Clare Shaw

An Empirical Examination of the Stage Theory of Grief


The silence of lakes. Rain in the evening.
The music has stopped and the people are leaving.
Her face was a shadow. The sound of her breathing.

Blood on her cheeks. The house we once lived in.
The scars I’d forgotten. The junk in the garden.
Empty cafés. Her eyes were wide open.

Ash on the table. The glasses are empty.
The fire has gone out and the carpet is dirty.
A girl all alone and her friends at the party.

Three in the morning. An old woman singing.
The wind on the moor. The smell of stale urine.
Motorway driving. The heavy rain falling.

The stars are all out and there’s light on the water.
A small patch of dirt in the shape of my mother.
The flowers are dead and the summer is over.


*


Lesbian Conception in the Euston Hilton


There was no god
only a barman who served me juice
and football on the screen in the corner.

When the moon rose over the city
I slept alone.
No sea without shore

and no waves breathing.
In the morning
nobody sang.

There was no Big Bang.
The telly was on next door
and the birds were awake.

I watched squirrels in a park
and drank coffee
and nothing at all
 
felt the same. It was there.
It was one cell dividing.
A light rain was falling

and the trees were already green.


*


Child Protection Policy


Once, everything felt like threat.
Only my body could keep yours
alive.

I’d get up to check your breathing:
it was shallow and warm on my cheek
and the whole world swam in its tide.

I stared into the dark
where no monsters were,
built fences to keep you safe,

put the matches on the highest shelf.
I took on the wolf
with my own weak teeth.

Never will you not be my child,
would I not hold you,
wrap you in blankets of stars,

sweep stones from your path
so you won’t fall.
I will hold your hand by habit on the road.

And you ask, would I die for you?
A thousand times over.
But the fences are growing smaller
 
and you should climb them.
I am giving you the matches.
Now make fire.


*


Monkey Talks About Self Injury


When he bites himself, he says, he belongs to a tradition
dating back thousands of years.
It is possible he is in cave paintings, though this is undecided.
He is certainly in the Bible, and all major religions.

Monkey is fascinated by Rose of Lima: her fasting, her crown of thorns.
She was the most beautiful of all the flowers, he informs me.
Monkey does not believe in God, but he feels strongly
that science lacks imagination and humanity.

He weeps when he reads of self-inflicted wounds in the trenches.
The removal of finger-joints in indigenous cultures
makes him shudder: though he understands the desire
to express grief, he is easily triggered.

Liposuction distresses him terribly, as do piercings.
He can only imagine, he tells me, the horrors that women
endure. We have not discussed waxing, but he is aware
of sunbeds and bleaching. He talks

of Adverse Childhood Experiences, neglect and self-hatred.
I feel there’s an elephant in the room,
but it’s late, and neither of us wants to name it. Even as I write
Monkey is weeping and rocking

whilst he reads of the consequences of smoking.
I am placing a block on all information relating to suicide,
obesity, alcohol and drugs. Also botox and cage-fighting.
We will return to these subjects in due course.


*


Lorry Driver
(after Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin)


When all this is over, I will take to the road
where the day starts at 3am
and conversation is largely a matter
of country music on late-night stations.

I want to learn a new language:
to blow my doors off, to be southbound
and hammer-down through Europe,
to drive through centuries of forest,
the memories of trees in the dark.

I intend to travel in straight lines,
to be shocked by the colour each morning,
to stop only where the services are worth it.
I want to be stalked by wolves,
to drive on bridges that might not hold.

I won’t hurry. On the high tracks over La Paz
I will take it steady
where dusty plastic flowers mark the graves.
I will be adept with a mallet and hammer
and the weather will be my story.

The world will shrink in my mirror,
storms will approach me.
I want life to drive towards me all lit up.
I want to be awake through the night
with hundreds of miles still to go.


*


The Garden of Earthly Delights


Back then, I was the moon.
I shone, I was perfect
and the trees were all heavy with fruit.

There was a heat between us
and it was divine. Your hair was long
and you smelt of sun.

Every word of this is the truth –
how a lion is filled with desire,
how women are fish, you can swim there.

How two people together are flower,
how flowers bloom from us.
How we carry a beast on our shoulders,

how we are birds.
We were so hungry back then –
do you remember?

