Ruth Padel

She was born round the corner in an attic. Balancing chemistry textbooks on her feet, her father pushed the ivory five-foot pram down the middle.

‘He thought you were immortal’ says her mother. Later she daggered sticks along immaculate black railings.

Today it is a psalm with each brass doorbell, every blue-rinsed concierge, daily bland against the rush of last hopes....

She dreamed he made a scape ship from a grandfather clock,

bone soap, and the certainty that human’ll breed true.

Refuse the transhuman, he’d thunder in his sleep to the digital alarm.

But that’s the old style him. He’s bought air purifiers, banned whisky from her house,

eats only yellow food. He’s carving tables of exogamy. Marry out.

Seek help from

In Memoriam Gerry Macnamara

I

They were switching on headlights through A40 dusk, despite the blaze from Mister Lighting

and a glow-worm trek of aeroplane through the scuffed cloud: a written line, a last letter

running left to right of the flyover till it smudged out in coughs.

The little source drawing south, away from its end: that soft broken run of cotton commas.

II

Driving west, I took...

The fox you didn’t know you had in your front garden is craning his velour neck

from the hedge at two in the morning to see what he doesn’t often get a glimpse of,

that moonspark on a glass of Scotch

he doesn’t often smell being more at home with fish-heads and the rinds of Emmental:

trainspotting to his fox-astonishment a tumbler doing the rounds of his own beat about...

In the 1640s, every musical household in Italy had a copy of ‘Ariadne’s Lament’, high-spot of Monteverdi’s Arianna and his most famous song. The lament expressed the opera’s theme: abandonment. Monteverdi called it Arianna’s ‘most fundamental part’. There have been many Ariadnes since. Cambert, Marcello, Porpora, Handel, Strauss: only Dido can challenge the number of times Ariadne magnetises ‘abandoned’ to her name. At the moment of the lament, Ariadne’s abandonment is fourfold. Two past abandonments: she abandoned her home and herself, for and to Theseus. Two in the present: abandoned by him, she again abandons herself, this time to her feelings in song. Her self-abandoned expression of abandonment is a hieroglyph of all four abandonings.