This is the News

Rose Ruane

I have slept and I have woken,
watched the weather come from elsewhere,
seen the sun arrive to cross the flags outside, have
watched the evening fold the light hours up,
then carry them off –

and I was
left in shade – a shadow, standing
still
behind the same window:

my face, an apparition,
doubled and reflected
once the lamps behind are lit.

Spectre and flesh eliding:
birds are travelling through it,
to their nests and yet –

this is still my face

a great shame
viewed from either side of the glass.

Regardless, I am waiting, now, for
nothing more than dinner hour,
for bedtime, breakfast and tomorrow:
for the same day to repeat itself –

the same days to repeat themselves,
each one neat: as finished as a bead.

But this is the news; the news is spring is coming –

I have detected its promise in the light.
Less slender now. Some heft to it.
A touch.

The animal in ourselves has such a hunger for beginnings,
Even though it is built to end.
And there is hope –

always,
there is hope;

some tenderness beneath the cicatrix,
certain rays which turn the scar into a bud,
yes, spring is coming as it always does –

and this is the news:
everything which has been, always is,
and of course there is a God because
who else would place death inside creatures
who have so much love for living –

which
goes on regardless, the body still demands
the ordinary gifts of food and water,

in spite of what the mind refuses.

And the days come, the days go and the seasons, and
my old life, thrums

elsewhile and
otherwhere

unseen traffic on a distant road,
daily less moulded to my absence
just as each dropped stitch in knitting
pulls the garment out of shape, but

there is nothing to fear but the fear going,
becoming still in the jaws of this:
certain kinds of patience are a death
or overgrowth, the closing of a road

home. The blackthorn will be flowering soon
loyal piss stink, blossoms;
white as missed first tooth or
a veil before it’s lifted.

And this is the news:

I am the living spirit, keeping the faith
and keeping the faith, and keeping the faith,
and holding it all, believing that
my life will return to me like
a hawk to a gloved fist –

tamed but with a wild heart still
Yes, this is the news –

the news is the I am still myself,
in spite of all attempts to cure me of it.

Commentary

My archival extract was a 1913 edition of the patient magazine produced at the Asylum, The Gartnavel Gazette. While I experimented with ways of employing it directly in the work, I found its air of authority alienating. I was more interested in how an individual’s experience of being compelled to live at the hospital might have felt, and so dislocated the work from a specific time period to explore ideas of what might constitute news within a confined and repetitive daily life during any era, such as small acts of noticing changes in weather and nature, including veiled reference to the progress of a missed home life.

[Edition of The Gartnavel Gazette from 1913, HB13/2/178]