Nine Lessons From the Dark Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Also by Adam Thorpe

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Cairn

  The Proposal

  After the Fall

  Message in a Bottle, 1968

  Troubles

  The Garden of the Fugitives, Pompeii

  Sacrifice

  The Hummingbirds

  Nine Lessons from the Dark

  The Blitz in Ealing

  Limbo

  Aux Jardins

  Fleece

  The Jewish Cemetery, Cracow

  Neolithic

  Odemira

  Petroglyphs

  Recent Summers

  Fred’s Treasure

  Flesh and Blood

  The Chances Are

  Your Name in Full

  The Causeway

  Prints

  Lago Nero

  Nerve

  Market Day

  Migraine

  Snowed Up

  Productivity

  Play It at Forty-Five

  Ghosts in the Baths of Caracalla

  Blueberry Picking in Michigan

  Cordial

  Exile

  Tracks

  Scratchings

  Honesty

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Adam Thorpe’s fourth collection continues his engagement with history: the living continuum that connects us with our near and distant past, nourishing and illuminating our present. Here are traces left of presence: Indian scratchings on rock, the nail-marks of destroyed frescoes, spoken fragments of war memories – petroglyphs that function as both memorials and re-awakenings, traceable with the finger of the imagination. And here, too, are images of the stilled, the stopped life: a snowed-up village, the paralysed victim of motor-neurone disease, a soft drink fermented in an old village cafe.

  From this rueful equilibrium of mid-life, Thorpe circles his own personal history, allowing regret and anticipation their Janus-like say. These are erudite, generous poems, formally versatile yet rich in startlingly original observation and a natural lyric grace. Performing his unique archaeology on lives lived, Adam Thorpe once again displays the range of his imagination and the depth of his humanity.

  Also by Adam Thorpe

  FICTION

  Ulverton

  Still

  Pieces of Light

  Shifts

  Nineteen Twenty-One

  No Telling

  POETRY

  Mornings in the Baltic

  Meeting Montaigne

  From the Neanderthal

  Nine Lessons from the Dark

  Adam Thorpe

  When a cloud is not on the mind the sky clouds

  Ivor Gurney

  CAIRN

  Like a person, spookish, spying from on high

  over the whispering of marram on the brae,

  it stretched up out of a slew of scree

  to be this: the peak’s thank-offering to the sky,

  our hike’s lynchpin. And the sky was clear

  when we started out, singing even up the sheerest

  parts, enthusiasm roped to our

  excellent spirits. Then the clouds thickened and the four

  showers blurred into one – the going far more slur

  than stone. Boots squeaked like tholes against the oar

  and we lost the cairn, vanished somewhere in layer

  upon layer of grey. It was yards away

  when we saw it again: a huddle of granite as near

  as bereavement, like a small tomb, like fear

  that had dragged us to face it from where

  we were safe in the glen; unnerved and blinking here.

  THE PROPOSAL

  for Jo

  Beside the thin woodland stream

  which runs full at this winter’s end,

  still this oasis of moss in the thorn

  and blackberry bush and bracken,

  the water running the same cold ribbon

  through the flints’ fingers (the infant ferns’

  sea-horse shapes among the bracts of primrose

  sheltered in the wood from the worst)

  to the same dammed and secret pond

  dinted by drowned trees and their roots

  where, as planned, I stole on one knee

  and made you laugh, thank God, before you’d say.

  AFTER THE FALL

  1

  Hospitals are ‘hot and sad’

  and make her feel ill, my daughter says.

  I’d held my broken wrist like a broken wing,

  walking the streets between the X-ray unit

  and the Maison de la Santé

  Protestante, in Nîmes: now, girded

  by resin, in a sling, wincing until the panadol

  slugs the pain (not the bone-end’s grate so much

  as a barbed asterisk, a drill’s deep bit),

  I discover how many are willing to say

  they’ve been there, done it, showing me

  the scars, the precise spot where it fissured, or the way

  however hard they try they haven’t got it back

  quite as it was, twisting their hand like a doll’s

  or as if offering something of their own harm.

  2

  The dead have had their say

  but the living hang around

  for a little longer, meeting them

  halfway, pretending

  all they’ve done is high

  drama and worth preserving:

  my hand is a shoot off the root

  of a plant in the birthday X-ray

  and the broken wrist’s that

  dark parasite, introduced

  by a lean on a ladder

  too far, as if I was entranced

  by something out of vision.

  Cutting the cake, of late,

  I’ve winced; but now the pain is true.

