Dolor, © Janet Kenny

A Sort of Ode to the Poem Lady

(or You Don't Have To Be a Hypochondriac, But It Helps)

Hush, they are carrying in the Poem Lady again.
She is too weak to walk herself; she comes swooning
from a room thick with the scent of sinister blooms:
hellebores, opium poppies, lilac, pallid orchids. They wrested
the belladonna from her frail fingers, although she wept.
Her dark eyes are still watery, her nerves as delicate
as a spider's network which leaves stickiness
on your fingertips if you are unwise enough to touch.
Once I tried to bring her a bouquet of peasant flowers:
stiff-stalked Piss-a-Bed, Ragged Robin and corncockle
but they turned me away with curled lips and curses.

A linen handerchief, redolent with lavender, veils
her temples. One lily hand droops towards a pen.
A rumour ripples round the room that she will write
today—it buzzes fretfully like an exhausted bee.
She grasps the pen—the courtiers hold their breath
terrified they may waft away her strength and inspiration
but she dispels their fears. Her ivory soul shuttles
across the sheet, weaving a lattice of fragrant words:
amaranth, muscatel, damascene, vermillion, amber.

She drapes into Pre-Raphaelite attitudes as Poetry
continues. She writes of her weakness, of her womb
which is connected to the moon by silver strands,
and her sacred suffering self, her sensitivity,
her swollen heart which bleats like a sacrificial lamb.
Her tear-haunted eyes sweep the walled garden
for the Vision Suitable, for trembling leaves
and picturesque petals. She acknowledges
a thrush's distant rapture, rain patterning
her casement, the purple periphery of sunset.

From a world she is too fragile to consume,
she retreats into consumptive dreams, floating off
to seek death like Elaine on a tapestried barge.
Taken by the current, she sings of suicide and pain.
O Poem Lady, may we be forgiven if we hymn life
instead of celebrating the sickroom. O, help us
to wallow in unease and depression and shadows
as we should. For ever and ever, lest Poetry die.

© M. A. Griffiths