The Poetry Room

The Fourth Man

Obliged to live in three men's homes,
she watched and learned
and chose her fourth man carefully.

The first, a towering, thin-lipped bully,
film star-handsome, pale-eyed, blond,
vainly bought her white fur coats,
velvet dresses, dainty shoes,
between rages, called her 'Dorothy',
because it means 'a gift from God'
and taught her vigilance till, fleeing the accusing
bruises on his turned-worm wife
and taking all their money,
he rid his thoughtful infant daughter of himself for good.

She washed up in a shoreside terraced
cottage, sheltered from the storms,
fostered by a Cornishman, uneducated, church-mouse poor,
whose black eyes twinkled with the wisdom of the good.
He called her 'My Cockles', took her fishing.
Dipping in his seas and rivers rinsing herself of dread,
she began to plan her kind of man, aged seven.

She was rescued from this haven by her mother,
newly mismarried to a blear-eyed drunk,
an alcoholic unconfessed,
whose cure proved very temporary.
He called her 'M'Wench'.
His charm when sober was perhaps
some compensation for
the vomit and the violence,
the limiting and pitiless, enduring penury.

She waited till full grown.

Her fourth home is a silky place
of rapture, interest, tenderness.
She shares it with a grey-eyed man
who makes her laugh, who feeds the birds,
who looks up from his book at her and calls her wife.

Dorothy Pope