In the meantime…
Thursday, July 30th, 2009…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.
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.
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