10 in my attic bed; picture her dancing with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.
I dust her shoulders with a rabbit's foot, watch the soft blush seep through her skin is like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass my red lips part as though I want to speak.
Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see her every movement in my head . . . Undressing, taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
20 for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way
she always does . . . And I lie here awake, knowing the pearls are cooling even now in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night I feel their absence and I burn.
1987
1. British political activist and bookseller (1925? with Radstone about the practice of ladies' maids 2001). According to Radstone's obituary in The increasing the luster of their mistresses' pearls by Guardian, the poem was inspired by a conversation wearing them beneath their clothes.
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MEDUSA / 2875
Medusa1
A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy grew in my mind, which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes, as though my thoughts
5 hissed and spat on my scalp.
My bride's breath soured, stank in the grey bags of my lungs. I'm foul mouthed now, foul tongued, yellow fanged.
10 There are bullet tears in my eyes. Are you terrified?
Be terrified. It's you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own;
15 but I know you'll go, betray me, stray from home. So better by far for me if you were stone.
I glanced at a buzzing bee,
a dull grey pebble fell
20 to the ground. I glanced at a singing bird, a handful of dusty gravel spattered down.
I looked at a ginger cat,
25 a housebrick shattered a bowl of milk. I looked at a snuffling pig, a boulder rolled in a heap of shit.
30 I stared in the mirror. Love gone bad showed me a Gorgon. I stared at a dragon. Fire spewed
35 from the mouth of a mountain.
And here you come with a shield for a heart and a sword for a tongue and your girls, your girls.
1. In Greek mythology the mortal, snake-haired shield given him by Athena, Perseus cut off gorgon with the power to turn anyone who gazed Medusa's head as she slept, upon her into stone. Looking at her reflection in a
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287 6 / CAROL ANN DUFFY
40 Wasn't I beautiful? Wasn't I fragrant and young?
Look at me now.
1999
Mrs Lazarus1 5I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a day over my loss, ripped the cloth I was married in from my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawed at the burial stones till my hands bled, retched his name over and over again, dead, dead. 10Gone home. Gutted the place. Slept in a single cot, widow, one empty glove, white femur in the dust, half. Stuffed dark suits into black bags, shuffled in a dead man's shoes, noosed the double knot of a tie round my bare neck, isgaunt nun in the mirror, touching herself. I learnt the Stations of Bereavement,2 the icon of my face in each bleak frame; but all those months he was going away from me, dwindling to the shrunk size of a snapshot, going, 20going. Till his name was no longer a certain spell for his face. The last hair on his head floated out from a book. His scent went from the house. The will was read. See, he was vanishing to the small zero held by the gold of my ring. 25Then he was gone. Then he was legend, language; my arm on the arm of the schoolteacher?the shock of a man's strength under the sleeve of his coat? along the hedgerows. But I was faithful for as long as it took. Until he was memory. soSo I could stand that evening in the field in a shawl of fine air, healed, able to watch the edge of the moon occur to the sky and a hare thump from a hedge; then notice the village men running towards me, shouting,
1. Lazarus was the man raised from the dead by fourteen icons (pictures or carvings) correspond- Jesus (John 11). ing to the stages of Jesus' crucifixion and over each 2. Allusion to the Stations of the Cross, a series of of which a prayer is said.
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MR S LAZARU S / 287 7 35behind them the women and children, barking dogs, and I knew. I knew by the sly light on the blacksmith's face, the shrill eyes of the barmaid, the sudden hands bearing me into the hot tang of the crowd parting before me. 40He lived. I saw the horror on his face. I heard his mother's crazy song. I breathed his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud, moist and dishevelled from the grave's slack chew, croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time. 1999
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Poems in Process
