Nine Lessons From the Dark Read online

7

  The Danes! You can’t have forgotten them:

  lona evacuated, the Golden Age of Ireland over.

  The sea which had brought St Patrick

  now brought the Norse gunning for God knows what:

  fame, plunder, women! A fight! Their hair

  is their boat’s wake: very fair and long,

  like white caps, like the sea’s storminess falling

  back off cliffs and freeing us tonight from fear.

  8

  Scribe-scratch, over and over

  by the dim dip-candle in the howled-at cell.

  Spring came famously on the edge of that ninth-century

  ‘Cassiodorus on the Psalms’ – this pleasant glint of sun,

  its flicker on the vellum of the margins.

  Patience breeds the patience of His will.

  Nib-peck, hen-scratch: the sun flickers on my desk’s

  beechwood, wealed by so many vanished boys.

  9

  Columba, or Cuthbert. Various rock-fingers

  rising from the wastes of the sea’s ignorance.

  It’s thanks to these, we were told:

  on Skellig Michael’s, seven hundred feet

  over the Atlantic, the monks rose

  in prayer on the washed rock . . . and thus

  civilisation endured through spray, sheer cold;

  let otters dry its toes, without hauteur.

  THE BLITZ IN EALING

  You crouched under the table as the ceiling

  rained down flour and the lights went out. Upstairs

  whole chunks played the devil with the bed

  still warm from your dreams

  and the clues of hands and haunch and head.

  But you weren’t there, crushed

  beneath the latticework of laths,

  though the air’s arch concussed you into dark

  to bring you round to such amazing quiet

  you were sure you were in Heaven, a graceful park

  coasting to a cry, which was yours, and then

  the familiar kitchen was crawling out of dust

  into time you weren’t, after all, denied . . .

  the All Clear siren and the shrills of bells

  and the neighbours unhooked from the brick slide

  that was next door’s up to minutes ago

  groaning on the sofa, bleeding in the hall –

  and you knew now where you were, you said

  (standing in the street by your own front door),

  the fiery light dancing on the stockinged dead.

  LIMBO

  My father worked in them for thirty years,

  hassled by fog days, a prisoner of wings

  and hijacks, fake bomb-calls, his singing in the ears

  from standing in the shrieking reach of jets; and thinks

  flying has lost its élan, these days –

  more like catching a bus, he says.

  And somehow something has to give, you feel,

  the throng thickening in this town’s unlived-in sprawl –

  families gathering between landscapes (real

  places with rooms and trees), waiting for their call

  at quiet anchor where the runway’s roars

  sound ominous, like the booms of shores

  beyond phosphorous breakers. The end, I suppose,

  seems more plausible when you’re cutting loose;

  I think of hospitals, and how these rows,

  these queues, call to mind that long slow fuse

  of decrepitude you find in wards:

  the leaving feared that we shuffle towards.

  AUX JARDINS

  Every view is a judgement here

  and somewhere to sit down,

  the foregone conclusions of paths

  among shrubs whose motives are blurred

  cross like flirtation, depart up steps

  half-hidden by ivy, crooked, you pretend

  you’ve not noticed before. The beds

  are dressed as for their first ball,

  the box clipped perfectly round, the ancient

  olive lopped to its trunk

  and no one mentions the orange

  rind in the pond that might be a goldfish.

  The mind, tamed by squirrels,

  sees in the sunned Aleppo pines

  a decent likeness of Cézanne’s

  and breathes much easier for it

  in the clearer air; a park is not confused,

  there are fifty iron rules

  posted on the gate. In an antique

  painting in the town museum

  you see how only the people

  have changed – languid

  curiosities in frocks, toting parasols:

  the steps and the statues and the fountains

  are the same. And you know,

  from the squeals of schoolkids

  skidding over gravel, clutching

  their I-Spy forms, that nothing

  important will ever happen, here,

  beyond the goldfish floating on its side;

  while the lovers sprawled on lawns

  in the shade of corners

  will always be retiring

  to a home and profit

  before twilight locks itself in

  and leaves you to wander the paths

  alone, not quite breathless

  enough to sit. Not yet. Not there.

  FLEECE

  for M.K.

  ‘The dogs were really Elizabeth’s,’ he’d say,

  ‘we had them all up North.’ So I’d walk

  the five of them on leads taut

  as kitestrings in the freezing winds

  of the winter downs, bare as steppe up there,

  hoping to spot the shepherdess

  (from the farm next door) bumping past in her jeep

  or waving far off in a field

  over a groundswell of wool.

