Barbara Fisher: Three Poems

Dear Reader

Yesterday I picked up the book

I’d given you for your birthday,

your last birthday as it turned out to be,

and found where you had marked your place.

You hadn’t got far with Noel Coward’s letters

but knowing you I know you tried,

in spite of being unwell because it was my gift.

 

Dear reader, how you marked your place

in my life––and other lives, warmed

by your kindness and courtesy.

I loved the way you

went about your reading,

full of purpose, serious, planfully,

tackling ancient history and the bible,

following your favourite mountaineers,

Antarctic heroes, and the carefree

travellers of the 1930s. Whether

you were enjoying Betjeman,

investigating Lutyens or pursuing Piranesi

there were always several books on the go,

places marked or open on the table

so illustrations could be savoured.

And who but you, immersed in the Russians,

could finish War and Peace,

waiting all day at the hospital

while I had surgery?

Barbara Fisher

 

Mrs Stevenson

Margaret Isabella Stevenson,

a daughter of the manse,

doting mother of Robert Louis,

whose health was always such a worry,

could not have guessed how

she would spend her latter years.

Yet there she is in the photograph

of her son’s Samoan household.

How far a cry from Scotland

and the noted “lighthouse Stevensons”,

those brilliant engineers that Louis

could not, would not join!

The family are photographed on the veranda

of the handsome mansion Louis built

on his plantation acres, respected, loved

as Tuvelu, great teller of tales, while

living the life of some transplanted laird.

He stands, casually dressed, with his wife,

American, and eleven years older than he,

her son and daughter and son-in-law

and some of their household staff.

Mrs Stevenson senior is easily identified.

Seated, black silk dress and white widow’s cap,

she might have still been in Edinburgh

but left of her, things grow exotic.

An oddly dressed man stands with a parrot

on his shoulder, named, but his function not.

In the foreground is a Samoan named the butler,

well-built, bare-chested and wearing a sarong,

as are the other menservants. Female staff

are conventionally clad but it’s tempting

to think they sometimes wore grass skirts.

Free and easy the Stevensons’ life

seemed by late Victorian standards

but there was a certain grandeur

of a beguiling South Seas kind.

And who’s to say that Margaret Isabella

did not relish her Samoan life, the island

where her darling boy was relatively well,

never yearned for Scottish mist

and the banks and braes, or tea

beside the parlour fire?

Barbara Fisher

 

Mrs Whistler

When Mrs Whistler, pious and proper, moved

in to her son’s bohemian London household

his mistress was moved out, and he, ever the wit,

declared the place “had been emptied

and purified from cellar to eaves”.

 

The famous portrait of his mother,

which he, in love with Japanese art,

called Arrangement in Grey and Black

shows an elderly lady of slender build,

seated, dressed in black and wearing

a white widow’s cap from which

long muslin streamers frame

a profile, unsmiling and austere.

Poor lady, how was she to know

in years to come she’d be the butt of jokes

and disrespectful comment?

Posing for her clever boy, she did not mind

that she was only called upon because

his model had failed to turn up.

There was little she would not do

for dear James.

 

As the portrait gradually progressed,

for Whistler worked so slowly

dozens of sittings were needed,

what were her thoughts, I wonder?

Did she marvel at her curly-headed wunderkind,

who aged eleven studied in St Petersburg

at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts?

The family had left America in the 1840s

to live in Russia while the father, a civil engineer,

worked as chief consultant on the railway

to be built from the capital to Moscow.

Did she fret at his failure later

to make the grade at Westpoint,

where Major Whistler had taught drawing?

They were a military family and he did prove

his competence at making military maps

but the army was certainly not for him.

And what were her concerns

about his Paris stay, learning to paint

and living the free and easy life

of studios and models, cafés and immorality?

 

Just as well, she must have thought,

she’d colonised his London home,

discouraged some disreputable acquaintances

and quietly made her darling boy, the fashionable dandy,

brilliant conversationalist but always the outsider,

suddenly respectable.

 

Now society flocked to have him paint their portraits.

Of one thing I am sure—when James laid down his brush

and she rose from her chair to preside at afternoon tea,

she was glad her portrait had been painted

while she was sitting down.

Barbara Fisher