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At this tail-end that might unwind a longer tale than I would care to tell, how vividly I see, under the microscope’s unfocused lens, the child I was and, viewed through sharper eyes, I still may be, wriggling on the slippery slide on which I’m caught, none the wiser in this, than that, lost century.
Born with, though not quite silver, nonetheless a spoon to overfeed my avid mouth - that I now find myself your specimen is no catastrophe perhaps, but I do feel a victim, and I mind my length of life, assiduously extended by right attitudes, has got me in this bind.
You find yourself impatient with my sentences which start out one way, turn around and start again most often in the middle; then, just when you think there’s no hope of an ending, suddenly do end— but some place in the middle, yet again. A dash will do, as in ‘I must’ – and dash I would, my friend,
if only... Slowly do I rise and slowly sit, and those who face a working day each morning sigh when offering their hard-won seats on buses to the likes of me. Embarrassed, I’d rather stand, but try as I might with smiles and all five feet of solid inner pride, it’s the outer me I can’t deny.
As if I am an actor made to play the part, and nature applied the putty and the grease-paint, I walk out on the stage, an extra in the scene, to no applause. Indeed, I feel I am a faint shadow in the backdrop, something that the artist tried unsuccessfully to hide, something too quaint
for the production that the playwright had in mind. And so is this alexandrine, a rhythm slow yet jogging quite irregularly, like the walk of one unsure of how or where she’s meant to go. Wherever, however, it’s not the way I’d choose. Odds on, I bet my life that I will get there, though.
© Leah Fritz, from Going, Going..., 2007
The trees are gone from our back garden now. When I first found the flat, that garden seemed the lushest place I’d ever seen below a city window. Wild, unkempt and green, it was the view that sold me. New York trained, my eyes looked inward, all outside a mirror image of the brick facade behind which twins of me would hide as if in terror, their curtains, like my curtains, mostly drawn. I had not reckoned on the clay all but alive that London houses bedded in, or known that trees and houses battled to survive. If left alone, of course the trees would win, roots strangling clay, sucking the old house in.
© Leah Fritz, from Going, Going..., 2007
Wakeful at night, I kiss your snoring mouth, hoping your sleep’s contagious.
© Leah Fritz, from Going, Going..., 2007
I hurry past, no longer see the plaque above the bell in memory of Yeats. the carapace of sorrow where she sat. (Each day the green of life is freshly made just yards away.) She could not shed that shell’s dead weight, but turned the leaden ache to gold while children slept. She claimed she did death well, thought dying proved it. But lead in Fitzroy Road is lead, not gold. ‘Damn near blew up the kids, the house, the street. Ought to’ve taken a leaf from him up there. Grown old,’ a neighbour said, ‘listening in Sligo to the bees.’
© Leah Fritz, from Going, Going..., 2007 |
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