Now You Shall Know

Now You Shall Know

Maria Callas sings the aria “Voi lo sapete” from Cavalleria Rusticana

The aeroplane is hung in the sky from a clever hook, so we seem

to inhabit a thrumming stillness, but we believe we are travelling

forward. A little this way and a little that way, up and then down

as if we are nosing out a scent. And there is a singing in my ears.

This is cleverness. Recalled from history, the voice of Maria Callas

and the presence of that audience, their rapt surrendering translated

into a thing of monstrous beauty, as she screams, exquisitely, her high

anguish. Or is it our commonwealth of torment? It is, anyway, almost

unendurable. As human as anything is. And everyone present is part

of this. She pauses. She breathes. The orchestra dawdles to intimate

there is a resolution to come. And then he coughs. The man cannot

contain himself a moment longer, the paroxysm erupts. He coughs.

Forever, at this point, he interrupts. Whatever else he did in his life

he coughed and is now part of the story—which I can’t follow but

can tell is of dark betrayal and death. And of the tickle in his throat.

But I don’t know—non lo so—what it might mean—“Voi lo sapete”.

You it will know? You will come to know it? Now I am being previous.

I am hung in the sky knowing nothing of what I will come to know.

*

Held high in the palm of technology’s hand, awaiting our delivery

to a runway, a skybridge, a carousel—to our eternal mother, maybe

propping up on the pillows like a bright-eyed dolly. Oh holy dread.

There is nowhere else to sleep this midnight except within her reach.

Believe me. In this house there are no other beds in which I may sleep.

She doesn’t whisper stories all night in the dark, her mouth to my ear,

in a language that I used to know, a shuffle of syllables, as if she can

talk me back into her sad, shamefaced arms, snowball’s chance of that.

But in the morning when we wake, she laughs, and denounces me as

a blanket thief. A rusted coil has eased. You selfish old woman—I say.

But I am an old woman also. Two old women waking to the new day

that will bring a sudden jolt that is the beginning of the end for her.

I have imagined what I might feel dressing for my mother’s funeral,

and as I pinned her lily-of-the-valley brooch to my grey lapel, I knew.

*

I have flown in with a book in my clever hand. She loses all feeling

in her left hand. I quit the house to speak to everyone at once. She

is lifted into an ambulance. Something tells me she is about to throw

the performance of her life—her parting shot—the last big push with

everything she’s got. I read that poem—she says—the one about …

ah yes—that one—the one about … we are in the busy corridor of

the hospital close to the grief room. And I know that she will die soon.

This is the hospital where I was born. Once again she reaches for all

her strength and pushes me away from her. I didn’t know—she says.

And that is enough. Go—the voice in my head says—just go. Now.

Jennifer Compton

(This poem won the 2013 Newcastle Poetry Prize)