Birds With a Broken Wing
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
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Epub ISBN: 9781446434079
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Published by Jonathan Cape 2007
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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,
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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