Missing You
Did you know the moon was so old
It might have to go into a home?
It keeps edging nearer
The way old people do.
Goya wore candles on his hat
But Humphrey Davy invented the miner’s lamp.
On Enceladus a day is longer than a year.
Tonight, we have the Spanish Civil War.
You can’t go on like this, moon,
Peering into people’s bedrooms
And the stars have their own lives to lead.
When did you last think of Cassiopeia? Really? Think!
You must pull yourself together, moon.
You say you remember things.
What can you remember?
It’s embarrassing. You think you’re all right.
Only yesterday you put rice crispies in the fridge.
What’s going to happen next?
If your hand trembles, sit on it. Wipe your mouth.
Skittering about. When did you have a decent job?
Your voice is like a nervous cough.
You must pull yourself together
And shut the door if you can’t sing in tune.
Your eyes look like two catacombs
And make me think of furnished rooms.
We’ve heard enough of Grandad’s work in Leeds.
Your eyes look like abandoned creeds.
Miles Burrows, born in Leicester in 1936, published his first collection with Cape when he was around 30. In the succeeding decades he worked in various countries and practised medicine before his more subversive vocation was celebrated by Carcanet’s 2017 publication of Waiting for the Nightingale. It was followed by a Collected Poems, Take us the Little Foxes, in 2021.
This week’s poem, Missing You, is from Burrows’ latest volume, Slow Puncture. It’s related to one of the new poems in the Collected, Remonstrating with the Moon, expanded now with additional “characters” and a focus on the sheer savagery of western social attitudes towards ageing. Like much of Burrows’ work, and important to the pleasure of engaging with it, it presents readers with a bizarre but far from unreal theatrical scene, and insists we stage it in our own imaginations.
Missing You seems to gather together a family conference on “what to do” about a very senior relative, who is imagined, cruelly and comically, both as moon and person. As the lights go up, one character whispers resonantly to another “Did you know the moon was so old / It might have to go into a home?” The moon-person, on-stage (it’s fun to imagine the costume and the antics), represents non-personhood, and may be assumed not to overhear these words. As the poem’s title suggests, there is a “you” who is “missing”, as well as a “you” that is missed.
In the second couplet I imagine a second voice, raised in corroboration with the first, only to expose an ignorance of lunar fact. The moon-person is imagined to be “edging nearer / The way old people do.” The actual moon, however, is yearly increasing its distance from planet Earth. I’d go further in the dramatisation, and suggest the moon-person is given a speaking part in the next two couplets, tossing random facts together, as if remembering some important information from its specialism, lighting. Art, science and one of the moons of Saturn, Enceladus, are illuminated briefly in cheery non sequiturs.
Missing You is a macrocosm of one of Burrows’ favourite devices: the joke and its dismantling. Moon-person’s listed failings include the innocent moon-habit of “Peering into people’s bedrooms” and the harmless practice of storing “rice crispies” in the fridge. But the fun dissipates, and there’s a steadily hardening impatience and anger. This phase of the poem could be expressed as a Greek chorus of unanimous disapproval.
The intensifying re-characterisation takes apart the Romantic, or romantically decadent, moons of poetry. This moon is increasingly recognisable as an ageing human body, marked by forgetfulness, hand-tremor, the habit of “skittering about”, the voice “like a nervous cough”. Polite concealment is urgently required. The moon-person in the meantime has begun singing horribly, intending to drown out the repeated commands to “pull yourself together”. It may have begun to feel strangely liberated by the fragmentation of its identity, and the limitless antisocial possibilities revealed.
Its face at the end of the poem reminded me faintly of Sylvia Plath’s moon imagery in The Moon and the Yew Tree. Burrows redoubles the bone-cold bleakness, an effect produced from the similes themselves, and the reiteration of the end-rhymes: “Your eyes look like two catacombs / And make me think of furnished rooms”. “Catacombs” and “furnished rooms” evoke mismatch and connection between echoing hollowness and stifling clutter; both suggest extremes of isolation and human invisibility. Most of us, if we’re like the middle-class characters in Burrows’ satire, will leave furnished rooms behind us when we die.
Not all humour has yet drained away. The first line of the last couplet is funny, because “Grandad’s work in Leeds” still cooperates with the oddity of a moon that’s also a person – one proud, it seems, of its working-class roots. But the return in the final line to eyes “like abandoned creeds” is frankly grim. It seems to echo the reference to the Spanish civil war (line eight), which, according to the adjusted calendar of Enceladus, the speaker had decided would be happening about now: “Tonight we have the Spanish Civil War”. The relatives are making war on the moon-person, but they’re moon-people too, their dreams and creeds ephemeral, betrayed by the unavoidable negligence of dying.
If Missing You plunges at times into fury and gloom, Slow Puncture is a happy reminder of what a rare satirical and self-mocking talent Burrows deploys. He can be heard inimitably introducing himself and reading from his Collected Poems here.
