dublinka

The first Rendezvous: Los Angeles 1944, is one poem in particular, which caught my eye from Anne Kennedy’s 1995 release, The Dog Kubla Dreams my life. It's a beautiful but tragic portrait of lives too afraid to come into being. Before it begins, it is prefaced by a portentous Robert Lowell quote: “all the forgiving couples, hurry on to dinner and their nights.”

With easy notes, the poem tells the simple story of the first day of a love affair. A woman, emerges from a Moorish doorway in a building complete with minaret and:

sniffs slyly
for tell-tales scent of lover
looks right, looks left
hurries off
her heels tick tocking
down the empty street.

With ‘sniffs slyly’ the poem captures the air of success and liberation that any affair brings. But after studying all her excitement and triumph, it peals below this surface, to uncover and proceeds to illustrate a common social arrangement: the fraudulent lives of weary married couples. As such, Kennedy rushes her protagonist home to the backwaters of domesticity. Here she cooks for her husband, whose flaws are being tired, accepting chintz and casseroles, and worse: being bored.

Later behind chintz crossovers,
she serves a casserole
Assuring her tired husband
her day’s been boring too
while beneath the dinette light
her ankle bracelet gleams

She assures him, that she too is bored. Presumably this was at his 'off poem' prompting. And crucially it is by seeking this reassurance and by thereby attempt to drag her into his own oblivion, that finally seals his fate to her and the reader. We cannot pity him. We realise that he cannot miss, but does not comment on her gleaming ankle bracelet. We suspect this is most likely because he is too afraid, too weak. He has already forgiven her. Perhaps in a similar way, she may even have forgiven him in the past. And so they will continue, in mutual deceit and fraud, like all the other forgiving couples, and hurry on to dinner and their nights. And so in this brief poem, with out any fuss, Kennedy has shown us this terrible norm. Twilight lives: half dead, maybe over.

From Anne Kennedy The Dog Kubla Dreams my life. Salmon press. 1995.