Poetry resurrects me

"I tried to take the train today.
Stepped into a vacuum full of
shadows, old romances
And completely missed the station
All together.

You sang Lou Reed into my ear
Until laughing, you forgot the words
And I had turned away.
Five minutes later,
‘Sunday Morning’ started up again.

I told you that if I died I could only be revived
by poetry, so

You used to carry a crumpled, faded
Postcard of Keats ‘Faery Song’
In your left back pocket;
‘In case of an emergency,’
You said.

The world was never big enough and

Sun dripped afternoons went by unnoticed
As we poured over maps and glossy pictures,
Planning dreams and fancies: London for the Sex Pistols,
New York for the Velvet Underground and
Norway for no reason at all.

We were the Sid and Nancy until

One day, on the corner of Redfern and Glen where
You turned to me and asked me
If I’d ever loved:
For some reason I just shook my head.
I couldn’t catch your eye.

Now I sit on those single seats on trains
With no whispered song to soothe me,
Nor poetry to revive me should I fall.
I’ve been to Norway and saw nothing there
At all.

On the solitary linoleum that is one stop too far,
I see you, fleeting, and then you’re gone and I am all alone.
Let’s go back to that corner, on Redfern
And in the twilight
Question me again."
-- 'Moth,' Between Currambine and Perth


There are certain people whose vision takes my breath away: one is Tennyson, one is Guy Gavriel Kay, and one is a girl I know only as 'Moth.' There are more, but these are the ones I have up on my wall - they are the ones that inspire me daily. It is very important, I think, to have inspiration that lasts. Fortunately, they are there.


FAITH
Chapter -

Her name was not Faith.

Theresa Michaela Farrier was born on the Ides of March to an English father and French mother, and – in her mind, at least – she should have been called Faith.

In all fairness, she was probably right: her elder sisters, twins, were named Hope and Charity by their father on a pious whim. With him dead, three months before his third daughter’s appointed arrival date, his wife had decided to bury his traditions with him. That he had crashed his car into an overpass in Paris at 120mph, stone drunk and high as a kite while on ‘jury duty’ only made things that little bit easier. His sixteen-year-old lover had escaped the passenger door with a few cuts and bruises.

Given that his business trips over the years had been lengthy and frequent, ‘Faith’ would probably not have been the most appropriate of names for the child he had never known. The Virgin Saint, Theresa would comment dryly, was not exactly the most inspired namesake either.

Whether she felt some connection with her absent father, or just found it easier to love an imaginary character than the mother she had, Faith embraced her misplaced name with an almost religious fervour. It made her mother cringe, but she simply would not answer to any other name; probably the pained look its mention caused was more than any other the reason she kept it up.

“I may have been born and named in bitterness,” she would say, stretched out among the wild weeds in the French countryside, “but I was conceived in faith. That’s all sex is, isn’t it? Faith, hope and charity.”

I was still young enough to be uncomfortable talking about sex with anyone, let alone someone I could almost – almost! – imagine trying it out with. She was never uncomfortable about anything: she just had faith in herself and whomever else she was with. She was Faith; she took her name and nature very seriously.

**

If I had got my way, I think I might have just about been able to walk out of Dr. Isaakson’s office and never see her again. She frightened me: not only did I feel guilty for hurting her, as if I owed her something, but then there were her eyes, her face, her voice. In all of ten seconds of knowing her she had felt too serious, too intense, and the same voice that was telling me to find her and spend every last second with her was screaming in the other ear as well. Get out! it yelled. I have never yet figured out which piece of advice would have been best. It is not surprising: when it comes to Faith, I have only ever received conflicting advice, even from myself. Especially from myself, I should say.

Which side I would have followed was never to be known: I was not given a choice. The moment she had recovered enough to walk, Faith set about finding out who I was, where I lived and anything else she could learn about Patrick Kilgallen. You probably don’t recognise the name. It’s not the one I wear nowadays.

I still believe that it was what she didn’t learn, rather than what she did that piqued her curiosity. Not that it ever needed a great deal of piquing. What she found was that I was fifteen, and living with my great aunt and uncle on the edge of town, every summer since I had been a baby. What she could not find for the life of her – and what must have driven her inquiring soul absolutely wild – was anything else. I had no close friends, no confidents; no-one knew my history, parentage, even where I had been born. The only piece of information she got was from the good Doctor, who betrayed what he knew without the faintest qualm.

“Irish by birth,” he told her when she accosted him outside his house. “I looked him over before he was even a year old, the first summer he was here. Anything else you want to know you’ll have to get from him – not even you will get into his medical records!”

To be honest, I was surprised he held back on that: she had ways of making a person do things, not all of them particularly conventional. Or nice.

My address, however, would have been enough for her; the twinkle in my uncle’s eye was rather more amused than usual the day he told me what he had never had to in fifteen years of having me in his house. Strange to think: he never would again, save once.

“You have a visitor,” he said.