Words Revealed 1996/97

Restored Typewriter:  Our Lives and Ourselves.

 

A collaboration with the poet Maura Dooley, for an exhibition organized at the Midland Arts Centre Birmingham, in association the Irish crafts Council – touring venues in Britain and Ireland, (1996/97).         

When I discovered this discarded portable typewriter, dirty, wordless and tongue-tied, I wanted it for Maura. In this age of word processors and laser writers I wanted it to end it’s working life in a poet’s hands; the last touch on it’s antiquated keys, to be a poet’s touch.

I cleaned and restored it, releasing and unpicking each letter, discovering it’s little quirks and idiosyncrasies. I became extremely fond and protective of it, and then I trusted it to Maura. ‘Our Lives and Ourselves`, the poem she wrote on it and for it, is an affirmation of language and love and a confirmation of our dependence on the poet to keep us all from being wordless and tongue-tied.

(The piece was displayed in a sealed case, with Maura’s poem permanently positioned and readable within the typewriter)

Our Lives and Ourselves

Mam, I want you to know
I made this the old way
with paper and pencil,
rough copy, fair copy,
a child at my elbow
and not enough to sleep.

I wanted to tell you
the parlour still smells
of snuff and polish,
of musk roses, soot,
the chill northern wind
and the dampness of spring.

On Sundays while Nellie
and Clem are at the Chapel,
I sit setting down here
my heart’s smallest secrets,
in ways I could never,
when life was your shroud.

A mother, a daughter,
the rough and fair copies,
I could never tell you
our own little story
of soot, and musk roses,
our lives and ourselves.

I want you to know, Mam,
it’s your hands I gaze at
spread over these letters,
as if to protect them
from words and from meaning,
from something as simple

as just making sense.
This silence between us,
has made the keys blurry,
the way this ‘g’ trembles
on a word I once fought
that now fits like a glove.