  Ours were rarer – mostly Jacobs

  for their russet fleece, meant for the loom

  gathering dust in the sitting room

  from the day the Land Rover was hit by the wheel

  that weirdly came from nowhere,

  their last run down. ‘Everything

  on the skids since Elizabeth,’ he’d say,

  talking of her like a reign, not a wife –

  a loss unredeemed by the sweetness of feed

  clouding from the trough, or all his plans.

  We’d mostly be having to mend, in fact.

  Gates. The barn. Or the unstrung fence

  that day of driving sleet in the lower field

  by the stream – tamping around the posts

  with the punners, stapling afresh . . .

  The old, rusted snipes of wire

  kept flaunting tufts of fleece

  the year had purged of oil.

  ‘The lovely stuff she’d spin,’ he’d say

  again and again, fingering the tobaccoey hairs

  as though it was hers

  he was seeing there, snagged

  from her state of grace.

  THE JEWISH CEMETERY, CRACOW

  for my father-in-law

  Nettles crowd the avenues, giant ferns

  jungle the corners under trees. The stones

  rise above these like Mayan ruins, inclined

  and cracked, their runes solemn under moss,

  faint as tracks of birds that are all crows, here,

  defying respect from the tree-tops

  though scarcely heard above the hiss

  and trickle of the heavy rain; too many leaves

  and the headstones have turned into gulleys.

  Neglect is its own care, but also means

  someone’s won, somewhere. We search

  for hours in this green darkness,

  tacking up and down, meeting each other

  as if in sudden clearings. Carved names become

  familiar; our trousers stick to our thighs.

  Th
e kids complain but not as much

  as might have been deserved: the hunt’s a game

  and the place is a maze, for the tomb is not

  where you remember in ’35; the stretched

  wake shuffling here, the sheer weight

  of your grandfather’s coffin on a teenage shoulder.

  Ten or twelve more names chipped on since then

  (you can’t be sure) around ’45 – but in one go,

  without the heave of a body or the qualms

  of mourners (who’d been mainly them).

  History is a fraud whose lies are true

  but this one stone of it we fail to find,

  in the end, more bewildered than frantic.

  No doubt we walked straight through it, as it were,

  the rain hammering on our umbrellas – you

  refusing to let it matter, of course, stiff-necked

  as ever when it comes to remembering

  such absurdity of loss. Nothing gained.

  Later in the cathedral square we follow your finger

  as it traces your walk from school, taking

  your first vodka (in the very same café we sit in)

  on a far-off afternoon, freed from the classroom.

  The names on the stone we could not find

  bob among your words – like ships, not flotsam:

  you are their haven. They were here all along

  where Cracow teems with the living

  and your gestures show you as young among them again.

  NEOLITHIC

  (West Kennet Long Barrow, c.3500 to 2500 BC)

  1

  We’d have done for them, anyway:

  dope-heads, darkies, aboriginal scrum

  of simpletons. Our home-grown gingery

  version of the Apache, soon to become

  gloom under stone, a litter of fags and condoms,

  a forty-foot corridor of corbelled rock

  rammed into Wiltshire and still, after all

  these years, stiff under its jeans of downland.

  2

  For a rough ten hundred winters,

  we know, they coughed around it, tending

  their earthwork of slow-motion grief

  in a running commentary of crows;

  though silence comes off them like a smell.

  Spina bifida twisted a few

  of their spines, we can tell: a long insignia

  of paralysis, a burr in the gods’

  teasing of the wool. Of all their stories

  (envy, murder, love, humiliation),

  just one invented proper noun

  and the stave-lines of absent adzes.

  3

  The mud’s still shiny as gristle,

  the trees blurred in the mist’s daguerrotype

  that shows me as a schoolboy, here,

  alone, scraping, hoping for a find –

  before the rich sods smashed my bicycle

  and left it by the Chapel like a trophy.

  4

  We plough around their shadows so it shows,

  scattered in the fields: East Kennet,

  Liddington, Tidcombe Down . . . I’d wade

  through grassland to get to them, or strike

  off slowly through a seethe of barley

  from Sugar Hill; dream I was theirs

  but never, whistling inside, of death –

  my elders, then, being almost everyone alive.

  5

  Now they’re building them near Holsworthy

  I read: not bell or bowl or disc, but thirty

  low mounds like the Neolithic’s: a grave

  complex, a computer-catered knacker’s yard,

  a reek of gone-off eggs. Discreet, of course,

  (the Danish for barrow means low),

  the hundreds of thousands of cows compressed

  in bin-liner smoulderings under floodlight,

  it’s patrolled day and night like an airbase;

  The Times calls them (saving face),

  ‘Pharaonic tombs . . . the future will wonder at,

  as if some mysterious sacrifice has taken place.’

  As though the gods won’t know full well,

  lowering their weight through the crows.

