This too is related to my daily swimming experience, but this time out of the changing room and into the cafe for my obligatory cup of tea. With the tea (depending on who is making it) I get a couple of those little foil wrapped biscuits that are part of the cup of tea experience. I tuck one of the biscuits into the side pocket of my sports bag for later use as a base for my home made yogurt, while the other is a treat that I allow myself. It was the breaking of this little biscuit that prompted the poem.
I suppose in some ways this is a poem about the writing of a poem, a meta-poem, because while having my cup of tea I try and write something in a small 9 x 14 cm notebook that I have with me at all times. what I write in this book is usual banal in the extreme, something about the weather or what I am going to do, or more often something I have not done. But the idea of the writing is to write something, anything, in the hope that a free flow of words might bring something to the surface which can be useful for a poem. This works sometimes. Other times, it is just pages of irrelevance.
For some reason, after the biscuit broke as I was taking it out of its foil wrapper and half the thing bounced on the page on which I was writing, instead of brushing the tiny crumbs away I just looked at them. Part of me was simply resting after a particularly impressive catch to stop the floorward half of the biscuit from reaching its target, but the other part was thinking about bits and pieces that get caught in the pages of books and are discovered later. Receipts used as bookmarks, torn pieces of paper, references, comments, newspaper, insects, leaves, photographs, sand, dirt, blood, phone numbers, cloth, ribbon, food, a tiny shell, book marks, money, cards - those are just some of the things that I can remember finding. There are also the more poignant items when you find something of a parent or a grandparent inside a book that was once theirs. Or indeed of friends who are still very much alive but far away.
Whatever the reason for my musing, I decided to leave the crumbs there and wonder if I would ever go back and if I did would I remember leaving them there for me to remember that I left them for that purpose. So to speak!
As I say in the poem,
Should I return,
as, having written this, I might,
I am conscious that I am deliberately making something out of nothing, but it is also a playing with a concept of memory.
I am well aware that when I re-visit some of my writing, I read it almost as a stranger - though an oddly prescient one. Although I cannot directly and precisely relate to all the exact circumstances of the production of each piece of writing, I am certainly strangely in sympathy with the writer!
I always enjoy experiencing,
what another me laid down
for future memory
Crevice crumbs
They’ll stay where pages meet.
Detritus, smaller than a nit.
Memorials to where a biscuit broke,
fell, bounced, but did not hit the floor,
but left some shattered bits to
trail along the notebook’s seam.
Slight specs, like foxing,
on the newly filled-in page.
I turn that page
and run my nail along the crease.
I feel a tiny crunch.
And start another leaf.
This notebook waits for distant eyes
to come back through and glean
the words that have been missed,
that could, perhaps, feed thought anew.
Should I return,
as, having written this, I might,
will I observe small rubble
from a crumbled rusk
and struggle to recall
why it’s still there?
Or turn the pages, losing
what another me laid down
for future memory?
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If you would like to read more of my writing then please visit Cardifftocatalonia.blogspot.com where my daily thoughts are posted.
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