Anecdotal Evidence
Page 3
Your interest, your encouragement.
I hope I made it clear
That you were high up on my list
Of favourite people. You’ll be missed
As long as I am here.
In Memory of a Psychoanalyst
Arthur S. Couch 1924–2015
1 The Kleinians
Your funeral. And on the day
The Kleinians were crying.
Your vilified opponents. They
Turned up for you on that sad day
And wept. I wonder what you’d say –
Some quip about the perks of dying?
I wish you knew that on the day
The Kleinians were crying.
2 Dreams
I had a dream about Nanna.
I was walking in her funeral procession
and she was walking beside me,
alive and well.
You talked about ambivalence:
I wanted her back
but I was tired
of worrying about her.
I had a dream about you,
a dream I won’t be telling you,
now you’re gone, now
I can only tell the page.
You came to see us, you
and a friend, a woman analyst.
We sat and talked. It was
a pleasant occasion.
When you left, you walked
a little way, then turned to wave.
That image of you, well and happy,
has brought you back
the way you were before
your wife died, before
the years of loneliness,
before you were ill.
It seems (as you would say)
it seems I have a wish
to see you restored to health
and with a companion,
a wish for you to visit me
and meet my husband,
to stay a little while
and then go cheerfully away.
I miss you sometimes
but I’m not felled by grief.
It seems that’s how it should be.
It seems you did a good job.
A Little Tribute to John Cage
‘Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.’
– John Cage
My computer humming
while triangles dance on the screen.
A blackbird singing,
perched on the garden gate.
The soft scratch of my pencil
as I write these words.
A trio for computer,
blackbird and pencil.
One continuous sound, one random,
one controlled by me.
The pencil’s part is almost over.
When it stops
A Statue
Here is a statue of a man who died
Nearly thirty years ago. He stands
On one leg, in a dancing pose, beside
The sea, near children playing on the sands.
People with cameras form a little queue.
In turn the men adopt the dancing pose.
I’m touched to see what all the women do:
They hug the statue’s arm and nestle close.
Is there another statue anywhere
That people treat like this? Can’t think of one.
The man wears specs, has lost most of his hair,
Inspires affection that goes on and on.
The town? The man? Both answers are the same:
Morecambe. Eric Morecambe is the name.
Cento
for Fleur Adcock
Art’s whatever you choose to frame.
It looks easy enough. Let’s try it.
I got a Gold Star for the Pilgrim Fathers
but I don’t suppose that counts, does it?
In the dream I was kissing John Prescott.
No-one ever notices his ears.
All the worse things come stalking in
and I am still a day off 70.
Somehow we manage to like our friends,
but now that I am in love with a place
one day is enough to remember.
It makes me laugh. In fact, it makes me sing.
Where’s a Pied Piper When You Need One?
Headline in the Daily Telegraph, 25 May 2012
In ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning
Thousands of rats are led to the river and to death by drowning.
A good story but not a true one: no-one sensible believes a word of it.
None the less, tourists flock to Hamelin because they have heard of it.
Tourists spend money and make a place richer,
But, sad to recount, that is not the whole pitcher.
Visitors leave litter, some of it edible, and that’s
Why Hamelin has a problem, and the problem is RATS.
When they’ve finished their dinner they go back underground
And gnaw through any cables that are lying around.
The traffic lights stop working and so does the fountain.
Council workmen have repaired them so many times they have stopped countin’,
Which brings me at last to the burden of my song:
Next time someone quotes Auden saying ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’, you can tell them he was wrong.
On a Photograph of the Archbishop of Canterbury
You see an archbishop out jogging in shorts.
You know it’s unfair to have negative thoughts.
There’s no reason at all why he shouldn’t keep fit.
It’s commendable. You can’t help sneering a bit
And thinking of Becket and Cranmer and Laud
And numerous others, who may have been flawed,
But of whom, I believe it is safe to say, none
Ever took off his trousers and went for a run.
Of course, things are tough for archbishops today –
Nasty photographers snapping away.
It’s nasty of me to write this. I confess it.
I don’t think I’m sorry enough to suppress it.
Men Talking
Anecdotes and jokes,
On and on and on.
If you’re with several blokes,
It’s anecdotes and jokes.
If you were to die
Of boredom, there and then,
They’d notice, by and by,
If you were to die.
But it could take a while.
They’re having so much fun.
You neither speak nor smile.
It could take a while.
At 70
Of fitness and vitality I am not the epitome.
I sometimes think there’s something wrong with nearly every bit o’ me.
My teeth are wearing out. I cannot give them a sabbatical,
And finding shoes that will not hurt my feet is problematical.
My hearing isn’t what it was. I fear that’s undeniable.
My memory? It may be just a fraction less reliable.
I cannot read a word unless my glasses are available.
The view that I am somewhat overweight is unassailable.
That’s been a lifelong struggle. I’m not ready to surrender yet.
I’m very careful what I eat. I dream that I’ll be slender yet.
I might stay healthy longer if I were a vegetarian,
But I’m not doing badly for a septuagenarian.
