Birds With a Broken Wing Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FICTION

  Ulverton

  Still

  Pieces of Light

  Shifts

  Nineteen Twenty-One

  No Telling

  The Rules of Perspective

  Is This The Way You Said?

  Between Each Breath

  POETRY

  Mornings in the Baltic

  Meeting Montaigne

  From the Neanderthal

  Nine Lessons from the Dark

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446434079

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Jonathan Cape 2007

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Adam Thorpe 2007

  Adam Thorpe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs

  and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by

  Jonathan Cape

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited

  can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780224079440

  Brighting at the five life-layers

  species, species, genera, families, order.

  David Jones

  Contents

  I

  Below Allihies

  Drombeg Stone Circle

  In Syracuse Museum

  Early Morning at Owl’s Head, Quebec

  Lifting the Harp

  Roman Lead Mines, Derbyshire

  My Grandfathers’ War

  Two Beirut Poems

  Maiden Flight

  First Kill

  Dublo

  Capital

  On Silbury Hill

  Before the War

  Bookmark

  Addicts

  Somewhere

  Purposes

  Defeat

  The Ox-Bow’s Heath

  On Her Blindness

  Ansaphone

  Hands

  Transparent

  Ampurias

  The Taxi-Driver’s Tale

  Invalid

  In Tesco’s

  Expulsion from Eden (Restored)

  The Sick Child

  Tidal Times

  Cuckoo

  Nîmes

  Life Class

  II

  The Abandoned Road

  Light Pollution

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following: London Review of Books, Poetry Review.

  ‘The Abandoned Road’ and ‘Light Pollution’ were commissioned for broadcast by BBC Radio 3’s The Verb and Between the Ears respectively; ‘The Sick Child’ was commissioned by Tate Etc.

  The Ox-Bow’s Heath first appeared as a limited edition chapbook published by Ulysses (London, 1999).

  The epigraph is taken from Part 1 (‘Rite and Fore-time’) of David Jones’s The Anathemata (Faber, 1952), p.74. With reference to ‘the five life-layers’: ‘T.D. [Thomas Dilworth] points out the careful reflection of the tables printed in W.W. Watts, Geology for Beginners (1929), pp. 219 and 288, pages noted on the fly-leaf of D.’s copy of the book.’ (René Hague, A Commentary on The Anathemata of David Jones, Wellingborough, 1977, p.71).

  With thanks to Robin Robertson and Charles Lock.

  I

  BELOW ALLIHIES

  Flat out, with the moor’s turf in the small

  of my back on the Allihies cliffs,

  long before the naming of the cliffs

  or of County Cork, long before the mountains

  were the Slieve Mickish, to the soft interleaving

  shirr of the surf against the cliff below

  I drift in a half glow of sleep, then stir

  awake to this westernmost view

  of land edge and water and a clear sky’s silica,

  half not believing it, the mind’s sinew

  tautened by names, stiff as disagreement; then loosening

  to the truth of it and losing it again.

  DROMBEG STONE CIRCLE

  Between the portals and the axials lay the central slab

  with its slew of eurocents and hair-ties, wet-scarred words,

  a Ryanair boarding pass kept from flight by a pebble.

  Just when the grey rain cleared enough

  to take a photograph and find the atmospherics

  I’d so looked forward to, your mobile rang.

  Our son in Corsica, wild-camping with a hammock

  in the heatwave. You stepped to the left and the signal died.

  I asked you if you’d heard his voice. ‘No,’ you sighed,

  wondering why he’d phoned – assuming it was not

  his friends who’d tried, or someone official from a ward.

  You’d been standing on the line between the axials

  and the portals, where the sun still casts

  its westerly rays on midwinter’s day above the mountain

  by the sea, precise as a laser . . . so, shuttling in cross-stitch

  and staring at the mobile, we searched like fallen adepts

  for the place, that square foot of pulse

  you’d stepped out of sync from, not quite

  keeping sentinel enough. And wandering still further,

  out of the stone circle and up into the heather

  then worrying the track back to the gravel of car park,

  it was as if we’d caught on the too-warm air

  word of something dreadful that only the wise

  might know how to neutralise: deciding what the offerings

  should be; and who must be sacrificed, and where.

  IN SYRACUSE MUSEUM

  You’d have lived among them here, maybe,

  left nothing more than a BRONZE FLAME-SHAPED KNIFE,

  BRONZE HASP, BRONZE AWL, BRONZE

  ELBOW FINIAL and (unevenly typed) BONE WHORL.

