Poetry Thursday - The Onion, Memory by Craig Raine

Divorced, but friends again at last,

we walk old ground together
in bright blue uncomplicated weather.
We laugh and pause
to hack to bits these tiny dinosaurs,
prehistoric, crenelated, cast
between the tractor ruts in mud.

On the green, a junior Douglas Fairbanks,
swinging on the chestnut's unlit chandelier,
defies the corporation spears--
a single rank around the bole,
rusty with blood.
Green, tacky phalluses curve up, romance
A gust--the old flag blazes on its pole.

In the village bakery
the pastry babies pass
from milky slump to crusty cadaver,
from crib to coffin--without palaver.
All's over in a flash,
too silently...

Tonight the arum lilies fold
back napkins monogrammed in gold,
crisp and laundered fresh.
Those crustaceous gladioli, on the sly,
reveal the crimson flower-flesh
inside their emerald armor plate.
The uncooked herrings blink a tearful eye.
The candles palpitate.
The Oistrakhs bow and scrape
in evening dress, on Emi-tape.

Outside the trees are bending over backwards
to please the wind : the shining sword
grass flattens on its belly.
The white-thorn's frillies offer no resistance.
In the fridge, a heart-shaped jelly
strives to keep a sense of balance.

I slice up the onions. You sew up a dress.
This is the quiet echo--flesh--
white muscle on white muscle,
intimately folded skin,
finished with a satin rustle.
One button only to undo, sewn up with shabby thread.
It is the onion, memory,
that makes me cry.

Because there's everything and nothing to be said,
the clock with hands held up before its face,
stammers softly on, trying to complete a phrase--
while we, together and apart,
repeat unfinished festures got by heart.

And afterwards, I blunder with the washing on the line--
headless torsos, faceless lovers, friends of mine. 

Craig Raine

The poem's title was used for Raine's first published book of poetry (1998); he remembers it being panned:

"or more accurately, they said I had previously been over praised and so made the negative case. But no one reading the review knew anything about me being praised, so I was cut down to size before I'd even been built up". 

At this time Roger Fenton coined the label "Martian" and Raine's second book, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, published the following year, got positive corrective reviews, and Raine found himself at the head of a movement associated with making the ordinary strange again through close observation 

So says this article, written just before his retirement from teaching at Oxford. As well as poet and teacher, Raineis also an editor and in 1999 founded the triannual literary magazine Areté, which he still edits.


My discovery of this poem came via one of Alexander McCall Smith's "Isabel Dahousie" novels, which put the words It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry in the mouth of a character who was cutting onions during a domestic scene that was, as so much else in the novel, intercut with ruminations put into the mind of the philosopher heroine in that way that McCall Smith has - which is surely annoying for readers who want him to get on with the plot, and who thereby miss the point - a philosophical novel needs these stop-motion moments.