Title: Sharp Poem

Author: Virginia Were

In: Sport 8: Autumn 1992

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, March 1992, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 8: Autumn 1992

I

I

Where the man was is now an empty space.

I have cut him out with scissors,
says the woman.
I followed the sharp contours of his elbows,
his hands, the space between his legs
where you can see grass and flowers.

I have cut the shape of the man from the photograph
and stuck him between the pages
of a book, she says.
It will be dark in there with only the
words for company, the black shapes
of spooked horses clattering across
the page.

The bits around the man fall to the floor,
curling and peeling away from the essential
shape, the well known outline.
These are the bits she doesn't want,
here a building, there a cloud, here a rough patch
of grass covered in twigs.

But it's really the man who cut
the woman out, inexpertly, so that bits of the
background still clung to her.
He cast her into a wastepaper basket
along with bank statements, bus tickets
page 40 and brown paper bags, the things he didn't
want to keep.

You don't see me as separate from yourself,
says the woman.
She is laughing from behind wire-rimmed
spectacles, standing in front of a tree.
And it is true, part of the man,
his body, is grafted to her side.

During the session she resolves not to ring
and pour her bitterness out of a chipped
jug.
Anger is healthy, says the psychiatrist.
The man receives her anger silently
on the end of the phone.
He is patient, she is the patient.
I don't hate you, she says.
When she is empty and dry she says
goodbye and hangs up.

The woman takes her time. She searches
the house for a pair of sharp scissors.
She sits down in a good light
and takes her time, she wants to know
exactly what she is excluding.
First she examines each detail.
The expression on his face—
is he happy or is he sad?
His eyes, are they green or brown?
Or brown with flecks of green, a mixture
of both?
He is both happy and sad.

In the photograph he is turning away.
Perhaps the thought was already in his head?
page 41 A sharp thing he meant to keep safe, a secret
until he needed it.
Could she have forseen this? A faint clouding
where her face appears alongside his.
The way the bark peels in long, filmy
strips from the smooth, hard trunk
of the tree.

Could she have averted it?
From the photo it is possible to sense
the wind, the way their hair streamed,
the way his coat spinnakered.
She reads a line in a book of poetry—
Each day takes me further away
from your death—and puts departure
in the place of the word death.
Each day I have lived is a triumph,
she writes.

At Xmas she traces the shape of the excised man
onto two sheets of paper.
Black for death and white for the landscape
into which she will be reborn
—a landscape of snow and ice,
clean and pure and strong, a land
devoid of memory.
The paper is folded many times
so that when she opens it out
there are many men.
She strings the men across the window,
across the empty walls so that her small
flat is filled.
She waits for the phone to ring.