Poem Of The Week: Being Present By Rory Waterman

Being Present

Not every night, but most, when I call,
and you haven’t remembered what we’ve talked about,
I go on loop to see the half-hour out:
‘So, did you listen to the footy?’ ‘No’ –
surprise in your voice – ‘no, somehow I forgot.’
‘What’s been on the radio? What was dinner?’
You rarely know the answers. Or the questions.
Or that you’ve known the things that keep you there.

But lacking heart, or having one, or both,
I keep to tiny talk – or tinier talk:
the sound of breath, yours chafing against mine,
until ‘I’m tired now, son. Good night.’ Tomorrow,
Dad, we’ll do this again for the first time.
It won’t grow old. It won’t have even begun.

Rory Waterman is not the first poet to get to grips with the relentless erosion of dementia. This increasingly visible marker of the modern condition – that functioning bodies sometimes ‘outlive’ cerebral coherence – makes a terrible irony of burgeoning longevity. If Tony Harrison’s long, televised poem Black Daisies for the Bride performed, from the perspective of a mental hospital in the final stages of decline, a tangential ministry of elegy to his own long-dead parents, then South African poet Finuala Dowling ‘squeezed’ something beyond love into the ‘stone’ of memory, to create a series of poems in homage to her mother. Fully rounded, witheringly honest, Dowling found a humour that is counter-intuitive in a landscape of occlusion and retreat (Pretend You Don’t Know Me).

‘Being Present’ is an apposite and double-edged title for a poem about cognitive decline: ‘being present’, in the sense of ensuring one’s availability at a time of great need; and ‘being present’ as an indicator of cognitive awareness – both meld into re-negotiable meaning as circumstances change, and the architecture of cerebral function shifts gradually between presence and absence.

Waterman’s artfully constructed sonnet is rendered a paradox by the process of deconstruction it describes. And yet, in the passage of an octave and a sestet, he finds the means to secure a kind of tenure, a means of accord that is predicated upon abandoning the futility of reason to the wilderness of ‘tiny talk’. And if the consequent silence yields little beyond thin comfort, there is salvation in the poetry of its shared peace:

‘the sound of breath, yours chafing against mine’.

The ‘chafing’ need not indicate an antagonism; if father and son are ‘juxtaposed’, then a temporary, uneasy harmony provides respite from the continual misunderstandings and mental blanknesses that embody the father figure’s condition. Waterman’s closing lines are beautifully drawn: resolving to repeat the exercise of reorientation for as long as it confers reassurance, the poet remains stoical as he acknowledges the inexorable dissolution of temporal locators into Groundhog Day:

‘It won’t grow old. It won’t have even begun.’

‘Being Present’ is taken from Come Here To This Gate, published by Carcanet (2024), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of publisher and author.

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