To All Intents and Purposes
I have struggled all my life to never
write about the pepper mill
its corset shape
of common wood
and secret machinery goings-on
of grinding, grinding kernels down to drift
like ash from a chimney
but now I am lamed in the kitchen
now winter slants a window frosted shut
because it knows I am alone
I find it’s not a paperweight, not even a Christmas rose
in my right hand, but the pepper mill
lifting to my nose like a snuff-box
There is not a breath that doesn’t burn
with the invisible
One spring my father’s father sank a pipe
and gassed the warren
His men with shotguns stood by
every freshly blasted burrow-mouth, taking turns
to roll a smoke
until the sun had set
So many houses
built on ground like this – the offices and factories
and mills where lines of women work a loom
to thread the rotten cloth, rags
across their mouths that let them breathe
and I had not seen until now, I had forgotten
how clear the grain is running through the brown wood
how sly the hourglass shape
and the stamp you are never supposed to read
on the base of the pestle, spinning in the dark drum
Cole & Mason, England –
here is my mother
buying her goods from respectable companies
blowing the dust from a tinned Yule pudding
then putting it back on the shelf
I am holding the mill too tightly, I know
if the man comes now he will think I am one of those
women whose fingers need prising off things
the milkman, the postman
the window-cleaner wanting notes
might find me here
still barefoot in my dressing gown
and breathing down a hot black hum
how the raw side of a coffin smells
how the scorch of a gun would taste
at the rim of the mouth, would burn
on the back of the tongue
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2008. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editors in 2008 were Rosemary Goring and Alan Taylor.
Editors’ comment:
Poems can be written about anything and some of the best have been written about some of the most inconsequential of objects. Has anyone before Frances Leviston focused on a pepper mill? Not to our knowledge. But from now on this commonplace piece of kitchenware will never seem the same. From the domestic it moves by degrees to its final intimation of violence. You will not read a better poised or more disturbing poem this year.
Author’s note:
Like two or three other poems in the collection, Public Dream, to which this poem belongs, ‘To All Intents and Purposes’ begins in the contemplation of an ordinary object – a small wooden pepper mill – and opens outwards from that single point of attention into the larger images and memories that the object invokes. Because of the mill’s shape, and its function as a tiny processor of raw product, I found myself writing about domesticity, about the constricted lives of women, and about a heavy industrial past in which, it seemed, the individual life, especially the life of a factory worker, was not much more than an overhead. In writing such irregular free verse, I had hoped to suggest something of the struggle mentioned by the speaker at the beginning of the poem – the difficulty she experiences in voicing these thoughts to herself – as well as the dreamlike, associative quality of the mind in solitude, ranging freely from past to present, literal to symbolic, and collapsing the distance between.
