Ursula
Ursula “My best unbeaten brother, this isn’t all I see…” Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, ‘I See A Darkness’ Then, we sat at the bottom of your steps and cried. Faye namedropped Peckwater Quad, but it meant nothing to us that night, starry marble cold under a pitchblack sky. Christ Church was always midnight for us. I can’t remember who left first – we’d been drinking, but the boys didn’t understand – and cried in each other’s arms on the stone step below Julia’s room, below your room, about the music we gave away. I’d played Hindemith to George and, headphones clamped to his head, he’d looked blank at the most beautiful cadence I could find. The piano in Mansfield chapel, staring aghast as I smiled politely at his performance before taking the stage. Suddenly, then, my Oxford; the city I withstood for so long, crashing, flooding, only the numb clunk of a heavy padlock between us. A Sunday afternoon with the sun streaming in. Finally, aged 20, the animal act, and the contradictions remain. Always so different with Katherine, my love; a lazy Saturday afternoon, talking in the sun until she lit candles to see my face. *** Unsure, I stepped back and watched you, looking like a couple. The white witch in me told him you looked more functional than I felt I could be. We’d been drinking, but the boys didn’t understand, and when you sided with him the grimy canal saw fury swell up in me, near the house of a man I didn’t understand. There’d been a boy there I never really knew; who bought old vinyl in the sun an hour before you split me apart, clasped me in his arms when he saw your wounds on my wrists. Four talented friends with nothing better to do but rip each other apart. The sole sincere, only she approached a pound of flesh; more celebrity skin for you to etch yourself in. For once, I’m resigned to taking bronze. But it’s gone, raw in the mind like a childhood slur. Further back, nights, nights, always night; shielding myself from sterile spires, or Oxford shielding itself, indifferently, from me. Only buildings and skies and my own clear eyes. Lewis in the Eagle and Child, Plath’s large flat feet slapping the awkward stones. A terrified, hysteric American laugh. She stands outside with impeccable style and molten eyes, with Emma’s dark beauty, Emily’s mistrustful eyes. He takes her away, and, waiting for him to finish, I’m imprisoned still. When will he get out of my life?
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
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