I shouldn’t be here, I know. It’s dark. A dirt-yellow glow in her window, the only light. The leaves under my feet damp. My toes chilling through my velvet boots. I can see her in the yellow. I watch her lift her thin arms, wipe her silvery hair behind her ears. She’s staring at the moon like it’s her inspiration. Her life source.
*
I’m reminded of Daisy. That other poet. My first. She too saw the moon as a muse. I’d met her in a pub reciting her slam, the room full of smoke, the sour beer stink choking. I shadowed her, too. Then one day I saw her youtube interview. She mentioned being stalked. It was a just hunch, she said, as she peered skittishly over her shoulder. I followed her for another week, silent in my velvet boots, then on that inky night into the park beside the river. Frogs, reeds and broken branches. She never slammed poetry again.
*
But yesterday I was at this woman’s reading.
*
Like with Daisy, I was transported by Bleak’s reading. The words, the flow; our connection.
*
I’ve been immersed in her first book of poems for years. Her sonnets and free verse have always been my shell, my blue blanket, my sword. I carried her book so constantly, clutching it at work and on the bus, kissing its pages so often the paper frayed. I had to glue some pages back in with sticky tape. That was the copy I need signed. My bible.
*
Something struck me on that crisp winter morning as I flicked on my daily Google poem and first discovered Bleak. So much so I ordered her book from Amazon that day. Not cheap – what is it about poetry books? why so expensive? – but more necessary than the phone or electricity bill payments. They could wait.
*
Imogen Bleak. Her beautiful Plath-inspired lines, complex and grubby, impenetrable but sublime.
Death is life is death is birth.
Lies glitter from gold rings. Gold rings that refuse to bend.
Besotted I cannot bend.
*
It was her publisher, I assumed, who was setting up the lectern, arranging the armchairs on the small podium, testing the mike. Although I was early – an hour – the bookshop’s staff kindly allowed me to wait in the audience pit; stolid, plastic chairs that chilled my bottom. No one sat around me. All that was happening in the world was remote – customers flicking through books from the shelves, glossy hardbacks from the show table, the ting of a text, muted laughter at the counter. A waft of coffee and the crisp spice of magazines and the stench of unloved paperbacks.
*
The room filled. I moved from the second row from the front, then a few rows back. A cocky man’s head blocked my view – I moved again. It was essential that I could see her.
*
A muted conversation about the poet behind the armchairs made me lean forward, cock my ear, but all I heard were vowels. My tinnitus is extreme, nails on blackboard. The cruel melody of stress.
*
The publicist introduced the poet, said it’s the first time she’d ever read her work in public. And could be the last. She smiled: Depending on you, her audience. Her fans.
*
Bleak appeared. Thin, staunch, all in black. Her mouth a tight moue. Her eyes behind lunar sunglasses. Without preface she began.
*
Her voice was starchy, unclear, and I gripped the base of the chair and pleaded to God my God in my dread. But then she centred and the words began to dance, just a little, then pirouetted, flowed, the poetry swooped and floated through the air like a moth and I was transported far away as I am each time I read her book.
*
These were her new poems – her new book – her first in a decade. Maybe my tinnitus screamed because I feared the worst. But each line delivered; I gasped as she recited in her gravelly voice:
I’ll caress you in your bed
In your coffin
Without you crabs crack on the sidewalk
Follow you I must.
*
I closed my eyes even when she recited her earliest poem, the one I knew by heart; when she pronounced her famous last line; when the small audience applauded and chairs scraped around me.
*
I’d hoped to meet her for years – I need her.
*
And she knows my need. She understands my life is empty, an echoless drain in which I’m lost, lost. That only she can fill.
*
When I opened my eyes she was sitting at a desk, pen in hand. The queue for her signature was growing. Already five people deep. I forged forward with strangled excuse me’s; bitter that I wasn’t first in line. Would I shove to the front, mutter that an aunt, no, a mother, was ill and so time was paramount?
*
Of course not.
*
Finally I was first in the prime spot. Banshees in my head screeched. The poet smiled –
I was finally meeting the famous Imogen Bleak –
My hero –
My heroin.
*
The yellow light in the window flickers like a dying match.
Is that her room?
Of course it is – I’ve been following her, I know her every move, I followed her to the chemist, Coles, on the metro to houses on the North Shore and Liverpool. Friends? Family? A lover?
*
The knife in my pocket –
*
My name is X, I said, leaning on the desk. She smiled like a weary friend, like a companion I hadn’t seen for years. Her silver hair flitted like diamonds. She lifted her glasses. Her eyes lasered mine as if we were sharing a secret, a private joke, as if she intended asking me to join her for a drink or a meal. And how I’d love that! To discuss the poems in her new book: Killing Woland. I’d heard they touch on her years in Ukraine, hiding in a cellar as Russians invaded.
*
I don’t really understand.
*
It doesn’t matter, anyway.
*
Because her poetry is about me. I find it near impossible to explain how I know that, but I will try.
She appreciates what it is to be ugly, unwanted.
To be despised by your mother.
To be bullied for your acne. Your discoloured buck teeth. Just for being you.
*
Her words are my bones:
Lie beneath the carpet, hear your loved ones trample above thrusting your turned face into the soil
Like when kids at school made fun of me.
You don’t have to love the monsters just let them roam as you hide in their shadows
Like when my mother caned me. When she stamped on my fingers, and I hid under the bed.
*
I wanted to touch her silvery hair but I smiled like an idiot. I wanted to tell her how she’s kept me alive but my mouth was glued shut by fear and the tinnitus was hammering and shrieking so much I wouldn’t hear myself.
I shoved the book before her.
An old copy! she smiled, lifted her glasses. My, my. She twisted it up and down and held it with two fingers like a soiled rag. There’s a desk up there with new copies, you know. And my new book.
Her smile twisted slightly.
The room narrowed and the darkness around me was thunder and we were no longer connecting.
She began to say something then her eyes flicked to my tshirt and she jerked as if startled by a spectre.
You’ve been to Russia? Her voice was even more raspy; her eyes were on my tshirt. You like him?!
I looked down at my belly. Oh, I said stupidly, Putin on a horse. I didn’t even know I was wearing it. My hands trembled. This – I got this at Vinny’s. I don’t…
I can’t sign your copy, she said. Her eyes cut like jagged purple ice.
*
An alarm curdled the silence. The lights blinked and a man announced we must leave. Bleak cried out and jumped, knocking her chair to the floor.
You must sign my copy, I shrieked and thrust the book into her chest.
The lights switched off – only a cold white glowed along the wall’s gutter. No, no, get me out of here, Bleak was weeping, tears smearing her face. I can’t breathe, she gagged. I grabbed at her arm, tore at her black shirt, but her publicist ushered her down the stairwell to the bookstore’s front room and into the street.
*
Imogen! I screamed, but she was already in an SUV cockroach being whisked into the night’s soot.
*
I couldn’t sleep that night.
*
I burned that tshirt in the bath.
*
I remained in my bed for days, hugging my unsigned book. Until I realised I missed her too much.
*
I sent her an Instagram with my poem – with lines that explain what she’d done to me. But I’ve received no reply.
So I just keep watching her…
I see her in the shower.
At the deli.
Returning from her yoga class.
*
It would be easy to climb the fence, to creep along the apartment’s side alley and use the key I stole to open the door and pad stealthily like a cat up the stairs. I’ll climb into bed with her, and she’ll cuddle me, feed me, care for me. Once she understands.
*
But not yet. I just keep watching. For now.
Photo by Taylor Wright on Unsplash
