Like most things in my life, I only get round to making a major change when I’m more or less forced into it by some outside intervention. In this case, it was having double-glazing installed in my lovely little writing room – not just the door and the big window overlooking the garden but also the French windows that we’d never opened in the twenty years since having this room added to the back of the house.

So most of today and all yesterday, I’ve been rearranging everything in this room. It opens onto the garden and is full of light on sunny days, so, with the doors and windows open it almost felt like being outside.

I hadn’t realised quite how long this would take me, and once I’d piled up all my books from the three bookcases onto the floor and every other available surface, I had to carry on. And it wasn’t just the books. The knee-hole desk I’m sitting at now has nine small drawers, and the tiny table I was using as a desk , also has a drawer, and then I’ve got a large carved camphor wood chest, and all these were crammed with accumulated papers and other odds and ends that had to be sifted and sorted.

I feel very pleased with myself now that it’s all finished, but I do regret not being able to catch up on other things I wanted to do, such as writing a post about R.J.Ellory’s inspiring talk to Bookcrossers on Friday night at Hudson’s – but that will have to wait.

Meanwhile, here’s my poem of the week:

Preservation

His mother’s fur coat sleeps under their bed.
Each night she listens as another stitch
that binds those skins together snaps.

Now sun slants in between the blinds
jostles motes of dust, and something
like a boulder is worked loose.

This is a poem that I first wrote at least seven years ago and was published in my small collection, Single Travellers. In spite of it also winning a place in the Ragged Raven Anthology, Writing on Water, (2005) I’d never been quite satisfied by that version (see below) so I’ve spent the last hour chopping and changing it. At the moment, I think this version is more effective, but when I read it again tomorrow,
I’m very likely to want to make other changes. (I’ve just read it again, and am not sure what I think now!)

I’d be very interested in your comments about these two versions.

Preservation

There’s barely room to navigate the decades of newsprint,
calcified narratives stacked on the carpet like
dry-stone walls. Does he believe

they can shore up the present? Beneath accretions of
photos and bric-a-brac, the clenched piano
is choking back old tunes.

Her mother-in-law’s fur coat sleeps under their bed.
At night, lying above those stitched-together
skins, she feels them stir.

Years back, on the edge of Lovers’ Leap, he
told her about limestone crags, billions of
fossils from aeons ago.

Now she’s found them on the net, sea-lilies,
feather stars, swaying and feeding in tropical seas.
All that life!

Sun edges in through smears of condensation,
its slanting shafts jostled with motes of…dust, is it?
or particles of

something more ingrained, intangible,
worked loose at last
from the boulder in her throat

1. H Says:
   September 23rd, 2009 at 10:24 pm

   Chris

   Stick with the original. It has your usual scent of something intangible and lovely.

2. admin Says:
   September 23rd, 2009 at 10:47 pm

   Thanks for your interest, H
   At the moment I prefer the version I’ve just posted, but I’ll probably change my mind again after a week or two.

   I should stop messing with old poems,and make time for writing new ones!

3. Serial Killers and a great raconteur | ChristineColeman.net Says:
   October 30th, 2009 at 12:02 am

   [...] briefly mentioned R J Ellory a couple of times since I first heard him speak at a gathering of Bookcrossers in September but never seemed to get time to write about his novel, A Quiet Belief in [...]

4. Interviews, Publishing and a Lost October | ChristineColeman.net Says:
   November 5th, 2010 at 9:21 pm

   [...] I blame the accumulation of clutter in our house over the last two decades. I could stand it no longer and embarked on a frenzied clearout that could not be completed methodically, step by step. What was done in room A, would affect Room B, and room C had to be half emptied, to make space for refugee pieces of essential items that were banished from room D . And so on, from mild untidiness to chaos, then utter chaos and eventually, after several trips to charity shops and the municipal tip, to soothing order. Phew! I was able to draw breath, and after producing a couple of passable poems to ease my creative famine, I turned to my neglected blog and started browsing some of the headlines on my daily updates from the on-line Bookseller. Poetry and clearouts were combined several months ago here in the post [...]