Lizard [A Poem by Martha Close]

Each morning, strobed in the flicker of the kitchen light

It speeds a steep slalom up the wall above the sink,

This fir-cone fat one dislodges dust and air and

Its firm tail flails a hectic pulse to its lair behind the fridge.

Then once, deep in a bag of biscuits that I ate without a plate

I saw it seeing me. Its defiant, guiltless,

Sugar-sated eyes are dry; fearless, but unblinking still.

In its throat a muddy vein throbs through watery skin,

As it gulps and grips and sets to squirm.

Its unwitting trespass sickens me, makes me take tongs

And lift, still bagged, the lumbering live-ness.

Feel it clutch and heave and fight. Does it howl as I toboggan it,

Bag and biscuits all, down the long garbage slide?

This is a terrific poem, written by someone with sharp powers of observation, who has either an affinity with DH Lawrence and Ted Hughes, or an acquaintance with their poems about animals. I once spent a day trying to write about a lizard, and got nowhere near the accuracy of this inscape, which focuses on physical details, seen close-up: "Its firm tail flails a hectic pulse"; "In its throat a muddy vein throbs through watery skin". I love the sound-patterns in the poem: the alliterative trio of 's' sounds in 'speeds a steep slalom'; the pairs of 'g' and 's' sounds in 'gulps and grips and sets to squirm.' Is the writer thinking of Lawrence's snake, when he describes the lizard's "unwitting trespass" and its undignified tobogganing down the garbage slide? There is no spelling-out of the speaker's guilt, as there is in 'Snake'. But the phrase "lumbering live-ness" and the question "Does it howl?" leave us disturbed by this sudden, violent rejection of a creature whose habits have been so patiently observed.

Review by Lucy Newlyn


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