  Their bronze is the verdigris brightness

  of frogbit. Now what we leave

  is a skein of gizmos, uncorroding;

  amalgam-filled teeth; a retaliatory

  stain of medicines instead of ghosts.

  EARLY MORNING AT OWL’S HEAD, QUEBEC

  ‘We are like birds with a broken wing.’

  Chief Plenty-Coups, 1909

  Walking the grit road

  past the sign that’s marked Arrêt

  like a fish bone in an English throat

  and the English names of farms

  down the clear valley

  where the Abenaki carried their canoes

  from river to lake (and nothing

  in their wake but a few

  flints, the corners of glass cases

  in silent rooms), with every tree

  younger than the history

  of our dominion here (the timber

  trade), I watch the sun

  clear the hill to strike

  this clipped-on landscape.

  Time’s too savage for the long

  shadows of morning to stay

  longer than necessary, but the heat’s

  serviceable at m
idday after rain

  when the hollows steam. I like

  this loneliness, like a sharp

  stone held in the palm, like the hill’s

  profile of Chief Owl, scarred

  by ski-runs, whose shadow’s

  a chill I’m hurrying from

  to break into sunlight, soon.

  I’m sure he vowed, too, not to go down

  without a fight, the day freshening

  there at the edge of his woods’ mind,

  the red clouds scurrying from him

  like all the unspoken crimes

  while the neat farms still hold good down here

  with their jeeps and dog-slobbered gates

  and the dim, cultivated slopes beyond

  like something stroked, like a still life

  with its hues and shadows, the light

  catching on an upright, an antenna, finally

  brighting in a flash like feathers,

  as if the old route’s

  thumped headlong

  into our world-way’s hurtling glass.

  LIFTING THE HARP

  for A

  Lugging it up two flights,

  three of us on the job but

  my back put out as usual, I think

  of what we agreed in the concert

  after the course, when fifteen

  of you were playing at the same

  time, while Israel was pounding

  Lebanon again: how if you put

  a row of harpists on the front

  line of any war front (each

  of their hands like a lover

  desperate to reach the other

  through the screen of cords

  over and over and never

  succeeding), the guns would stop.

  We reach the top and straighten up,

  letting it down like a great wing, wincing

  at the considerable weight it takes

  to make the music of angels.

  ROMAN LEAD MINES, DERBYSHIRE

  They scab the moor

  where someone worked out

  what they could, moved on.

  Astonished ogres’ mouths

  bearded with nettle,

  they wait for the pebble-

  casting kids, their leaning

  to the sound. You jumped in at the age

  of five, and survived

  the fall of sixty foot

  unharmed, though no one

  quite knows how.

  If life’s a field

  then these are life’s mistakes

  stamped like hoofprints –

  but one of them bore

  a miracle: the boy

  who sat in blackness

  on a mirage of a ledge

  while his father called down

  not to move, descending

  rung by metal rung, the plumb-line

  of love acknowledged by

  its own lead weight of care.

  MY GRANDFATHERS’ WAR

  Sidney taught enfilade in Matlock –

  how to fire full belt, how to receive,

  how to pat the drum to swing it

  from side to side: so easily done, he’d say.

  Samuel was at Passchendaele, his younger

  brother lost (killed near Arras

  in the last weeks of the war), then –

  shell-stunned, gassed – left by his wife.

  He never saw his two small sons again

  from ’20 on. And yet I find in each

  an equal torment: the one enthusing

  lads whose bright fire life would soon

  be losing (he did feel bad, he’d say);

  the other mired where lines of men

  would meet what Sidney meant by easily, done.

  TWO BEIRUT POEMS

  1. Ambiguity

  1958

  On a sick-making mountain drive

  we were stopped by men with guns.

  One waved a photo of President Chamun,

  demanding our views. I was much too young

  to know that if, in the hills of Lebanon

  above Beirut, you got it wrong you did not live.

  My father raised his hands and cried,

  ‘Ah, mais oui . . . Chamun! Chamun!’ –

  not knowing they loathed Chamun, the Druze.

  They only waved us to the rest of our lives

  because they saw, not wild admiration,

  but hands thrown up in mock despair –

  and laughed and clapped as we sped from there.

