulness.

In her view though, she felt that women were better starred as lovers, because of that greater ability to fulfil both roles in one : to be the big sister one moment, and the little sister, the next. She described instances of both and said how, she believed, true one-ness occurred when the roles became so fluid that she and her lover could be both at the same time, changing poles from moment to moment.

It certainly was an intoxicating thought and it stuck with me when I went to sleep that night, imagining the type of relationship my friend had painted. The next morning I had the words to express it in this poem.

What’s interesting is that lesbian friends who hear the poem all seem to understand the meaning without the need for an explanation. Heterosexual friends almost all assume I’m writing about something else.

So draw your own conclusions …

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I’m not really sure what to say about this little poem, except that it’s grown on me with the passage of time. I like the simplicity of the words painting the scene - especially “Speak only with your hands .. let fingers serve her soul’s demands”. And then there’s the surprise twist at the end, which transforms the sense of the whole piece.

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My Boxing Day pick, “Song for April”, started life as a song lyric. It was written when I was still an undergraduate student in Manchester, in early April 1976.

At the time I was alone in the house that I normally shared in one of the less salubrious parts of Manchester’s northern suburbs. Everyone else had gone home for Easter, but I’d stayed on, to house-sit and to fret over my impending finals. Worse, I thought I’d fallen in love. (How wrong we can be).

It had been a miserable few weeks. I’m still sure to this day that the house was haunted. It was cold, damp, and the last few nights had felt very lonely. It had even snowed. Yet on that particular morning Spring had decided to arrive. Sunshine positively beamed through the large bay window of the downstairs room where I worked. I could feel the light passing through my skin and warming me inside. And my room looked different suddenly. The corners weren’t dark anymore. Everywhere was fresh and new. Was it love or the sunshine ? It didn’t matter, but the two were both bound up together in the sense that life was different today than it had been yesterday.

I used to sing the lyric but advancing age means I seem to have lost the ability to hit the top notes or sustain them. So, this is the first time I’ve tried to reinterpret the lyric poetically. Hopefully the sounds of a warm Spring day help it along.

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I haven’t a lot to say about this poem, written back in 1975, except to say that it deals with that common experience of reflecting back on a relationship that wasn’t, and trying to figure it out.

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There has to be a first time for everything, and this is the first poem I ever wrote. Rather appropriately, I suppose, it concerned my very first meaningful relationship too.

Looking back, the encounter itself was nothing out of the ordinary… I suppose that it was no different to the rather awkward and self-conscious experience that epitomises the experience for most young adults encountering sexual desire and feelings for another person the first time around. Sadly of course, as often happens, the relationship (which seemed so important at the time) also simply fizzled to nothing almost as soon as I’d unpacked my bags for my first term at University.

Mind you, if I’d appreciated at the time that such an inauspicious end was quite commonplace then I suppose I’d not have found myself brooding about the event, feeling guilty, eighteen months later.

I was later to realise that this is the environment into which poetry is born. You can’t write a good poem (or a second rate one, for that matter) without good fresh emotional material. Being happy and content is the kiss of death to my own brand of creativity. Even my humorous poems are born at moments of black despair, in a sort of gallows humour. You can’t fake an experience to order, either. Ersatz feelings give birth to ersatz poetry.

This was my first time though. As a young, virgin, poet I didn’t know that the need to get up at 2am and write the words down, was the portent of things to come. It was a long time before I understood the rule that there would be no sleep till the job was done .. till the words had been written down and massaged into syllabic symmetry on the paper .. topped by a title.

What I did learn from that first night under the desk lamp was the sheer pleasure of releasing the feelings onto paper, between the lines of double-edged words. I’d discovered that the real poetry lies in the ideas conveyed in such a short, neat, package. The trick of getting words to say more together than their individual meanings alone.

In short, I suppose I was hooked.

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