(ANOTHER) RIDDLE OF FORM

‘Soothe’ by John Godfrey (from Private Lemonade)

May the truth be gentle?

Reading John Godfrey’s poem ‘Soothe’ it’s hard not to hear a feint echo at the back of your ear: “soothe” (“sooth”). An almost imperceptible difference. And it seems to be a poem which depends upon such delicacies of sound and sense.

Here it is:


Soothe

The inside of my thigh

slides down from

the sun

through ceilings


I lift you

in front of me

so you bend over my hair

I exhaust you

by listening


I soothe by getting small

There’s no greater

distance

than from you to

night

I’m struck by the possibilities contained within “soothe”. The abrasive ‘s’ against the soft ‘th’ and the stretch and ease of the long ‘oo’ vowel sound. The word itself enacts a caress.

Is the title the first word of the poem? Perhaps. And that seems appropriate in a poem concerned with permeable boundaries, skin, intimacy and distance - “the sun/through ceilings”. So, it’s an instruction or an invitation?

Divided into three verses, the poem is a deceptive and deceiving read – something I notice with many Godfrey poems. Just as you think with Peggy Lee ‘is that all there is?’ a line delivers a jolt and you have to start all over again.

Here, in verse one, exactly what is going on? “The inside of my thigh/slides” – yes? The verb relates to my thigh? How then to reconcile this with the following two and a half lines – “down from/ the sun/ through ceilings”. Does this – can this – make sense? “Down from” and “through” allow for grammatical sense but it’s hard to envisage the scene, the events. Should “slides” be read as a plural noun? A momentary image of kabbalistic solar rays flashes in the mind like an engraving by Robert Fludd.

And while we’re on verse one, what about the skewed phrase “inside of my thigh”. Wouldn’t that be “inside leg” to your average tailor? Or some lover’s intimate whisper and encouragement? It’s definitely sexy.

Sexy, too, the “down” in line two, which hovers between adverb and noun (oh so fine hairs).

In fact, I would argue that the reading of the poem so far is sexily seductive – for what is being intimated (that’s a useful phrase) as against spelt out. There seems to be a lot going on between the lines and Godfrey’s line spacing suggests as much. Each line has just enough air around it to hold its own ground and the indented lines in verses two and three create further possibilities.

The effect is like a drop out in the tape, a skip in the DVD, a moment of inattention. ‘What was that? Did I miss something?’.

Yet gluing the words together is the spittle and breath of the sounds.

Let’s take ‘th’ – the ‘th’ present in the title word “soothe”, on to the opening word “the” to the last word of line one “thigh”. I’m no phonologist, but I can feel the difference here: the first instance is smoothed by the preceding “soo-“; the second is the most emphatic and voiced; the third, a flimsy thing, breathed, ghostlike. Lines three and four echo with a repeated “the” and then the beautifully apt “through” which in its ‘th’ + ‘oo’ sounds reflects and softens “soothe”. Then, in contrast, listen to the rasping ‘s’ & ‘z’ sounds at work in “slides”, “sun” and “ceilings”.

What to say about this? As so often, it seems to risk dulling the effect to try to articulate such subtleties. Or to imply that they require the assistance of paraphrase. Yet I’m tempted to say the effect is similar to a finger tracing a little path on the skin, responding to little spasms. Hard then soft. Ear and tongue in close collaboration.

In verse two, the crucial moments – the ‘jolts’ – are in lines four and five. What seems a fairly safe erotic scenario veers into something more disturbing: “exhaust you” (who?) by “listening” (how)? As indeed the sounds disturb – the crush of abrasive ‘x’ and ‘z’ and ‘st’ and ‘s’ sounds coming so soon after “so you” (line 3) had revived “soothe” in our minds and the number of either vowel or soft consonant end syllables.

Is Godfrey suggesting the an analogy between a relationship and the act of reading? The dangers of too close attention? (Imagine the problem pages of Cosmo: “I wish my partner didn’t listen to me ...”). Or – taking the poem out of the bedroom – the dangers if you place too much insistence upon language, read the small print, weigh words – think politics, the office, business, the supermarket. So what you’re really saying is .... .

Back to the poem and is it silly to sense the anti-climax, impotence, phallic failure in “I soothe by getting small”? Equally, it could be read as a moving away, withdrawal from the relationship. But who’s doing the soothing? I soothe someone? Or can one soothe oneself (as in licking your wounds with words)?. The poem as an act of self-consolation.

Certainly, a phrase from the first poem in the collection seems of relevance here:

“I have traced all this to my body
Everything beautiful, and everything
that ever goes wrong”

(‘Everything Beautiful’)

To my ears, line two in verse three invites the cliched “love than” rather than the brutal “distance”. And maybe that’s deliberate. And deliberate, too, the compression of sounds – the “s” established earlier and the “n” which has been at work since verse one - “inside”, “down”, “sun”, ceilings” - and on into verse two. There’s also a little sound logic to three important words: “ceilings” to “listening” to “distance”.

The pay off – the climax, if you like – is suitably deflationary:

than from you to

and the orphaned

night

The tmesis of “tonight” is the verbal equivalent of a wince. Embittered. The luxuriant ‘oo’ sounds (evoking the reassurance of “soothe”) are cut by the clinically clear ‘i’ and blade-like ‘t’. Lines one and two of verse one also return in the ear (“inside” ... “thigh” ... “slides”) like mocking echoes.

Yet the poem avoids too neat an assimilation into a New York romantic film – he wanders the street alone, the music plays, a tearful she is above in her apartment, THE END, we leave the cinema refreshingly depressed.

“From you to night”? That’s another dimension entirely. We’re back to the quandary of verse one where thighs and sun slide through (usually) secure ceilings.

The “you” is now placed against some black vastness ripping the poem out of any reassuring – why not say it, soothing – read.

And yet you’d hardly notice it. Sooth to say.