Featured Poet - James Turner

THE MOUNTAIN

1

Two people and fear, the man afraid of the woman.

Consider the tragedy of being drawn in

by love, willingly, and then – in vulnerable

openness, in the quiet receptivity

of love’s friendliness – the violent shock

of an explosion, her anger, which may or may not

have been directed at him but, hurt already

in his damaged depths, he feels as if it were.

Falling in love with a woman, obliges him

to care for her, to replace relationship

with Relationship, or so he believes deep

within his bourgeois ex-public-school soul. About marriage

they were in perfect agreement: don’t do it.

Sex, from the start, was good. But from the start

he found her anger fierce, humiliating,

confusing, crazy-making. She lived in the house

she owned, and he moved in. It takes a lot 

to kill true love, but 18 years with her

did this for him. He could have said no at the start.

He could have left her any day after that. 

Trauma bound them. They’d both survived

childhood trauma.

2

His eagerness to please, his lack of sense

of injustice, his background, his conditioning,

sexual, physical and emotional abuse

in babyhood and childhood which prevented

the growth of normal confidence and assertiveness

in him, made him afraid to say no. His fear

of her anger only provoked her anger

and increased it. He said to himself,

“I won’t run away from this, that would deny

the love that draws me to her.” And so he stayed.

And she wanted him to. Seventeen years

went by, the long story of periods of calm

between riding impossible storms together,

led to breakdown, thoughts of suicide – which

he never attempted though he tried to attempt it.

Fear and depression were contained by strong medication

and month or two on a psychiatric ward. 

Recovery was slow at first, he thinking

they’d steer through by the compass of love, she thinking

love is not enough. So, seventeen years on,

here they were, two people and fear, still

together, his fear intensifying, rising,

falling, rising, till one day, walking home

to her, he felt it build to a mountain that stood

in his path, and no way round and no way back. 

To please her and to avoid upsetting her, 

he’d been trying to hide his fear from her,

which only added to the mountain. They sat

opposite one another, and he told her,

“I am afraid.” His fear subsided a little,

then rose again. “I’ve been coming to a point…,”

he began. “I am afraid,” he told her again.

And then for the first time he told her, no choice,

he had to tell her, “I’m afraid of you.”

He knew this would upset her and it did.

3

“I’ve known that all along,” she said. Of course.

For 17 years she’d been aware of it,

struggled not to frighten him, done all

she could to protect him from his fears – and he

was still afraid – of her. She’d had enough.

She said, “To make you afraid of me is abuse,

and I don’t want to be an abuser.” She’d cared

for him in his damaged deranged state, through hospital

and since. Too long. “I made you ill. It’s been awful.

I’ll have to leave you,” she said. What she’d do

after that she didn’t know. Suddenly, he felt

he’d nothing to lose, defend or hide, nothing

to work towards, no hope, no future. Now

there was only now. “I’m not afraid of you

any more,” he said. She said, “Did you mean that?”

4

He thought a bit and said, “I meant it,” which

was true: when he’d said it, he meant it. But

she wanted his assurance that he’d never

be afraid of her again. “We’ll have to see,”

he said. This felt like an evasion, so

he went on: “Something has definitely changed,

a barrier has been broken. For me, talking

about my fear of you has been a breakthrough.

It’s never happened before. I’d reached a point,

you’d reached a point, one each side of the barrier

my fear has created between us. Just now

I broke the barrier for good. My mountain of fear

has almost gone. Next time a crisis threatens

it’ll be different. No more frantic trying

to defend myself, to influence your responses,

unsay what I’ve just said, and return

to my idea of how things were before,

as if they’d been all right before! Two points

within me have come together as a single point.

I’ll write about this and show you what I’ve written.”

5

She reflected. She decided to stay.

She felt drained. Seventeen years of tension.

She’d been afraid too, but now she felt

a small warm feeling deep inside, a tiny

flame flickered. Perhaps she’d have a life,

a future. With her help and input

he wrote this poem. “Don’t show it to anyone,”

she said. “OK,” he said – but from now on

he’d be less frightened by her beautiful tears.

~

SHARED 1

I’m looking back through thickening mists that mask

the past (though they let fear and sadness show).

The longer I look the more I see. I ask

and ask what caused my breakdown, but I know

it’s you who saw me through the worst, and cared,

supported, understood, worked hard, involving

me, the whole horrendous journey shared.

It’s you who bore the brunt of problem-solving

through my five feints at suicide and three

hospital months, and you who sought and found

this house and settled us here. You turned me round,

enabling the impossible, my recovery.

True, I helped all I could, but it was you

who moved that mountain range to get us through.

SHARED 2

Shared understandings truly do connect us,

and through them you help me. And here is one.

The ways our carers scared us early on,

twisting, distorting our childhood-minds, can still affect us

now, and for life, colouring how we live.

Such knowledge, mixed with gentleness, grows wise;

denial makes for trafficking in lies

and blocks the path through anger to forgive.

Between us gleams a placid pool. Though storms

may churn its surface, each storm soon dies down,

a shared peace intervenes (not yours, not mine),

the pool unwrinkles like a fading frown

and, in the time it takes to read this line,

our mirrored landscape magically re-forms.



SHARED 3

I think you really care. The things you do.

The exquisite thought that you put into, say,

choosing the card I got from you today.

Those pine trees, with a full moon shining through

the branches, summon up our shared delight

in the moon’s moods and phases, comings and goings,

and in how different its shy daytime showings

are from its bright assertiveness at night –

a full moon then outshines the lamps of town.

Whoever sees it first summons the other.

Many a waning crescent we’ve watched together,

sinking, as if pulled by the setting sun. 

And once, upon a pre-dawn tinged with red,

we glimpsed a new moon rising, thin as thread.

~

ABOUT THE POEMS: These four poems are from a sequence of twenty called 'Depression: My Recovery'. They were originally written while recovering from a severe mental breakdown that culminated in suicide attempts, two months on a psychiatric ward for severely disturbed elderly patients, and much medication (antidepressant, anti-psychotic, and sleeping tablets). These are the only poems in the sequence which are about my relationship with my then partner, with whom I’d lived for 17 years. I’ve edited them carefully recently, not changing more than a word here and a phrase there, to make them speak more clearly and truthfully. They are substantially the same poems – which were doomed attempts to save a relationship which had been stormy from the start, and was now threatening to come apart completely. We split up and I moved out the following year. 'The Mountain' is tenth in the Depression sequence of 20, and the three 'Shared' sonnets Conclude it.

ABOUT JAMES

"I am age 76 and educated at public school and university (where I studied physics and mathematics). In my first year of life I suffered severe, painful and terrifying abuse at the hands of my father. My mother knew nothing of this as far as I know. News of this abuse came to me for the first time when I was 43, in the form of two vivid “psychological” flashbacks. The abuse continued routinely, unwelcome but painless, until I was 11 years old. As a result, in adulthood I had to endure 50 years of complex post-traumatic stress disorder: two breakdowns, with decades of relative calm before and between, in which I held down a job as an unqualified library assistant at a university library. The second breakdown, which was about 7 years ago, was more severe than the first, and took longer to recover from. However, since that breakdown, my recovery has been extraordinary, and has reached a point, a level of creativity and wellbeing, that I would never have believed possible. However, I don’t think I would have survived at all without a great deal of help from books, friends and therapists."

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