Why PB is still here.

(Someone asked me why I keep posting these Port Brokeferry things here when I could enter them into comps and do well with some of them. They are here because they hang together and belong with each other. No publication that I know of would allow this to happen. So I put them here. And it's like giving something away for free to a stranger... and as such makes me feel good.)

CORINNE THINKS SHE IS OLD ENOUGH

Corinne has stolen a book from the library at school. Slipped it under her sweater when the librarian’s back was turned. It’s a slim volume of poetry. She recognised the name on the spine. It was the spurned poet called William that Mr Dodie Bredwell had taught them about. The poet had a funny name, too: William Butler Yeats.

She keeps the book under her pillow, like the words could leak through the fabric and the feathers and into her head as she sleeps, filtering into her dreams. She hasn’t told anyone about the book. She wonders how long it will be before it is missed from the library and if the librarian will recall Corinne lifting it down from the shelf. The date stamp on the inside cover shows that it has not been taken out of the library for more than twenty years. The book is held together with tape and some of the pages are loose. Maybe it will never be missed.

Corinne reads the book before she sleeps. Then again when she wakes. One poem at a time. Reads it over and over until she has made something like little sense out of what is written. It is not the same reading the words herself, not the same as listening to someone else read them. Not the same as hearing Mr Bredwell making music from what was on the page. Some of the words she does not know. She thinks of asking Mr Bredwell to help, imagines him keeping her back over lunch, pulling a chair next to his, sitting so close their arms touch, and the two of them reading together.

Her father has spent the night in the livingroom again. Corinne can hear him coughing in his sleep. There is an atmosphere, too, in the house. A coldness in the silences at table. All the sounds of eating magnified into pain. A brittleness in the air, so fragile that a single word can break things. That’s not how love should be, Corinne thinks - only it is so for the poet as it is for her parents, all pain. It doesn’t have to be like that, surely.

She tries learning one of the poems by heart and then saying the words out loud with her eyes closed. It would be better if someone was there to hear her, she thinks. She copies out some of the poetry from the book and reads over what she has written.

‘I whispered, ‘I am too young,’

And then, ‘I am old enough;’

Wherefore I threw a penny

To find out if I might love.’

There’s a boy at school she has noticed recently. Quiet and not like the others. His name is Munro. ‘Tall and thin as a tree.’ That’s what she writes in her own small attempt at poetry. ‘With eyes that follow you from place to place, or maybe it is my eyes that follow him.’ She is pleased with what she has written. She sets Munro’s name under Mr Dodie Bredwell’s in her diary, and Mr Bredwell’s name under William Butler Yeats. Beneath Munro’s name she writes ‘if I might love.’ Then she crosses the four words out.