My blood tests came back fine when they were sent off for analysis.
I’m lucky not to be on chemo or to need dialysis.
My hips and knees are bearing up. They do not want replacing yet
And cardiac anxieties are something I’m not facing yet.
It might be better for my health if I were less dogmatical
And didn’t freak out when a news report is ungrammatical
Or when a word is mispr
onounced. If someone says ‘mischievious’,
I want to shake them and explain it doesn’t rhyme with devious.
Please don’t call me sprightly, as I may react aggressively
And use my sprightly tongue to speak a little too expressively.
Perhaps I am intolerant, a tad authoritarian,
But I’m not doing badly for a septuagenarian.
I do some boring exercises to improve mobility.
I don’t know if there’s anything that helps postpone senility.
I do a crossword every day. I play with forms poetical
With one as tough as this I sometimes get a bit frenetical.
I borrowed it from Gilbert’s lines about the ‘Major-Gineral’,
Where even Gilbert had to cheat to make it rhyme with mineral,
Since nothing rhymes with General. The problem was intractable
But no-one minds because his song’s so singable and actable.
Gilbert was a genius who always got the metre right.
It is my modest hope that I have counted up these feet aright.
Where prosody’s concerned, I’ve never been a libertarian
And I’m not changing now that I’m a septuagenarian.
Health Advice
‘People who read books enjoy a significant “survival advantage” over those who do not.’
– report in The Times, 5 August 2016, on a survey published in Social Science and Medicine
If you want to stay alive,
Sit and read a book.
It will help you to survive.
If you want to stay alive,
Eat broccoli and you may thrive
But here’s the good news – look:
If you want to stay alive,
Sit and read a book.
New Year
The year has died. Another year is born
And people party, set the sky ablaze.
Puzzled by their happiness, I mourn
The passing of so many precious days.
Enjoyed or squandered, they won’t come again.
Out there the world is celebrating. Why?
The solemn midnight tolling of Big Ben
Tells us we’re nearer to the day we’ll die.
They know that too. Perhaps it’s why they drink
And congregate in crowds to cheer and sing.
Is it denial? Do they really think
Time moving on is such a joyful thing?
I used to make an effort to be glad.
Not now. I stay home feeling old and sad.
Tallis’s Canon
One of the things I’d like to do again
before I die is sing Tallis’s Canon
in canon with other voices, using the words
written by the saintly Thomas Ken
for the use of the scholars of Winchester College:
Glory to thee my God this night
For all the blessings of the light.
It’s years since I sang that hymn,
except to myself, or taught a child
to play it on the recorder.
I want to have it at my funeral,
not sung in canon – that would be
too complicated, and, anyway,
I wouldn’t be there to join in the fun.
What a pity. I’d like everyone to imagine
how much I would have enjoyed
organising a churchful of people
into four parts, bringing them in
at the right moment, and singing my heart out:
Keep me, O keep me, King of kings,
Beneath thine own almighty wings.
Que Sera
The song was ‘Que Sera, Sera’.
We sang and sang it in the car
Till Daddy called a halt.
Fatalistic and carefree –
That wasn’t him. It isn’t me –
Worriers to a fault,
Always keen to organise
The future, though the enterprise
Is sculpting water.
It goes on flowing anyhow.
Daddy has no future now
And mine is shorter.
As my last years cascade away
Moving faster every day,
The song comes back to me,
Saying you can’t change what’s coming,
Just let go and keep on humming
What will be, will be.
Every
Every ditch or stream or river the train crosses.
Every ploughed field, every row of trees.
Every square church tower in the distance.
Every minute of sunshine, every shadow.
Every wisp of cloud in the wide, blue, East Anglian sky.
Every day. Every day that’s left.
About the Author
Wendy Cope was born in Erith, Kent. After university she worked for fifteen years as a primary-school teacher in London. Her first collection of poems, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was published in 1986 and her most recent, Family Values, in 2011. In 1987 she received a Cholmondeley Award for poetry and in 1995 the American Academy of Arts and Letters Michael Braude Award. Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems was published in 2008.
By the Same Author
poetry
MAKING COCOA FOR KINGSLEY AMIS
THE RIVER GIRL
SERIOUS CONCERNS
IF I DON’T KNOW
TWO CURES FOR LOVE: Selected Poems 1979–2006
FAMILY VALUES
CHRISTMAS POEMS
prose
LIFE, LOVE AND THE ARCHERS:
Recollections, Reviews and Other Prose
for children
TWIDDLING YOUR THUMBS
GOING FOR A DRIVE
as editor
THE FUNNY SIDE: 101 Funny Poems
THE FABER BOOK OF BEDTIME STORIES
IS THAT THE NEW MOON?
THE ORCHARD BOOK OF FUNNY POEMS
HEAVEN ON EARTH: 101 Happy Poems
GEORGE HERBERT: A Selection
Copyright
First published in 2018
by Faber & Faber Ltd
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London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2018
All rights reserved
© Wendy Cope 2018
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ISBN 978–0–571–33862–7