Ceremony
After peeling a banana
you’d chop it widthways,
butter two white slices
and arrange the pieces
four by four.
Then pat and press,
and with a clink of knife,
cut corner to corner,
bring the first half
to your mouth without
needing a plate.
If I train my ears
I can bring it all back:
the rhythmic jaw click
as you chew a bite intact,
the muffled clunk
of blade on board
slicing many parts to one,
the bread unbuttered
the skin tears sutured,
the banana now whole,
turning spotless,
green, unripened
in the fruit bowl.
Unexpectedly titled for a suite of elegiac poems, Christopher Arksey’s pamphlet, Variety Turns, justifies the choice, its poems taking unusual, sometimes quirky angles on what might be called the discipline of mourning. The observation avoids self-centredness, with an unusual awareness of the strange jolts of perception that accompany the experience of seeing, close at hand, the ending of life for someone familiar and much loved – in this case, the poet’s mother.
These are short, succinct poems, or, if longer, delivered in linked fragments, but they’re not closed, either formally or psychologically. Death is both privately, personally registered and shared with other family members. The mother, an ex-nurse, is also vitally present, and retains her autonomy through to the final sequence, Portfolio, a series of photographic expressions of her particular character and life. The poet’s response to loss includes emotional and verbal tact. It neither excludes the intensity of grief nor edits out the randomness, humour and understatement of life continuing to be lived.
The poem Ceremony takes what might be a familiar elegiac sub-genre, the recollection of the mourned person’s engagement with a particularly characteristic activity. Arksey’s approach to this material is refreshing. He says: “It was partly inspired by Larkin’s poem As Bad as a Mile … although, unlike his, my poem isn’t about failure or regret. Of course, you’d do anything to ‘bring it all back’ when you’re grieving. But, in this poem, I’m trying to relive and savour the idiosyncrasies of the person and the moment – – particularly the sounds – rather than time-travelling to dwell on or change what happened.”
Arksey’s observation of his mother’s activity is detailed, but not laboriously detailed. He reveals a certain geometrical precision in the banana sandwich-making, a quality he doesn’t exaggerate or mock. The poem seems early on to have set itself successfully if modestly on a certain realist course, and it sustains the reader’s interest. But then, after the eating of the sandwich begins, the narrative unobtrusively changes direction. The change is introduced by a statement, lines 12 -13 which we’ll come to understand better later on: “If I train my ears / I can bring it all back.”
The key word here is “train” – a transitive verb with several primary meanings. To train someone is to teach them, but there is also “train” meaning to “direct” . You train your camera on a moving object for example. The speaker in the poem is not merely training his ears to hear the sounds he heard in real life, but to hear something extraordinary and impossible.
This happens with admirable economy and even a sense of the miraculous. “You chew a bite intact” implies that the process of breaking something (chewing) becomes a process of mending. There’s a moment of puzzlement for the reader, but we can savour it, and go on to enjoy the notion of “slicing many parts to one …” Half-rhyme and alliteration help hold things together: “back/intact”, “click/clunk”, “unbuttered/sutured”, “blade on board”. In the line, “the skin tears sutured” the eye meets “tears” willingly to combine both senses of the word, the tears that mean something is torn, the primary meaning here, and the tears you cry. It’s important for the poem that the secondary kind of breakage is felt only momentarily, and soon repaired, part of the overall scheme of renovation.
The restored banana, “turning spotless,/ green, unripened/ in the fruit bowl” acquires a symbolic dimension now. In being termed “spotless”, it seems virginal, immature, unmarked by growth as well as time. Ageing hasn’t intruded yet, either in the shape of “ripening” into adulthood, or in the processes that move an organism towards its death.
Psychologically, the poem reflects the mourner’s wish for an earlier phase in the mourned person’s life; as the poet says, “to ‘bring it all back’ when you’re grieving.” At the same time, the poem keeps a clear, detached focus on the living person to whom it’s addressed. She is always present, both in the first half and subsequently, when she is almost self-created from that unexpected, beautifully easy “turn” that reverses time: “the rhythmic jaw click/ as you chew a bit intact…”