We kept on eating the fruit
and I do not regret it
though a city burned in me

and there was rubble;
though the sun abandoned the sky.
Back then

we were not ashamed of our skin.
We lay in the grass and you smelt of sun.
And what happened between us was holy.
 

*


Other than Personality Disorder, what term
could you use to describe these people?


These people are Arctic Terns
who launch their tiny weight into the wind.
Their problem is winter,

their problem is weather; they avoid storms
by taking the largest detours to find land.
They are abundant.

These people fly between poles
and they sleep on the wing – they spiral,
their endurance is legendary.

They will bite your head
if they have to: they will draw blood.
They sing a high song of alarm

and they know two summers;
They have been studied and trapped
and tracked in their journeys,

these people are remarkable –
they have magnets inside their heads,
they go where they have to.

They know the glow of the snow
on the water, the sea as a glimmer,
the mountains as blades in the sky.

And they are the subject of various papers.
And life is harsh, and days are endless.

    9       What the Frog Taught Me About Love
    10     Letter to My Mother
    11     Elegy for My Grandma
    13     abcedarian
    14     The Night Your Mother Died
    15     This is a very small poem
    17     An Empirical Examination of the Stage Theory of Grief.
    18     Morecambe Bay as Grief
    20     Monkey Writes a Poem About His Mother
    21     Rhosymedre: Prelude on a Welsh Hymn
    22     The Day Thou Gavest
    23     Lesbian Conception in the Euston Hilton
    24     Midwife, Calderdale General Hospital
    26     Nocturne for My Daughter
    28     This Is About My Mother
    29     Child Protection Policy
    30     A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation
    31     Monkey and I Discuss the Difficulty of Working Therapeutically with Non-verbal Traumatic Memories
    33     My Bedroom
    34     An account of my reading from six to sixteen years old.
    35     I Ask Monkey How He Sleeps.
    36     The Impact of Neglect on the Developing Brain
    37     Why Did the Monkey Cross the Road?
    38     Monkey Talks About Self Injury
    39     Monkey Writes a Story About God
    40     Monkey Joins a Dating App
    41     Self Portrait as Monkey Getting Drunk
    42     When I look at her
    43     Monkey Teaches Me Map-reading Skills
    44     What the Goldfish Taught Me about Love
    45     Self-portrait as Hermaphroditus entering the water
    46     Night Swimming, Derwentwater
    48     Love as an Adder in Grizedale
    49     Love as DIY
    50     My Girlfriend Did Not Believe in Ghosts
    51     Love as a Poem
    52     The Titanic Reflects on the Recent Ending of a Long-term Relationship
    53     Self-portrait as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore
    54     I come from Kergulen
    55     Love as a SatNav
    56     Love as a Global Pandemic
    57     What the Moon Taught Me About Love
    58     Total Social Isolation in Monkeys
    59     Love at the William Thompson Recreation Centre
    60     Lorry Driver
    61     The Garden of Earthly Delights
    62     Everything Is a Gift
    64     You couldn’t make it up
    65     Information for Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Rape
    67     Other than Personality Disorder, what term could you use to describe these people?
    68     Self-portrait as Hermaphroditus coming out of the water
    69     Monkey Invites Me to Imagine
    70     Chronicles of Narnia
    71     If Love is Snow
    72     Things I find attractive in a person
    73     Instructions for Care
    74     Day after a Migraine
    75     Monkey Reads William Blake

    79     Acknowledgements
 

From the reviews of Clare Shaw’s Flood (2018):

‘There is a quiet, cool, authentic voice to the poems of Flood. A flood that destroyed Clare Shaw’s home town, mental illness, self-injury, the end of a relationship, are all experiences recounted with factual detachment… There is a sense that the poet’s most intimate surroundings have betrayed her, but the stillness and control with which Shaw writes reveal quiet layers of intensity drawn from unstable places.’ – Carla-Rosa Manfredino, Times Literary Supplement

‘Caught directly in the deluge’s rising tide, Shaw is a witness who gives incantatory evidence of poetry’s power to define, rather than simply describe, the existential pain of being caught helpless in maelstroms both external and psychological.’ – Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times