ANDREW MAYNE POETRY 

From Orbis website (2002)


REMINDER:  HOME  TO  BED

I too would like to return home to a room
in which the bed was truly integral
because I had once fashioned both from the wood
of a thick-pillared tree still rooted in earth.

There he stands now, braced by the door, measuring
how much anger is really necessary.
Needs must make up this woman’s mind again -
their marriage secret razed or play-acted so?

Does she not remember how the bedstead
was almost a natural feature from the start?
Did he not plane the floor around this mound,
and square off its corners? All this done before

he chiselled stones, each lodged tight in walls spot-on,
clipped back all those overarching branches
that could not be wefted into the rafters,
and finally hung the twin, tight-fitting doors?

After he’s enlarged in greater detail on
the problems of the guttering and plumbing -
his peroration’s a mock-push at the bed:
“So you really think this could be shifted out?”-

Now through high roof-beams there’s a map of clouds;
dizzyingly, worn grass shows between the joists.
See: her body slackens; her mind-being is
all flakes of wood-chipping and curls from the adze.

Arms white as stripped oleaster clasp him...
At this juncture, they re-entered happily,
their way lit by a torch, to where their bed,
as of old, awaited them would end the tale -

so you might imagine them, thickly-cushioned,
slowly growing into a tree together.


I have stockpiled poems for years, lacking the courage until recently to send them off anywhere. This means that poems written some time ago - and ‘Reminder: Home to Bed’ comes into this category - can strike me as though they are the work of another person. It is hard for me to pin down exactly what ‘inspired’ my poem; I wonder myself where it comes from. (I think it was Michael Longley who said: “If I knew where poems came from, I would go there.”) All I can say is that at the time I wrote the poem I must have been thinking about the Odyssey. Perhaps I had just re-read it and been moved by the way it ends - with the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope in one of the oddest bedrooms in all literature.

As for my favourite poem... Well I curl up with embarrassment at the predictability of this choice. It's a poem I read first when I was sixteen; it made me see what poetry could do. I did not understand much of it initially - though "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" was clear enough. But I loved its sound, the changes of tone - from failed attempts at striking a grandiose pose to bathetic self-confession. I gradually saw how the reader was being invited into a kind of complicity: the pieces of this monologue did fit together to dramatise a whole self-conscious sensibility. But the reader had to play his part in the creative process. I began to see, too, how a rhythm could suggest a state of mind and how an image could work - that there were, for example, thirty-seven reasons (and hy the narrator should exclaim: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." So I re-read T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ every six months or so. And always find something new.
                                                                                                              Poem 2