Looking Like Jackie Kennedy
You wear the suit you made: apricot mohair, Chanel jacket tailored skirt, to meet me from school. Stand at the corner by the ironmongers looking like Jackie Kennedy minus the hat, waiting to tell me you’ve passed your driving test, hair immaculate black. Out of factory uniform, a stolen afternoon you take me to the Bluebird café for melt–in-your-mouth shortbread and coffee that smells nothing like Nescafe.
They serve you in fine china not bone; their jungle cat in the yard, pearl in grit, non-porous itch on the skin of a small town. Your shadow prowls through porcelain.
I share your delight, you’ve proved it you say –women are better drivers than men. I nod, eat my shortbread and watch the light dance on your wedding ring.
Collage ideas inspired by poetry….
and yes my mother did meet me from school in her Chanel suit of apricot mohair –
I’ve just read Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The loving Spirit’. It reminded me of ‘The Sweet Track’. It shows how quickly generations’ pass. And how beyond the details and characteristics of an individual, there is a sense of a person’s essence encased within a period of time. As if a person’s being is almost like a singular brush stroke across a blank canvas. And only one or two things could truly be said about who they were. And here in your poem ‘watch the light dance on your wedding ring’, an intimate detail recalled. Expressed in such a way that any reader will remember that, in their own way, they too were once a child in a cafe. I think we must all create the narrative of our own history between a number of irreconcilable worlds.
I agree and I think sometimes the true narrative is more easily found in fiction, where the problem of’irreconcilable worlds’ is rendered unimportant; or in the distillation of history and memory through poetry. For us as writers detail is everything, it’s what makes our writing truthful and real. And one can only hope that the detail will strike a chord – leave an image in the readers mind which resonates. I’m glad you think that happens here, especially as I’m aware that these (I’ve written a number about my mother now) are very personal poems. Thank you for the comparison of ‘The Sweet Track’ with Daphne Du Maurier’s’The Loving Spirit,’ I haven’t read it yet so I will put it on my ‘to read soon’ list, but I’m delighted you should put me in such company!