Ivy Leaves
His hands were shaped into ivy leaves
that climbed up the tree, camouflage
for its inner rings, tickling the light.
Horse chestnut buds had given them
a stickiness which the rains could not
wash off. Touch them, he said.
He played games in the June garden,
named himself a bee, gold-striped:
a worker coming at her secret flower.
She had to open her petals, one
by one, even if it hurt. He would
make her queen of the princesses
she’d read about, would pretend
his body was a palace, hive-white.
He would paint faraway jungles
on her back if she’d take off her dress.
All the trees undressed, he said,
at the summer’s end and didn’t care
who was looking. His fingers turned
into bunches of sweet peas. She could
squeeze them for their scent, he said.
Bottles were waiting: red, blue,
yellow in the greenhouse, and cacti
that would make her shriek and shiver.
He pressed his face against hers.
Grafting, he called it. He did it
all the time. Only later did she recall
the earwigs and woodlice under the glass
while the green hands of ivy clung
to her nakedness and would not let go.
In her latest collection, Rockabye, Patricia McCarthy explores family and sexual relationships, finding both the bright fruit and the rotten. Her reach extends from the personal to the public, and the collection is dedicated to those women who have suffered domestic violence (in journalistic shorthand, “battered women”), especially in its poisonous intersections with sexual abuse. Rockabye focuses justifiably on the female sufferers: the poem that generates the collection’s title, Rockabye Grandfather, tells a terrible personal story in rhythms of insurmountable mourning: “Up to me to rockabye, rockabye rock, long ago / on the broken bough the baby that did fall.” But there are loving male portraits here, too, and disturbing reminders that “intimate partner violence” may bind as well as wound.
Ivy Leaves solves the difficulty of writing about paedophilia by keeping close to the point of view of the child in question: while cast as a third-person narrative, the voice is convincingly juvenile, with minimal adult perspective. At the same time, it avoids the faux naive, and the simple vocabulary is enriched with remembered words and phrases used by the abuser: “He pressed his face against hers. / Grafting, he called it. / He did it all the time.”
What is striking and subtle in the poem is the ambiguity created by the “natural” setting. The garden may be post-lapsarian but it’s still a garden, and, if partly metaphorical, its features are conveyed with unexaggerated realism.
The essential brutality of the experience is first evoked in the second stanza (“She had to open her petals, / one by one, even if it hurt”) and while this is unforgettable, it’s also absorbed into the narrative and the child’s unquestioning transition between her different sensations. The stickiness of the man’s hands in the first stanza is attributed to the horse chestnut buds (“sticky buds” as children call them) and when the child is invited to touch them, we may shudder, but the child has no reason to. Ivy leaves furled around a tree look harmlessly pretty, although the plant can sometimes kill the tree, a fact hinted – but only hinted – in the reference to the “inner rings”. These may represent the child’s own developmental stages, now disturbed and “camouflaged”.
The next stanza, with its bee imagery, takes on a playful, ritualistic quality. The abuser seems to be a shape-shifter, and even seduces his own imagination with a self-transforming narrative, a reminder of the troubling propensity of gods to become rapists on a whim. He “named himself a bee, gold-striped” and, for a moment, the danger seems inlaid with figures and symbols of ancient bee mythology.
As readers, we’re so completely inside the child’s perception that we’re still watching, with the child, the magical possibility in the abuser’s dangerous promises of metamorphosis. Much of his behaviour so far remains speculative, fantasised: he “would pretend / his body was a palace”, “would paint faraway jungles”. There will be no loss of natural connection, he implies, but rather an intensification. Trees “undress”, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Seemingly permitted her own agency, the child is encouraged to squeeze his fingers, now changed unnervingly to “bunches of sweet peas”.
When the narrative moves into the greenhouse, the bottles are read by their bright colours rather than their labels. They may contain toxic substances, but what terrifies the child (at last we meet her terror) are the cacti. If the man teases or hurts her with the plants, we’re not told about it. Again, the perception of brutality is oblique; this time, even at the moment of violation, it’s filtered through the vision of the tiny trapped insects. Does the child imagine that other children before her have been turned into these insects?
A further mythical connection the poem makes is with the Green Man, a pagan figure associated with fertility, but sometimes demonic. The “green hands of ivy” that “clung / to her nakedness and would not let go” are rooted in the past, and, of course, connect the child permanently to an experience she cannot let go.
The poem’s effectiveness as an account of personal trauma is not compromised by these broader anthropological undertones. Nature is often a positive and healing force in McCarthy’s work. Ivy Leaves subverts that convention with a different insight – that nature is intrinsically part of the problem.