  2. The Holiday Inn

  1978

  Nibbled at, charred, sucked hollow by shells,

  it’s that shadow side of all smart hotels –

  their peeling plush, the smoke in the lifts, the turd

  left in the bowl by the cleaner. Life deferred.

  Do the couples go on squealing through the paper walls?

  Do the murmuring televisions cackle after night falls?

  Snipers made secret assignations in the top suites.

  Corridors filled with the dead like collected sheets.

  MAIDEN FLIGHT

  for J

  Crouched over blueprints, slicing balsa,

  the weeks it takes him erode into months

  before the wing rises like a ladder

  and the tissue paper stiffens. Dope

  shrouds us, stings, brings thoughts.

  Softly he strokes. He thinks of clouds

  and the long wings against them. Sticky

  as larvae they lean against the wall

  of our bedroom, to dry: a draught

  might blow them over. Slowly

  he strokes at the crouched

  chrysalis of body, then dangles into it

  what, once hooked, persuades

  the propellor against him. Such strength

  surprises – that it doesn’t

  concertina into matchwood

  or crumple fierily into Hinden-

  burg. He glues the wings on

  and it becomes a creature.

  I trot beside him to the Dungrove field

  where he turns the propellor until I want

  him to stop: his finger slips

  and is stropped by the blade

  while the cows observe,

  the wind waiting for its chance.

  He lifts her high, holding her nose

  as if thoughtful, hushing her, then trots

  away between the crusts of pats.

  His arms spread wide and she leaves

  hurriedly and climbs – higher, higher

  than the treetops, stops, then drops

  like a stone. (I always think

  of that one as the damselfly.)

  FIRST KILL

  A little surprised to find

  the .22 was a stiffer lug

  than a shelf’s worth of books

  after an hour of climb; more

  surprised, jumping from a gate,

  that the head-butt of thunder in the glen

  and the glinting oyster of peat

  prised open an inch from my heel

  was my own doing (safety

  catch left off, I was only

  a boy). Surprised by the hare, literally

  – there! – that popped up

  from the compassless brae

  and jinked its way

  away through the heather, far

  up-country between the peaks . . .

  surprised most of all when my shot

  corrected the hare’s zigzag with a spin

  and flung it to where I

  panted up, already late, the retriever

  far off on the slope below . . .

  surprised, even so, to find

  a hare on a tangle of meat

  where the pellets had carded the rear,

  its head turning in fear

  but the eyes like Picasso’s

  countering mine with an unlidded stare:

  both of us guests in bewilderment,
not

  really knowing quite why or how

  and wondering, perhaps, if the other did?

  DUBLO

  1969

  He handed me a tenner for my Hornby set

  in answer to my notice in the corner shop:

  was quiet, overweight, with spots – about

  eighteen. Kneeled in my bedroom to admire,

  to switch the points I’d oiled in time;

  shifted the Humbrol’d personnel; adjusted

  the sponge of trees. His fag fixed

  smoking in the funnel, he was a bit

  too old, I thought, for the large-gauge –

  Double ‘O’ – clockwork type

  that just went round, and round again

  before winding down. But there was nothing

  weird about him; nothing deranged.

  A few days later in our local Waitrose,

  with a shotgun hidden behind the cereal range,

  he blasted the check-out girl in the face

  he’d not got closer to, despite the letters.

  How he just stood there, afterwards, among

  the screams, I don’t know. Glad, perhaps,

  to be coupled to her forever now

  in his own dream; our friend’s friend’s small twins

  freckled by it in the queue.

  CAPITAL

  Harris, Outer Hebrides

  These islands’ sudden wealth was a brown wet tangle

  of straps and belts, forests of it on rocks’

  holdfast, slippery as the economic laws

  that bound them to this the length of a war with France.

  The ashes were turned into soap and glass – though this

  concerned them as little as the war. Kelp

  was riches, anyway, cut from its own grasp

  in neap-slapped coves where seals watched them, idle,

  fat with fish. The pyres’ smoke sickened

  the eyes with salts, though: chafed them sightless.

  And it was mostly the women who slid

  and struggled in the kelp’s slub, wrinkled

  as shamans, edged with salt; while the men surmised

  on benches – backroom boys – their wives

  humped it up to pyres in creels that gnawed

  their shoulders, bent them old

  before they were forty. Then something shifted,

  like a spring tide murmuring in the lochan

  from its narrow channel . . . Boney