Sunday, November 16, 2014

The Saturday poem: ‘Smith’

by Michael Donaghy

'I remember a moment so pure' … Michael Donaghy.
‘I remember a moment so pure’ … Michael Donaghy. Photograph: Barbara Piemonte
What is this fear before the unctuous teller?
Why does it seem to take a forger’s nerve
To make my signature come naturally?
Naturally? But every singature’s
A trick we learn to do, consistently,
Like Queequeg’s cross, or Whistler’s butterfly.
Perhaps some childhood spectre grips my hand
Every time I’m asked to sign my name.


Maybe it’s Sister Bridget Agatha
Who drilled her class in Christ and penmanship
And sneered affected at my seven-year-old scrawl.
True, it was unreadably ornate
And only one of five that I’d developed,
But try as I might I couldn’t recall
The signature that I’d been born with.


Later, in my teens, I brought a girl,
My first, to see the Rodin exhibition.
I must have ranted on before each bronze;
Metal of blood and honey … Pure Sir Kenneth Clark.
And those were indeed the feelings I wanted to have,
But I could tell that she was unimpressed.
She fetched our coats. I signed the visitor’s book,
My name embarrassed back into mere words.


No, I’m sure it all began years later.
I was twenty, and the girl was even younger.
We chose the hottest August night on record
And a hotel with no air-conditioning.
We tried to look adult. She wore her heels
And leant against the cigarette machine as,
Arching an eyebrow, I added to the register
The name I’d practised into spontaneity –
Surely it wasn’t – Mr and Mrs Smith?


It’s all so long ago and lost to me,
And yet, how odd, I remember a moment so pure,
In every infinite detail indelible,
When I gripped her small shoulders in my hands,
Steadying her in her slippery ride,
And I looked up into her half-closed eyes …
Dear friend, whatever is most true in me
Lives now and for ever in that instant,
The night I forged a hand, not mine, not anyone’s,
And in that tiny furnace of a room,
Forged a thing unalterable as iron.


• From Collected Poems (Picador, £14.99).

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