  3

  He cleaves the dirty mould

  with a whining electric saw . . .

  torture, or the idea of it – slipped

  under, a metal bar is all that stands

  between the psychotic circular blade

  and what I can bear. Far

  too casual, his expert’s languor. Then,

  like a well-split coconut, it’s off!

  A limp rag of a hand, the healed hinge

  incapable even of acknowledgment . . .

  thin, as if wasted, an empty haulm

  that only needs the mind to fill it

  with impulse, need, gesture –

  the sugars flowing in like Fiorelli’s plaster,

  a split reed singing at the lips.

  MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE, 1968

  The Congo River’s slippage of brown lake,

  so wide at times it might, for all one knows,

  Niagara over the horizon’s edge, unburdening

  the weight of hippos (minnows in its wake)

  and bobbing logs like twigs, swallowing pirogues

  like seeds then thrashing to froth on rock

  or shallowed suddenly by a sandbar,

  tempted me to send it, probably, as far

  as I could throw, like a stranded cartoon Crusoe

  vying with the slim chances of root,

  reef, net, surf-fleeced beaches tricked

  out in whin or flesh, thalassic wrack

  and thirty years or more of gathering storms

  in which it still bounces like a periscope,

  kept afloat by hope, not foundering, not flung

  aside in dune-grass unopened by the lovers,

  To the person that finds
me pleeease can you write

  not even swept beyond time’s shimmering line

  to my own hand, the tight cap sticky with Fanta still

  and the spelling sound . . . as if regret might know itself

  as something never found by another, only,

  but visible in the ocean’s vastness, over and over,

  redeemed and floating, over and over in the swell.

  TROUBLES

  I have the memory of the quay at Kinshasa,

  yes, of leaning on the blebbed rail of the steamer

  as it left behind the lined-up dads

  dwindling into sheds and the blind

  bush of a bend. Though what we fled had

  spun lint turbans, blood-spotted,

  around their heads and torn some collars

  they grinned, nevertheless, sliding past us,

  each side mimicking

  the other’s waves, as if glad to be gone.

  A lot of dads, and behind them the invisible

  mobs with chains, fabricated pangas,

  the Congo’s soft ovals of harm.

  At any rate, what I remember

  is not so clear that I cannot bear

  the smothered feelings of loss, nor feel

  the steamer’s slow pulling away

  in a tremble of throbs under my feet

  some thirty-four years later, fearful still

  (the airport closed, the pot-holed roads

  mutinous with steam, a whole country’s

  steering gone) of growing up

  and being left behind there, waving with

  my sticking-plastered hand until

  everything I love is lost beyond the bend.

  THE GARDEN OF THE FUGITIVES, POMPEII

  for P.Y.

  This is the gist of it: all our hurt, panic,

  stuck in a row behind aquarium glass.

  We sprint for our lives under the burning snow.

  The man with the sack. The mother. The kid.

  Go, we are told. They fled

  to frayed faces where the teeth show through,

  the mould come out at the elbows . . .

  bone? I’d thought Fiorelli had filled

  a void! But no, look, there is body

  in them. And then

  there is Pam, stretched

  for a year already on a hospital bed,

  able to move only her left eyelid.

  Total paralysis. All the neurones down.

  Just the lustre of eyes and the odd groan.

  She wants to be dead but can’t

  quite be. So there

  in her cage of bone it lies:

  her garden, not quite fled.

  SACRIFICE

  The dead man who lay there was 2,000 years old . . . consecrated for all time to Nerthus, goddess of fertility.

  P.V. Glob

  for Claus Bech

  1

  Too close for comfort to the bog man

  (Glob’s Tollund, sleeping in peat,

  for whom we’d come to Bjaeldskov Dal

  camping wild among the ferny birch),

  I rose in the night and grappled

  out through darkness for a piss:

  Danish cold, a kind of burr

  of pine sweetness in the air

  that needs the snow to smother it.

  A walk alone over the fen

  as dusk fell had already

  throttled me with fear: all

  at sea, divining my own death

  in heartbeat twitches, lost

  among briar and heather

  where the sandy paths gave out

  to the sombre ooze of pools . . . So,

  in that same night’s darkness,

  the moonlight rent by leaves,

  our two little domes of tents

  scarcely suggested through the trees’

  phantom stripes of bark,

  I sensed as a medium might

  in some Islington cabal

  a second presence, no more than a hint,

  watchful of me. And now my son,

  more than two years later (and only

  now), tells me how he lay

  awake that night in terror, hearing

  what he’d dared to peep on

  pacing up and down, outside.

