My name is Podrigotumma and one of the things I love about poetry is that I can speak to you at different ages of your life.

There's poems I've loved since I was a child that I might have read at the age of eight and eighteen and thirty-eight and forty-five.

And then there's poems too that I know that the poet wrote this just when they were thirty.

And when I would have been thirty I'd have read the poem and felt a kind of connection with it.

But then even when I got older I continued to read the poem and feel a connection there.

Poems can change with me as I grow older and there's a kindness I think in the way that poems too can offer some kind of parenting and some kind of support to you as you're trying to look out to the world and observe what you can observe.

Married Love by Kathleen Flennican

All of them are dead now, my father and mother, bedded together under their matching stones.

They're married friends close by, the crystal and good plates all washed and put away in other homes.

No party food left over. My job was to whip the cream for dessert and ride behind on their fishing weekends like a seventh wheel, along with our airdale who wore striped socks over his muddy paws in the house.

Spirits accelerated toward cocktail hour in the red ranch kitchen where they made big to-dos over their drinks, then feigned to the house with a few of their food.

Then feigned concern, they might corrupt me. The men stirred the air, clustered at the bar, moved among the women conferring over the bubbling stew.

My mother flushed and pretty as a cornucopia of summer fruit.

That September before college I joined the happy group on a fly-fishing river in Montana and slept on the cottage's full-out couch.

Late one evening, lights doused, I was alone with mother and one of the men, not quite uncle, not quite friend, though I newly recognised that he was handsome.

I've erased whatever he said that convinced me he'd forgotten I was there, but there I was, afraid to breathe, confused to learn how delicately balanced these practitioners of marriage must be.

Then they retired to their separate rooms, though a presence hung in the air like perfume.

I heard Kathleen Flennican recite poetry at a festival in Madrid a few years ago, and it was a festival of about 60 or 65 people crammed into a tiny pool of water.

In the middle of all the heat and noise and excitement of this, she managed in the quietness and the poise of her poetry to open up small moments of recognition.

And so I was really keen to see where else she'd done this in poetry, because it is a feature of hers that she can look at a moment and go into it, and in a strange way you feel like there is so much space.

In this poem here, married love, there is so much attention given to observe the world, and the world is so beautiful.

You feel like there is so much space. In this poem here, married love, there is so much attention given to observing the space between her and her parents, between her and her parents' friends, almost between her and her life, and then right at the end, between her and her mother and this other man.

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