Carol Ann Duffy — The Biographer

Because you are dead, I stand at your desk, my fingers caressing the grooves in the wood your initials made; and I manage a quote, echo one of your lines in the small, blue room where and early daguerreotype shows you excitedly staring out from behind your face, the thing that made you yourself still visibly there like a hood and a cloak of light. The first four words that I write are your name. I’m a passionate man with a big advance who’s loved your work since he was a boy; but the night I slept alone in your bed, the end of a fire going out in the grate, I came awake- certain, had we ever met, you wouldn’t have wanted me, or needed me, would barely have noticed me at all. Guilt and rage hardened me then, and later I felt your dislike chilling the air as I drifted away. Your wallpaper green and crimson and gold. How close can I get to the sound of your voice which Emma Elizabeth Hibbert described- lively, eager and lightly-pitched, with none of the later, bitter edge. Cockney, a little. In London town, the faces you wrote leer and gape and plead at my feet. Once, high on Hungerford Bridge, a stew and tangle of rags, sniffled by a dog, stood, spoke, spat at the shadow I cast, at the meagre shadow I cast in my time. I heard the faraway bells of St Paul’s as I ran. Maestro. Monster. Mummy’s Boy. My Main Man. I write you and I write you for five hard years. I have an affair with a Thespian girl- you would have approved- then I snivel home to my wife. Her poems and jam. Her forgiveness. Her violent love. And this is a life. I print it out. In all of your mirrors, my face; with its smallish, its quizzical eyes, its cheekbones, its sexy jaw, its talentless, dust jacket smile.