  ‘A kind of man,’ he says, ‘all brown.’

  2

  Me? Or a divining of what

  we went to only the following day

  in the dim-lit room in Sikeborg?

  Sleeved in temperature, asleep,

  the body shrivelled to the leather

  of its stitched hood, stubble

  that gave that vexed, late-

  night look under the calm

  of someone who did not scream, it seems,

  death succumbed to our gaze

  on its lengthy pigtail of rope.

  Earth’s kindness is to hide us,

  I suppose, but Tollund was pickled

  in his own ghost, petrified

  to an absorbed, ebony drape

  of self, a landscape of ear

  and shoulder, mudslipped waist,

  those perfect striations of toes

  squashed to geology: calmer

  than the two just-drowned we found

  that earlier summer (the end

  being a state of mind), and ready

  to rise from his grave portrait

  to circle our guy ropes again,

  I felt, that we might sense him

  as more than in this room,

  still-born . . . pacing up and down

  with that slight pout of disdain,

  yes, a pained frown on the brown

  face, and moist as inside us.

  3

  I put his shrunken brain

  to rest

  in mine,

  settling the face

  like a mask

  cut from a magazine:

  earth prince,

  the black ooze

  of belief.

  Yes, there is something

  I mean, now.

  Thoughts like valves

  in the bog dream.

  Then scythed,

  just like that.

  Become the mollusc,

  the ammonid,

  the extinct types:

  and eyelids’ sudden

  conclusion

  that light’s not

  there to be opened for;

  that time might not yield

  more than time.

  THE HUMMINGBIRDS

  for Sharon and Katharine

  You fill the feeder with sugared water and sure enough they come

  out of the woods, tiny bright vowels on the edge of becoming

  words murmured in sleep that amaze or something never said

  revived just once like a peacock’s shiver of too many eyes that first time

  in sunlight in a cage, so alert to the twitch of a shadow’s stir

  they flee and flit back and flee to a footfall’s creak on the broad porch

  so you learn not to wait in a roll of drums but in a feather

  of silence, patient as guns set down for ever or a constant good

  in the gentility of trees, and be what we’d once be praised for: composed.

  NINE LESSONS FROM THE DARK

  in memoriam P.N.C.

  1

  Caesar had forgotten the moon, of course. She pulled

  the sea up like a shawl and embalmed

  the delicate arretine slip of the jugs, the ships’

  tackle: slipped each anchor from its tuck.

  Eighteen transports of cavalry short (the storm),

  Caesar surveyed: the tarred beach ending in trees

  where he saw villas, forts, schools; the shiftless

  whooping at him already from the woods.

  2

  Boudicca sounds like wood, darker

  than ‘Boadicea’. She burnt so many places

  we are tested on them for days.r />
  The croup of the dying, the not-quite-fled;

  the witchdoctor’s paraphernalia

  litters the cromlech. I’d almost reached

  the totem-class, already archaic, when towns

  diminished the hill-top camps with barbers and drains.

  3

  Willow-leaves feathered the air in flint,

  found their mark through woollens with a willow’s thirst:

  the blood puddled around the foetal dead

  still crouched to their pain, as if nestling in it.

  The willow’s the loom of enchantment no longer,

  nor used for the baskets that winnow corn.

  The New Stone Age is archaic, we are taught:

  welcome to the Moon-Walk Age, not the Moon’s.

  4

  Penda had his chantways, we suppose:

  Middle Anglia’s ceremonials, a return

  to the axial centre, the proper mythologies.

  No aedicula, nor the drowning bog

  nor the totem-poles of the henge in wood.

  On the granite combs of his kingdom

  where my grandmother’s showing me

  our mossed family’s stones, he held against God.

  5

  Linen times. Salt pork and honey. The homely

  Book of Kells; it took one hundred and fifty calves

  to stretch it into vellum. Ale and cloaks,

  the shingle-roofed church, horses for carts.

  Lousy weather was felt in the corbelled clochàn

  and Saxon hut alike, with the furious smoke.

  The oak-woods crumpled into ships and the great

  crucks of barns we toss (secret smokers) into flame.

  6

  The waterlogged timbers of the Sweet Track, the bogged

  wharves, the men throttled and held down

  in the peat wetland where the snipe gather – may wetness

  preserve us from air, from decay . . . Sutton Hoo’s

  a king’s sepulchretum without the king, the boat’s

  strake-ends creaking through earth too acid

  for the dead: England drips with regalia, her crowned

  dissolved to the unlearned loneliness of dates.