  6

  After I found my bike done in

  (its delicate derailleurs contorted,

  the broken chain coiled around the frame

  in a double helix of greasy links,

  the air fled from the tyres), I’d walk

  to the barrows. It took more time,

  though the time was mine. Anorak snapping

  on the tombs like a cloak, I’d dream of kings,

  the future sprawled like smoke or the corn

  below. I did not know, I did not think

  how history is mostly repair and revenge,

  hurtling at you like the wind up there

  on a winter morning: a dormitory

  of bones and fear you thought far off,

  dealt with, finished, long buried beneath.

  But no, it’s here, and you’re the guest

  and ghost, antlered and drawn and running.

  ODEMIRA

  Quem se lembra

  da poesia

  que nos contava em segredo?

  for Manuel Branco

  We thought we’d meet a potter, met a poet

  too; at the end of a long track

  like a vein of thought running hidden off the road

  he emerged in a white beard and slacks,

  clay-thumbing spirit of the revolution,

  Com Homem Dentro, the victory of the red carnation.

  I told him in French how a toothless old crone

  with her three-legged dog and wild gesticulations

  had shown us where to go, like something out of myth.

  ‘Cerberus,’ he smiled, ‘pas têtes, mais jambes.’

  The pottery shed had a cobwebbed look,

  the kiln opening to a secret huddle he termed

  his ‘mistakes’: flat open-throated flagons

  for wine or flowers, the blue and cream

  bubbled in places, completely ‘missed’. I loved them –

  the fish floating over trees, the boat flying as in dream –

  and he sold them to me for a song.

  We drank good beer on the wooden porch

  of the long low adobe home (to celebrate, he said).

  And talked. I felt I had stumbled on a mage.

  He wondered why we’d come at all. I mentioned

  the tourist-office pamphlet (‘local crafts’),

  asked him why he’d put no signs on the road

  that faded to a lake under trees. He laughed.

  ‘Signs bring trouble,’ he said. ‘I don’t like signs.

  If you want it enough, you arrive.’

  He used to read to tens of thousands

  at the height of it, he said, ‘when I was still alive’:

  in Lisbon, in Paris, in Frankfurt. His best friend then

  was now the prime minister. He remembered the rallies,

  more fiery friends who’d made it. He had judged it wrong

  and never compromised. We looked out on a valley

  of cork trees, acacia, olives. Stillness.

  His vegetable garden brimming with bees.

  The dog of the German hippy down below

  yapped at our legs. ‘Our dream was this,’

  he said. ‘With decent schools and freedom. Not big roads.’

  He sighed. ‘All that’s left for me is clay and rhyme.’

  The dog yapped and nipped; he stood and yelled.

  The German, pony-tailed, came up in his own slow time.

  They conversed in English. The poet was angry.

  ‘Europe,’ he growled, afterwards. But we drank to hers

  still, as if the porch was a plane and the whole bitch

  stretched out eastwards under us, bombed by our verse.

  PETROGLYPHS


  (Eastern Townships, Quebec)

  for Charles Lock

  1

  Given nothing but an axe and a direction,

  told to go where, in mosquito-clouded bush,

  a rood of trees was theirs to make short work of,

  they struck out west with their porcelain

  and evening silks, their buckled-down bits

  of Europe: just a razor’s strop away

  from the incurable Indian, that nakedness

  the pocket Bibles fig-leafed. Now the land

  is easy with its private rites, barbecues

  snaking their smoke through the maples

  on seamless lawns, the boats wobbling on the lake,

  the chromium flash of wealth on the roads

  between the stripling woods (the old ones felled).

  They dropped in droves, the pioneers. Enough

  to make one feel that cold and cholera

  might have sufficed to leave the New World old,

  standing here between these huddled graves

  in a rough meadow where only the names are saved.

  2

  On Harry Jones’s land near Vale Perkins

  there’s an ‘Indian rock’, I read,

  where the Abenaki

  scratched the story of a raid

  on Fort Bridgeman

  in 1755. No directions

  or signs, so we gaze on the fenced hill’s

  tumble of boulders, knowing

  how one among them speaks

  of something so grave

  it might have been the gods

  that scraped, if we could find it;

  but it would take us days.

  Like one of those games

  where the treasure’s secreted,

  or a family secret that shame

  once concealed

  from the gaze of strangers.

  If only it was shame

  that had! Instead,

  this thistly, wired-off indifference.

  This shrug of history.

  3

  My son and I, crashing through maple

  on the final day, came across a boulder

  on which signs were scratched all over;

  faint white lines like signals from space.

  No claw or tine could scrape such forms, we felt.

  It was the old ones who were speaking