Captured Women

‘Why stond we? Why go we noght?’ —Robert Mannyng

And in that house there was a room
that was hung with many drawings
of women, with their mouths tight
shut, lips making a point:
‘Why do you stand in front of us?
Why stand there? Why not go?’

One dipped her curls forward
thoughtfully: ‘Why don’t you hang?
When will you go?’ Their hair, serious
expansion of each, upwards, sideways,
a boundary against the questions:
‘Why are we on the brink of you?’

The pencil asked what hair weighs
and drew it to cover the tucked-away
technology of ear. Listen.
The captured women ask: ‘Why
do we hang in front of you?
Why hang here? Why don’t we go?’

The jib of them, their hissing sound
like woodpeckers or worried finches
considering a swing at the seeds
before flight from the sparrowhawk:
‘Why do we hang here while you stand?
Why don’t we go? Why don’t we go?

Clara Murdstone

She asked: ‘Who has taken my balancing man?’

Her thumb of wood, fixed to a hoop
of inverted iron, precariously
sat on her bedroom mantle for years.
Red marked his head. A triangle
of wood was cut to make the points
of leg stumps. Pushed, he swung
over a crowd of dried petals
brought back from the Holy Land.

Bend him flat, he self-corrected.

‘If he was to appear again,’
she pleaded, ‘on the newel post
or the hall chair, I would accept
that I had lost him.’ He was now
in a room forbidden to her.

The cheval mirror caught a baluster
on the balcony. ‘I must
find my steelyard,’ she said

‘while I can wear a rosette slipper.’

Note: Clara Murdstone is a character in Charles Dickens’ novel, David Copperfield. She is David’s mother. I have imagined this episode in her life.