Four Poems After Paula Rego's Jane Eyre Drawings, by Margaret Moores

Girl Reading at a Window

after Girl Reading at Window
 
I was no beauty as a child.  
 
I was always cold. I wore handknitted woollen jumpers, their sleeves lumpy with sodden handkerchiefs, over scratchy pleated skirts. Long grey socks pulled up over my knees did little to warm my feet and legs.
 
A window seat hidden by red curtains — cold lick of glass against my cheek. The bitter smell of old ashes in an empty grate and mildew from the foxed pages of a seldom opened book. 
 
Condensation obscured a view of the garden and my father’s rhododendrons. When I tired of my book, I drew on the windows with my finger, transforming frosted lawns and dark foliage into dripping vignettes of frozen wastelands. 
 
There was no possibility of taking a walk in this or any other shrubbery.

**

Loving Bewick

after  Loving Bewick
 
I would read whatever I pulled from the bookcase, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. 
 
Two books came to my hand again and again. My mother’s childhood fairy tale book — its dark woodcuts, lost children, terrifying beasts. Cruelty, burnings. My father’s souvenir of the Tower of London. Gold and jewels, hangings, beheadings, torture chambers. The pulsing mystery of a world behind red curtains.
 
The pelican was believed to nurture its young with its own blood. With Bewick’s History of British Birds on my knee, I was then happy: happy in my way.  Its weight like a great bird paddling its feet, cat-like, on my knees.  My hand on its back. Feathers, warmth. Mouth.

**

La Ligue des Rats

after La Ligue des Rats
 
You could hear rustling in the roof sometimes. Scurrying footfalls. In the evening, the cat perched on the back of the couch staring up at the ceiling as if it were observing, telepathically, a rambunctious meeting of rat delegates. When I was outside the house, I sometimes saw a brown body and tail disappear into the tradescantia and ginger plant that had overwhelmed the boggy lower garden. My nights were disturbed by dreams of rats on the windowsill watching me sleep and an enormous cat with a rat in its mouth.  One morning, a tiny, clawed foot and a piece of tail on the front door mat.  
 
I had learned to recite La Fontaine’s “La Ligue des Rats” when I was ten years old.  I wore my best dress and declaimed with gestures. No one watching me that day was impressed, despite the soft light of candles in the room. Although I knew what it meant, my accent was wrong. The cat’s unblinking stare unnerved me.

**

Up the Tree

after Up the Tree
 
I am often not very tranquil in my mind as if I were a stone upon which a hand was continuously drawing then erasing, drawing then erasing. Colours wash over borders and seep through my clothes. Nothing sticks for long and even then, images coalesce and blur.
 
A gravel road winds through scrubby trees and gorse interspersed with blackberry on damp corners—drops of purple and black. The farmer’s gate—crosshatched posts and bars. A splash of green for long damp grass leading to the macrocarpa that I see from my bedroom window. Sheep have worn a bare patch around its trunk, their droppings mixed with shards of brown glass, cigarette butts, and what I once thought were shreds of pearl-coloured balloons.
 
All the girls tuck their skirts into their knickers to hang upside down from the jungle gym. Burning metal rails on a hot day, our shadows flying across the concrete underneath. Up the tree, my skirts billowing around my knees, I can see the red tile roof of the house, the glint of my bedroom window and a flash of scarlet from my father’s rhododendrons.
 
Smoke wakes me every night. When I open the curtains, the dark bulk of the hill I once climbed is fringed with flickers of red and orange. All the lovely colours. Figures stand in the street shouting while the foliage of the macrocarpa streams like hair against the flames. Each morning, its black fingered skeleton is etched behind my eyes.
  
Margaret Moores
​
Note: Some ideas, lines and phrases in these poems are derived from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

Margaret Moores is a prose poet and flash fiction writer from Aotearoa New Zealand whose work has been anthologised in print and in online journals. She has a PhD in Creative Writing in which she investigated how the invention of photography has contributed to modern ekphrasis. She has been a bookseller for many years, and with her husband owns Poppies Books, a small independent bookshop in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.