The Friday Poem on 25/10/2024
This poem perfectly evokes the need to get out, get away, leave behind the hurly burly and the chattering world. Crucefix pokes gentle fun at those party conversations, and those party people, then takes us by the hand and leads us out, out into a private, simpler space. This is what poetry, at its best, can do.
Other people’s parties
I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked out of
them, not even making my excuses. That we’re apart
from all other things, he says, the mythos
of the individuated self, she says, she gave birth
to a full-grown woman, when she was already
fifty-three. In the far kitchen, along the hallway,
outside the bathroom, the eavesdropped fragments
of other people’s conversations, often more interesting
than the slow plod of your own with the man
wearing a blue neckerchief. A clicking in her womb,
unmistakably, how it felt. Pulling the blue door,
the cream door, the apartment door,
the church hall door, gently to, and turning then
into the lovely falling rain, or with a glance at Orion
in the night sky, the length of a suburban street
with its privet hedges. She had spent the whole day
on her own birthday cake, glueing it together with sweet
chocolate paste, each baked and carefully sliced bar
of light sponge, in vividly different colours, laid side
by side, then entombed in icing to create a variegated
surprise when cut. Even from my own birthday party,
the noise swelling within, I turned from the door
and took hold of your hand and we headed out,
along roads we named, to our own déjeuner sur l’herbe,
where we were fortunate, finding children playing.
