The Beheld

(for B.)

She took several stones
from the mosaic
and gave them to me.

"But now they are meaningless,"
I said.

"No," she smiled,
"their meaning has changed.

"Why do you look through
and not at?"

And she drew a figure eight
and turned it on its side
and asked me if I could see
forever.


10 February 1989
  
 

I don’t remember the first time I met B. It was a long time ago. I’d have been a boy. Thirteen? Twelve? Who knows? If I was fourteen she’d have been seven and what fourteen-year-old boy notices a seven-year-old girl let alone falls in love with her? When I wrote this poem I was twenty-nine and B. was twenty-two. Now that’s a very different proposition. That is assuming I was in love with her. Even at the time I was pretty sure I wasn’t but what I was was obsessed by her. She was attractive without being stunning. When she was seven she was probably cute—hard not to be cute when you’re seven—but a cute twenty-two-year-old? No, she wasn’t cute but it was if cuteness had grown up and become… you know I really can’t think of a word that fits. I didn’t want to sleep with her. It wasn’t that kind of attraction. I suspect it was more of a reaction. F. was not a poet. She was an artist but not much of a reader. I’m not sure if I’d stopped showing her poems by this stage but it’s likely. She didn’t get them and I needed someone who’d get them, to get me. B. actually owned books of poems. I honestly think she was the first person I ever met who did and the second was probably Carrie. Before B. left for Ireland she gave me her copy of The Faber Book of Modern Verse. I gave her Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. The infatuation lasted about a year—looking back I would’ve sworn it’d been far longer—during which time I wrote eighty-five poems. If I ever had a muse she was it.