Nine Lessons From the Dark
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.
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.