My husband falling

Time trips you like a pavement,
says I’ll show you what falling’s for.
It’s a stony lesson — cuts to lip
and wrist and knee, where skin
meets slabs.

The solicitude of women,
a man’s joke about brandy, your
younger husband lifting you,
using both hands to balance
your weight, raise you to your
feet, ensure you stand upright
again, planted in your shoes
as if falling becomes improbable,
though time might be riding to
trip you once more, chiding you
to steady yourself, slow down.

What are hands for but to save you
from falling? What are cuts for
but to show why blood travels
under your skin? See how quickly
falling proves our fragility,
precious as breath, as gold.

This week’s poem is from the first part of Robert Hamberger’s latest collection Nude Against a Rock. The love poems that make up this series, My Husband Sings, frequently take the shape of a sonnet; written with warmth, tenderness and unobtrusive skill, they often explore moments of vulnerability. My Husband Falling names the major culprit, Time. Not a sonnet, it lets the narrative find an appropriate three-part form of its own.

In the opening assertion – “Time trips you like a pavement” – the context (the pavement on which the fall occurs) is suggested by the simile which foregrounds the impersonal destructive force and its “stony lesson”. Time, pavement-like, doesn’t seem to care at this point about the person it hits. Later, in the second stanza, time becomes a more genial figure: although “riding to / trip you once more” the subsequent rhyme introduces a mollifying note of concern: “chiding you / to steady yourself, slow down.” At this point in the narrative, the “younger husband”, presumably the poem’s speaker, has succeeded in helping his partner to his feet, and restoring the physical and emotional balance. There are lines where the enjambment is delicately effective in suggesting tentativeness, a certain wobble: “your / feet”, “upright / again”.

For the speaker, the perspective has changed: the hardness of the “slabs”, a word freighted with mortality, has been set at a distance. The female passers-by have expressed “solicitude”, a man has made light-hearted comments: this is the “straight” social context but it is benign. The speaker’s husband is “upright” and safe physically. The words of “chiding” that warn him “to steady yourself, slow down” seem likely to echo the speaker’s own.

The rhetorical questions and their answers in the third stanza aid the psychological restabilising needed and are preparation for the concept of “fragility” with which the poem concludes. The speaker’s hands, it seems, have failed in their purpose, if that was to save the husband from falling, but, it’s implied, they will be quicker and readier in future. The “cuts” which were so painfully registered in lines three to five are given different significance by the answer to the question as to what they’re for: they exist “to show why blood travels / under your skin”. Blood here seems to represent energy, erotic pleasure and healing. The poem has, in effect, over-balanced the threat of time and ageing that dominated the first stanza, and now gives the protection of proven “fragility” a special emphasis. Both husbands are included in the pronoun “our” in “our fragility”: the damage of the “stony lesson” which has been averted is a potentially shared one, part of the physical ageing that is integral to a long-term relationship. The “gold” which is placed alongside “breath” in the poem’s last line points to the ring which each man wears, evoked in another poem in the series, the sonnet New Gold. They compare rings and the sonnet ends: “We place / our hands together to compare, to show/ how the years etch rings and skin. We face / whatever comes (old romantics, husbands now) like the first night I found you, felt your voice.”

Hamberger’s collection is named after the painting by Keith Vaughan, Nude Against a Rock, and closes with a series of poems exploring Vaughan’s work in connection with the inner life recorded in his journals.