The Long Rowing Unto Morning
by Norman Lock

Description

In this, his fifth full-length book, Norman Lock paints the portrait of a lonely everywoman, a plain Jane who spends days pushing a mop and nights drinking tea, sitting her sadness on her elbow “by the window looking out. Out, where all is hurrying over the rainy streets.” Lock paints the portrait of an “old woman with a cracked face” who, as a child, was teased to tears. Now, years later, in the last phase of her life, she is preparing for her own long rowing into death.

Jane lives alone in a room that she calls “mine and locked.” She tells us a secret about “the boy who put his hand on me, then went away never to come back.” She returns to the image of this moment in recollected tranquility, again and again, and it becomes increasingly menacing the more often the refrain is used. But her world wasn’t always so dark and alienating. It could also be quite poetic. This passage from her childhood, the happy part of it, stands on its own as a poem-in-prose.

Excerpt:

After supper we went outside to watch the night. We walked to where the sun went behind the hill. We watched the shadows spill, the birds fly. We felt the night fall. It was a cold shadow falling. It made us quiet. Behind us I saw the windows all on fire, the windows of our house. Suppose some day the house burns down? I thought. What will happen to me then without a house to live in when it’s cold? Without a roof when it rains? No beds to sleep in, no table for our plates? Every night I thought of that. Then the sun sank—it always did—and the fire in the windows went out. The shadows disappeared, the windows died and nothing shone in them until we went back home and lit the lights.