Poem
Helen Mort
THE RORSCHACH TESTS
THE RORSCHACH TESTS
THE RORSCHACH TESTS
ITonight we’re judged by what we fathom
in the unstoked embers of an open fire.
You see livid redcoats, bloodhounds
primed for quarry, you
see the fierce, mute breath of horses.
All I see is the cindered shape
of hare, streaking through flames
to imagined safety.
Between us, we cannot tell who
is gaining ground.
II
Think of windows, opening out,
a sash dividing heat and wilderness.
I’m squinting through, but when I fix
on the treeline, it seems the hillside
has been marching on us
all our lives: scree shifts by increments
each year, rooks are roosting closer
to the doorstep. For all their strength,
the boulders prop their weight
against our hearthstone.
How can I escape
into the wind and light
when it’s at the weatherboard,
getting in?
III
No-one who has seen a cat leap
swift and noiseless up
onto a garden fencepost
can ever think themselves as supple.
Well, I couldn’t pass a child
in the street without feeling aged
I couldn’t overhear a song
without being silenced
and I couldn’t stand at the intersection,
watch the traffic lights go from bronze
to red without knowing
I was trapped. To think of them
still there at midnight,
changing for nobody, deft as cats.
IV
There is an artist, far from here,
who renders shoes as mussel shells.
If a shoe can so entirely seem
an object from the deep
then how am I to know my face
from its own reflected alabaster?
Some nights I look behind me,
back into the old French doors
and can’t be sure which way
I’m turning; into the room,
or out into the black,
accepting glass.
© 2008, Helen Mort
Publisher: First published on PIW,
This poem was highly commended in the 2008 Writers Inc competition and will appear in their Writers-of-the-Year Anthology 2008, to be published late 2008.
Publisher: First published on PIW,
Helen Mort
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1985)
Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985. As a child, she loved language in general and poetry in particular and can’t remember a time when she wasn’t trying to write poetry, including dictating “an incoherent poem about trains” to her mum whilst at primary school. Although “not sure where the urge to write came from”, the sounds of words entranced her. She particularly delighted in “the way so...
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THE RORSCHACH TESTS
ITonight we’re judged by what we fathom
in the unstoked embers of an open fire.
You see livid redcoats, bloodhounds
primed for quarry, you
see the fierce, mute breath of horses.
All I see is the cindered shape
of hare, streaking through flames
to imagined safety.
Between us, we cannot tell who
is gaining ground.
II
Think of windows, opening out,
a sash dividing heat and wilderness.
I’m squinting through, but when I fix
on the treeline, it seems the hillside
has been marching on us
all our lives: scree shifts by increments
each year, rooks are roosting closer
to the doorstep. For all their strength,
the boulders prop their weight
against our hearthstone.
How can I escape
into the wind and light
when it’s at the weatherboard,
getting in?
III
No-one who has seen a cat leap
swift and noiseless up
onto a garden fencepost
can ever think themselves as supple.
Well, I couldn’t pass a child
in the street without feeling aged
I couldn’t overhear a song
without being silenced
and I couldn’t stand at the intersection,
watch the traffic lights go from bronze
to red without knowing
I was trapped. To think of them
still there at midnight,
changing for nobody, deft as cats.
IV
There is an artist, far from here,
who renders shoes as mussel shells.
If a shoe can so entirely seem
an object from the deep
then how am I to know my face
from its own reflected alabaster?
Some nights I look behind me,
back into the old French doors
and can’t be sure which way
I’m turning; into the room,
or out into the black,
accepting glass.
THE RORSCHACH TESTS
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