On Concentration

When Words Put Up A Fight

For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.

2 Timothy 1:7

I sit in a car round the back of Manaton barn as it starts to get dark. It’s proper, wonderfully, Arthurian gloomy. Trees have no leaf and are engulfed in fog, two carrion birds swoop over soaking wet grass. Shaggy people climb over fences with torches and backpacks and slip into the welcoming warmth of the candle-lit barn. The car is my Green Room tonight, and I’m doing my regular lesson in concentration. I am learning a poem. These are the first lines:

Ignorant, in the sense
she ate monotonous food
and thought the world was flat,
and pagan, in the sense
she knew the things that moved
at night were neither dogs nor cats
but púcas and darkfaced men,
she nevertheless had fierce pride.

It’s called Death of an Irishwoman, by the late Michael Harnett. As an owl squints from a pale wet branch I chew the words over and over. I keep getting it wrong: monotonous becomes drab, ignorant becomes unthinking. But that’s not good enough. This is not an exercise in response, this is a lesson in retention. I want it exactly as the good poet composed it. So round and round on a loop I go, admitting then concealing the lines scrawled on the back of an electricity bill. It takes a surprisingly long time, maybe fifteen minutes, to get those few lines down. I’m surprised at myself. I’m sure in my twenties I could almost hoover up poems and deliver them, now I squint and strain and make stuff up. I seem distracted.

But sentenced in the end
to eat thin diminishing porridge
in a stone-cold kitchen
she clenched her brittle hands
around a world
she could not understand.
I loved her from the day she died.

These are even harder than the first batch, ‘clenched her brittle hands’ becomes ‘her brittle hands clenched’. I know poets, and the best choose their words with economy and precision, and wouldn’t thank me for the paraphrasing. Honour their decisions. But the whole stanza seems to shimmer, coming in and out of focus like a photographer’s lens. Maybe I won’t inflict it on the gathered parish this evening, tomorrow night perhaps.