False Poltergeist

Something happened over the past few days. Earlier last week, I went to the shower and it froze me. I played the whole self-deceit act of hanging the arm under the stream, waiting for it to heat, though it never did. The next day it still froze me, though I could make it through without masking hisses beneath the sound of the cascade. By degrees, stadially, it worked up a kind of warmth, not as my arm hung, but over a course of days, until frigid went to cold to tepid to something like warm.

Helen Mort said that poems start with a "haunting": "I’m visited by an idea that won’t go away and I often carry it around for months. The shapes of poems seem to bother me. And like the glimpses you describe, they always stay somewhere just out of reach. The best poem is always the one you’re nearly-but-not-quite writing."

I suppose this is relevant because whenever I stood at the edge of the shower, pretending it would resolve into heat, I would keep getting ideas for poems, in the way you do with ideas when you have no means of keeping them. The first few times I was too slow, and they threaded out of existence. I had no pen in the bathroom, no paper, and the thought would have left me by the time I retrieved any. So instead I had the idea of writing in the deliquescence of vapour that formed on the mirror while the shower steamed up (by this point it was verging on warm). But the problem was, over the course of the shower, I completely forgot about it. Left the room scrubbing my head with a towel, not glimpsing the lines I'd fingerpainted on the glass.

But of course the marks stayed, stains, coming into sight again only when the shower misted the room up. You can imagine that it was a start, seeing them again, as though for the first time, as though they had written themselves, as though a ghost had left them (for me? for them? for anyone?), formed out of air and water into a strange space of un-air and un-water, un-lines nothing like ink that the mist clung around. And the fact is I still don't remember having drawn those notes, that's just the assumption I formed, spending soaked minutes ennunciated by drips, staring past my reflection into those lines I (must have) left there. Because even if I think I recall that writing, I can't sever it from my imagining that recollection. Like a broken shower waking you up - except these only put you to sleep - false memories are a pain, and yet such a constitutive pain.