Miriam sent me an origami Valentine. 
It was very exciting to receive in the post and I would have posted more on it sooner, but I was ‘between printers’ and have only just got my new scanner up and running. I decided to use it as a base for a freewrite. I’ve never posted a freewrite before. Or written one knowing that it would be public. So here it is: unedited. Cliches and all.
…I’m waiting for two things: one for the baby to arrive – today is my due date, and two, to work out how to upload my feet at dawn video entry that contains lots of stop frame feet images shot at dawn.
In the meantime I’m sorting through old notebooks and trying to find a stashed away but accessible place for them…I found this rough note along the way that I thought I might work more on.
The dark was so dark it had hands that pinned me to the flattened mattress and stuck a knee in my solar plexus. Outside starlight stiffened me like a starfish chucked in a bucket on a tumbledown pier. I did not struggle. A whole night where I tried not to tug at the edge of the madness. The Irish guy who had stayed an extra five days and still could not sleep at night. Days haunted by a purple cartoon of a motorbike accident, pages whipping open on it in the wind as sand blew round our ears and overtly muscular cats clawed at fish bones at our feet and spat hunger at each other.
Then this note from Anne Sexton:
‘Sometimes my doctors tell me I understand something in a poem that I haven’t integrated into my life . In fact I may be concealing it from myself, while revealing it to the readers.’
The feet at dawn and perhaps an incident in the dark, possibly connected. Meanwhile, I wait for the baby to make the journey from light to dark to light again.
I had another dream about the baby. This time I’m freewriting straight into the post. The baby was blond haired and very like S. Nothing like me. It was a girl but like a boy or was it a boy like a girl? In any case the monkey has stuck with me. The elasticity. The strength and physicality. Someone asked me if I’d had strange dreams which was a symptom of pregnancy – and I said ‘no’ – then the very next night I had one, and then another consecutively. (Pregnancy has ‘symptoms’: interesting – is it partially in our consciousness as some kind of dis-ease?) Anyway: I need to keep that brute physicality in mind. It was frightening – or fascinating. The blond baby was also intriguing. I want green eyes so I want the baby to have green eyes. But you need green to get green apparently. Brown and blue won’t do it. S and the baby were alike. I felt a bit left out. The baby was older. Could sit up. It was however human! So I’m thankful for small mercies. It’s late now. Over and out.
7.00am freewrite
Started writing about the Beatles and ended up thinking about lobsters.
Looking at the How to Eat a Lobster mug Z bought me from Maine. I still crack their skins to get to the tender flesh – to suck it – they have exo-skeletons but then in the claws those quill like fine bones. Years ago I read how the lobster can live for 120 years and how they have a long childhood and a painfully shy adolescence…the family hold hands as they cross the seabed – wrote sea bred the… But the idea of mating: biology versus…what? Psychology? Sprituality? The light/life force? Love expressed in so many ways. Do you need a brain to love? Do trees love?
Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. Her poetry pamphlet The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She is also an editor.
Check her website for more.
