Other people’s parties

by Martyn Crucefix — our Friday Poem on 25/10/2024

This poem perfectly evokes the need to get out, get away, leave behind the hurly burly and the chattering world. Crucefix pokes gentle fun at those party conversations, and those party people, then takes us by the hand and leads us out, out into a private, simpler space. This is what poetry, at its best, can do.

Other people’s parties

I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked out of
     them, not even making my excuses. That we’re apart
          from all other things, he says, the mythos
of the individuated self, she says, she gave birth
     to a full-grown woman, when she was already
          fifty-three. In the far kitchen, along the hallway,
outside the bathroom, the eavesdropped fragments
     of other people’s conversations, often more interesting
          than the slow plod of your own with the man
wearing a blue neckerchief. A clicking in her womb,
     unmistakably, how it felt. Pulling the blue door,
          the cream door, the apartment door,
the church hall door, gently to, and turning then

into the lovely falling rain, or with a glance at Orion
     in the night sky, the length of a suburban street
          with its privet hedges. She had spent the whole day
on her own birthday cake, glueing it together with sweet
     chocolate paste, each baked and carefully sliced bar
          of light sponge, in vividly different colours, laid side
by side, then entombed in icing to create a variegated
     surprise when cut. Even from my own birthday party,
          the noise swelling within, I turned from the door
and took hold of your hand and we headed out,
     along roads we named, to our own déjeuner sur l’herbe,
          where we were fortunate, finding children playing.

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Martyn Crucefix‘s most recent collection, Between a Drowning Man, is published by Salt (2023). His Duino Elegies (Enitharmon, 2006) was shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation. Other recent publications include Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019) and These Numbered Days, poems by Peter Huchel (Shearsman, 2019) which won the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, 2020. Translations of essays by Lutz Seiler, In Case of Loss, was published by And Other Stories in 2023. A major Rilke Selected, Change Your Life, has just been published by Pushkin Press in 2024. Until recently he was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The British Library. He blogs here.