What Poets Need. Finuala Dowling

more important, like writing a poem, reading a book or catching up on the mundane chores that sometimes inspire poems. You start to wish you had brought a drawer along to tidy up on your lap, as the narrator does in a Dorothy Parker short story we studied at university.

      In this spirit, I was more than happy to volunteer to do the sandwiches instead. Beth buys these ultra-sharp Victorinox knives and I was trying to shave the crusts off the sandwiches with one of them when I turned my thumb into sashimi. The blood poured and poured, into the little bowl of ice cubes, all over the basin, into copious paper towels, down my wrist. The pain was intense, ridiculously so. I could feel all the intricate mechanisms – nerves – connecting my finger to my shoulder tingling with outrage. Beth seemed irritated with me, as if I’d done it on purpose. More concerned about the (bloody) sandwiches.

      Sal was much more sympathetic. While I staunched, she read to me from our family medical book which says that one can lose up to one fifth of one’s blood with no ill effects. The sight of me in extremis raised, for Sal, many questions about God and heaven, some of which she answered herself. For example, Jesus still has brown hair, and while his Father sits on a white throne, Jesus stands less formally at the doors of heaven to welcome newcomers, who arrive all the time, especially children from the Cape Flats and soldiers from the Middle East. She was still wearing her ballet clothes, which added to the surrealism of her theological observations.

      What I should be telling you is that today was the first official day of my contract to edit The Unofficial View. This morning I sent out an e-mail calling for submissions. I have the private email addresses of about forty South African poets. Then I also despatched notices through the Writer’s Network newsletter and Artslink. I felt that I had done something, that I was not dilly-dallying. What else should a new editor do, I thought. I couldn’t call a meeting because I have no staff. I tidied my desk in anticipation of the deluge. I tested all my pens and threw out the ones that are drying out or leaking. I wrote a list of all the things I need to do to get the first edition out:

      Cover illustration

      20–26 poems

      List of contributors

      Preface/editorial by me

      Other illustrations: cartoons/woodcuts?

      There didn’t seem to be anything else to do, so I went for a walk on Fish Hoek beach, looking across at the sleeping profiles of the Helderberg. Afterwards I drove to Simon’s Town where I had coffee and a large toasted egg, bacon and banana sandwich at a little restaurant on Jubilee Square. Most people like weekends, but I like the feeling of an idle Monday, to be at leisure while starched naval officers bustle past about their business. Feeling pleasantly crumpled, I read the paper and a little Japanese novel in translation.

      The sandwich made me thirsty so I ordered juice and in this state, full and calm, I thought of you and me. And archy and mehitabel: “expression is the need of my soul,” wrote archy, hopping from key to key, without capital letters. How I loved that book. My mother said archy and mehitabel were cult figures when she was at university.

      I tried to think whereabouts on my shelves I’d find my copy – I haven’t looked at it in years. It made me quite agitated. All the way home in the car I tried to picture the cover. It is a later Faber edition, I think, bright yellow with black writing, without a picture. Someone showed me the original 1927 edition once. It has a big cartoon cat against a higgledy-piggledy skyline. How I’d love to own that. At home I went straight to my shelves, but I couldn’t find my copy anywhere. I must’ve lent it to someone who never returned it. Ryno, perhaps, though it’s a bit out of date for him. He doesn’t really like reading, I suspect, but he likes to be able to refer casually to the title and author of the latest publishing sensation, especially when women are present. I’m never, never, never lending another book out. Except to you. You can take your pick.

      I had an afternoon nap because I didn’t get my full quota last night. After I’d put the potatoes in for Beth and Sal yesterday evening, and fried the onions, and written to you, I took a quick shower and met Red Moffat and his wife Frances at Cape to Cuba. He’d just heard that he’d won the Roy Campbell prize, and in a celebratory mood we drank too much. Everyone likes Red because he still has this boyish, surfer charm. Lots of surfers are really clever; submitting doctorates on Jung or studying whale skeletons or winning poetry prizes; but the longterm effect of sunburn, of salt water in sinus cavities, anvils and tear ducts, gives them a deceptively glazed look. Red has this look. Anywhere else it might spell derelict or hobo, but in Cape Town (and California, I suspect) it lends grooviness. His face says, “I’m from here.” The barman at Cape to Cuba knows Red from the reef so he kept sliding us these cocktails called Local Charm in recognition of Red’s local hero status.

      When we came out of the restaurant, it was late. The streets were wet with rain and deserted. The darkened houses rose above the Victorian shop façades, clinging to the steep hillside, keeping their opinions to themselves. Then in the midst of the stillness, we saw a group of teenagers running, shrieking in the road. I knew how they felt, it came back to me how it feels to be seventeen. Like this:

      Them Only

      Past midnight, the street is wide and wet

      with night rain. Teenagers come haring,

      scaring, down the clean, free, centre lane,

      the first and only pioneers to hold and kiss

      without permission, to stay up after eleven,

      to laugh at nothing, to run five abreast

      on the abandoned tar, high on hash or beer

      or love, in the streaming mist of witching hour,

      when the shops are dark and barred

      and all the feds and dads and laaities

      and school principals and moms in nighties

      are fast asleep, having surrendered the world

      to them, to youth, to the belly ring girls,

      to the cowlick boys with dark-ring eyes,

      to them and them only, no one besides.

      Beth suspected I might overdo it, so she had left a herbal sachet of something called Sober on my bed. But when I staggered in at 1.30 am, I was so trashed I fell asleep on top of the sachet. All the granules melted together inside the foil from my body heat. As we discovered this morning, when Beth prised the packet apart, looking at me like a matron. I’m all right now, drank lots of juice and told myself I’ll never touch a drop again. If there was any alcohol left in my body it poured out of my thumb with the blood just now.

      I don’t have to go; I’m not dashing off. Too often you end your letters with “dashing off” or “must go” or “left this too late so there’s only time for a quick note”. But when I complain, you say that you think of me all the time, that in any case it is I who am the writer, the one who records with ease.

      expression is the need of my soul

      Of course you’re right, what you say is true. I have more time than you do and I live to write. I just want to say that I get jealous that so many people have claims on you and your time, that they all take precedence. If I count Theo and the girls, the dogs, your workers, and your suppliers, I’d be lucky to find that I come twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh in your priorities. The queue is long; I find myself pressing against the others, trying to make it go faster, like the poorer shoppers do at Shoprite Checkers.

      Please don’t think I’m comparing you to a cashier.

      Wednesday 14th August

      8.30 am

      Let me catch you up on Tuesday’s thoughts before Wednesday surges in and blots them out.

      A woman approached me on the beach yesterday morning. Actually I saw her on my Monday walk on the rocks at the Clovelly end with her dalmatian, and hoped she wasn’t poaching mussels. I never linger down that end because it is so gloomy; almost permanently in the shade from the acclivity above – and because