Helen Farish

Things We Loved

The Marché Central at closing time,
men heading home on mint-laden mopeds;
walking up the marble steps to La Poste,
built as though communication was a god;
the Sphinx on a Saturday night,
the one-eyed rose seller, table to table
with the long stems men wanting to impress
bought by the dozen; the knife sharpener singing
outside the open classroom window;
the seamless powdery pastels of the medina;
the call to prayer; the labels in Arabic
glued to your bag before it was thrown
onto the roof of the bus; fish tagine on Fridays;
red and black taxis; the Atlantic at Ain Diab
in one of its opal moods, the football games
on the sands, the ocean thumping down its rollers,
scoring each and every time; the air in Essaouira,
glassine on the first day of spring; harira;
the cinema whose ceiling dripped as if it too felt
the weepy scenes; the slipper souk in Marrakesh,
and those acrobats twisting and looping and hooping
on the street, tumbling and rolling without fear
of what one bad move might mean. We watched
from the restaurant at whose window we sat
and where we must have known
(though we both claimed not to)
what was about to begin.


*


That Route

I remember that time we were driving back home
after visiting friends who had young children and I said
how glad I was we hadn’t gone down that route,
adding a rhetorical ‘Aren’t you?’ I was at the wheel.
Did I make some manoeuvre, switch lanes perhaps, 
as a way to breeze past the reply I hadn’t expected?
We were on the M40 on a late November
late afternoon, waning light, rain turning to sleet,
and the weather had been no doubt partly to blame
for why keeping small children happy in a cheerless
south London park had seemed like a fate anyone
would be relieved to have escaped. Tears on the seesaw,
fights on the swings, injuries on the slide, more tears.
But you had smiled through it all, volunteering
piggybacks and peek-a-boo and pushes on the swings.
High Wycombe, Aylesbury, Thornhill Park and Ride.
There were never any tears or fights in our house
until the night, two weeks later, you wept like a child


*


The Penny Dropping

When the penny drops, you don’t drop
a penny, you drop whatever it is
you happen to be holding.
So when the penny dropped
that my mother was dying,
that she was in hospital not to be healed,
but simply to be turned and cleaned
and medicated till she died –
standing there at the nurses’ station, I dropped
the yoghurt pots. I needed all of me:
I needed my hands and my forearms and my shoulders,
I needed my fingernails and my eyelashes,
I needed my cartilage and all my sinews and muscles
in order to bear the understanding, I could not also
bear the weight of the yoghurt
(which in any case my mother had spurned).
And so it was with you, though you happened
to be holding a glass when you understood
that you couldn’t continue, that the moment had come
and it was anguish. I’d looked so happy, you said,
knocking on our front door, both hands
clutching shopping, keys deep in my bag;
I’d looked so happy to see you
when you’d let me in that evening.
For years I didn’t understand how the glass
could have left your hands without your say-so.
I believed there must have been anger, the intent to shock,
or if not, then perhaps while breaking us
you also needed to break something material,
a nothing-thing, just a glass
from which we had both drunk
and which could now be spurned.


*

In Seville That Spring

In Seville that spring you’d fallen
face forward into your food, blacking out
slapstick-style. I remember waiters flapping,
a doctor coming, but we never did get to the truth
of why, what happened in your brain
that you were mildly unwell one moment,
the next unconscious. And it was like that with us –
one minute we were home-making, the next
you were on the floor, couldn’t go on,
you wanted space. I gave you space,
but I should have stayed, sticking to you
like the paella I’d picked from your hair.
I should have made you talk to me,
should have fought for you, stomping my feet,
raising my arms high above my head,
joining my fingertips, teardrop-style.
I should have flounced, shaken and lifted
my skirts like the woman in Seville
singing Por favor, mi amor, por favor.
Instead, British-style, I drove north,
three hundred miles, not even conscious
of the mistake I was making, the life
which wouldn’t be there when I returned.

 

    9    Things We Loved
    10     In the Balance
    11     Taste of Home
    12     ‘The Eve of St Agnes’
    13     Exposure
    14     The Innocence of Pronouns
    15     Mozart’s 233rd Birthday
    16     Premonition
    17     The Sirocco
    18     Qui e Li
    19     The Halcyon Days
    20     Snow on the Road to Naoussa
    21     Christ Has Risen! He Has Risen Indeed!
    22     Day of Miracles
    23     Filling Station, Crete
    24     P
    25     May Day
    26     From the Album
    27     Burning
    28     Legacy
    29     The Right Thing
    30     Valentine’s Day
    31     Flowers, Baguettes, Fromage, Wine
    32     ‘Pretty Woman’
    33     A Hundred Days
    34     That Route
    35     The Butcher’s Boy
    36     The Candle Snuffer
    37     The Penny Dropping
    38     In Seville That Spring
    39     Scapegoat
    40     That Postcard You Sent from Crete
    41     On Approval
    42     My Exit
    43     Thanking the Universe
    45     Fairytale
    46     The Waste Land
    47     Original You
    48     No Point Now
    50     Triggers
    51     Pasta alla Gorgonzola
    52     The Shaman Says
    53     How Brilliant Is That?
    54     Anniversary
    55     Red Circle
    56     Hero
    57     The Joke
    58     Films We Saw at The Phoenix
    59     Aftermath
    60     Beauty Spot
    62     Bringing Things Forward
    63     That Selige Sehnsucht Feeling

    64     Notes & Acknowledgements
 

Praise for Helen Farish's poetry:

‘The Dog of Memory is a deep and meditative ode … which handles time and memory with immense delicacy, imagination, and wonderful attention to detail.’ – Poetry Book Society

‘This book is Farish’s third – her debut won the Forward Prize for First Collection – and it is a confident performance. Farish’s poems have balance, and a smiling stride; they take their time (and seldom too much)…. The Dog of Memory is an intriguing offering from Helen Farish, evidence above all of a poet… working out what to do with the strange and beautiful things laid at her feet by her own capacity for recall.’ – Leaf Arbuthnot, Times Literary Supplement

‘Nocturnes at Nohant: The decade of Chopin and Sand is an original extremely intelligent working through of a complex relationship between two artists and their work. I loved the poems. The sequence works so well as a story and is so nuanced I felt completely absorbed in it. And full of admiration for Farish’s great skill.’ – Melvyn Bragg

‘Her locations are as varied as you’d expect from a well-travelled, sharp-eyed twenty-first century poet, but her native Cumbria is the source she constantly returns to, slowing the tempo to savour its place-names and define its subtle colours… A rare combination of elegiac feeling, humour, and earthy reminiscence characterises Farish’s poems.’ – Carol Rumens, The Poetry Review [on The Dog of Memory]

‘Helen Farish knows intimately who she is and her beautiful poems capture the intense sadness of memories recalled as the years pass.  The poems are wonderfully, closely crafted.  She is possessed by memory, but it is a memory that is both painful and illuminating.  They are poems which are deeply felt, and though they read as though they draw intensely on her own life, their power to move comes from their reticence, from what is not said, but is deeply understood and quietly acknowledged.’ – Steve Matthews, Cumberland News [on The Dog of Memory]

‘These are intelligent, brave pieces that make you wince and smile.’ – Jackie Kay, ‘Books of the Year’, Evening Standard