Small Female Skull
Carol Ann Duffy
With some surprise, I balance my small female skull in my hands.
What is it like? An ocarina? Blow in its eye.
It cannot cry, holds its breath only as long as I exhale,
mildly alarmed now, into the hole where the nose was,
press my ear to its grin. A vanishing sigh.For some time, I sit on the lavatory seat with my head
in my hands, appalled. It feels much lighter than I’d thought;
the weight of a deck of cards, a slim volume of verse,
but with something else, as though it could levitate. Disturbing.
So why do I kiss it on the brow, my warm lips to its papery bone,and take it to the mirror to ask for a gottle of geer?
I rinse it under the tap, watch dust run away, like sand
from a swimming cap, then dry it — firstborn — gently
with a towel. I see the scar where I fell for sheer love
down treacherous stairs, and read that shattering day like braille.Love, I murmur to my skull, then, louder, other grand words,
shouting the hollow nouns in a white-tiled room.
Downstairs they will think I have lost my mind. No. I only weep
into these two holes here, or I’m grinning back at the joke, this is
a friend of mine. See, I hold her face in trembling, passionate hands.
Small Female Skull by Carol Ann Duffy reached my hands during a workshop on research writing. We were to read the poem and respond to it critically. I looked at it “with some surprise”. Women, someone in my discussion group said, are said to have smaller skulls than men. Or so the sciences claim. She opined that this is a feminist poem. My thoughts aligned with hers for the purpose of the discussion, but took its own route as I meandered through the poem.
“I balance my small skull in my hands”. The speaker in the poem seemed to me to have taken the advice of Derek Walcott in Love After Love, welcoming herself. To look at oneself from outside could be an act of self-reflexivity or a case of narcissism. She wonders what the skull looks like. Probably, an ocarina. A wind instrument with several holes and one to blow through to create music. This creates a startling image of a sad music. But as she looks at it, she realises that the skull is beyond despair. What remains is a grin to which the speaker presses her ears.
The speaker is confined to the space of a lavatory where she sits and weighs her skull in her hand. It is disturbingly light, as light as a volume of poetry. It seems to have a sense of something more, something that makes her want to befriend it. A quality that makes her feel like it is levitating. A quality of lightness which persuades her to take it to the mirror, to kiss it, and to offer a “gottle of geer”. She seems to be finding in herself a person that she could identify with and call a friend. An instance of self-realisation and realisation of independence. May be, a beer with herself is all she needs.
What she does is wash it carefully, treating it like her firstborn. She washes and dries the skull and as her fingers run through it, it shows to her all the scars that she has accumulated, especially the one from when she “fell for sheer love / down treacherous stairs”. She reads these scars in braille, for she was blinded by love. She feels a sense of disillusionment at the world that has hurt her. As she takes care of herself, she realises that she was blinded by love, by the people around her, and by the world as a whole. She withdraws into herself. She becomes the friend and the firstborn. She learns to love herself.
“Love,” she calls out, along with many “other grand words.” She is increasingly aware of her confinement in the “white tiled room” where “the hollow nouns” echo. Those people “downstairs” might have started to think that she lost her mind. But it is not how it is. What has happened is she has started to talk to herself, to be content with herself. It does not matter what the people downstairs think and that ought to disturb them. By now, she is in on the joke that the skulls grin to, and she has joined in. She has attained a sense of peace and fullness that brims and spills into the sphere of passion. She has possibly learned to love herself in all possible ways — emotionally and physically — and all within her confines and without worrying about the world.
