Nine Lessons From the Dark Read online

  deep in the woods where no one walked

  but a man and a boy, given sudden wings.

  RECENT SUMMERS

  This imminence . . . an English distillation

  of lowering hedges, a hammer-weight of heat

  on the accomplishing ferns: everything tending

  to cataclysm, fiddling while even dawn burns.

  We wait: things might get worse (the hearse

  ticking by the cemetery gate). The silence of the birds

  we don’t look up to, now we’re up to things.

  The calm freight of clouds too late to count.

  FRED’S TREASURE

  ‘Still gas,’ he chuckled, back in ’76,

  strengthening the wall-lamps’ whiteness. ‘I’m the last

  darn house in Chesham, now.’ The rooms were a wade

  of cardboard boxes – from which he’d pick, wrapped

  in sheaths of the Bucks Examiner, his collection’s gems.

  Mainly flints. The coulter’s clang had betrayed them

  to him, trawling the plough-lines in its wake;

  tell-tale swells and trims, purposeful, flaked –

  nothing chance did: all enacted, shaped.

  God knows why he’d begun, as a kid, to the creak

  and cluck of a horse-team, in a blizzard of gulls,

  but his passion’d found itself in furrows

  up Buckland Common, or down near Chartridge,

  over Botley way or in the thick

  chalk of Cholesbury where the hill-fort is.

  He let me palm a bulk of Clactonian axe,

  smoothed by bone to a meat-red shine, that the BM

  craved to have. ‘Oh no, it stays, I said.’

  I’d brought him mine to check, in a Co-op bag:

  a pyx of flints from walks and a curve of bone,

  pick-like, he might have laughed at. Well, you could

  have drystone-walled a field with what he’d found:

  chopper, spear-tip, scraper, core; axe-heads,

  chisels of bone, a jaw . . . the lofty drudge

  of a lifetime, that – that only just fought shy

  of sadness, for all his love had knapped

  it into jewels. Dulled, I suppose, the moment

  he was gone (as with all our things)

  to a frass of boxes full of pointless rocks

  in a gassy semi, near the water-cress beds.

  FLESH AND BLOOD

  Feel my hands, you’d say: like ice! –

  hugging the radiator in the warm room;

  certainly a little chill, the touch

  of your elderly skin. Proof of age,

  by which, of course, you were still amazed –

  as I am now at how the speech from Hamlet

  on the BBC (reissued) tape

  revives that touch, as real

  as the press of a piano’s key: the dead

  don’t quite leave off for good. I could

  a tale unfold whose lightest word

  would harrow up thy soul, freeze

  thy young blood – your voice

  still under it, bewitching my childhood

  between the easy chairs in Chesham,

  Hamlet dawning as a domestic god . . .

  Your own blood, old, slowed right down

  until sherry went straight to your head

  and our lunches would end in the ambulance,

  your gashed leg oozing a syrup

  that was almost cold, that scarcely ran

  from the too-soft skin that time

  it hung like a stocking. Hell

  was living too long, you said –

  surviving a husband you’d miss each day

  by forty years, London a prison

  of trip-wire pavements and dextrous shoves

  and the eternal flight of stairs to your nutshell room.

  THE CHANCES ARE

  (Campo Santo, Pisa)

  Swifts squeal where the firebomb fell –

  bouncing off the cloisters’ roof

  and sparing, from a wealth

  of quattrocento frescoes

  only one, like a kind of proof: The Triumph

  of Hell. The rest worn down to brick

  in an hour or two. As, quite suddenly,

  at a certain age (say, forty-five),

  what you could have done but did not try

  (the career on the stage, the moving

  to Amsterdam) arrives from the sky

  and rubs its ebullient, painstaking flame

  on your fixed tempera, scene after scene:

  the wasted opportunities, the best of a life.

  Though the chances are those charred walls

  would’ve shuttled into place the same.

  YOUR NAME IN FULL

  The Old Norse still clinging there

  like something a frog might do

  in a Danish bog

  or the sound I’d make

  on that temple slughorn my father bought

  in Katmandu in ’58

  or what those huge coiling snakes of bronze

  older than Vikings, thunder-booms

  slumbering behind glass in Copenhagen’s National Museum

  might wake to

  at the sour breath of Ragnaroth:

  porp.

  The other uniquely

  mine, caudled in affection,

  tag of love so familiar

  it was cleanly, clearly me

  until the Bible lesson

  in ’63 –

  Genesis, the Garden of Eden.

  Myself surging from the words

  and the class erupting in squeals

  as I walked in the cool of day with Eve

  between the trees,

  Miss Scott smiling shyly as she read,

  relentless, to the bell –

  then, in the playground,

  a scrimmage as the fingers

  tickled, let rip,

  clambering up the ladder of my ribs

  and down again

  searching for the missing rung

  in all seriousness,

  fervent as punishment

  or a girl’s kiss.

  And in the middle, yes,

  the scrupulous secret,

  shaming for no real reason;

  an old family surname

  rattling on through generations . . .

  a piece of forgotten root, a filler

  shared with my father

  that makes a disastrous acronym of name –

  A.N.T An

  ugly shadow, a haunting

  like the hand-me-down Roman nose

  or the strain of something botched

  or the old, forgotten loyalties

  of clan, of kin: something

  only vaguely my own,

  product of duty or sheer whim,

  uncalled for until

  some real shame rings it

  out at last in leaden strokes –

  hammered to the open, collared, caught:

  your name in full

  like the spy within

  who knows much more than he ought

  and might just tell

  but I’m not telling you.

  (So just as well

  the front-page court report

  in the Marlborough Advertiser

  back in ’82

  had ‘Adam Naylor Thrope’,

  and no one knew.)

  THE CAUSEWAY

  It was only a rowing-boat, back in those days;

  one-man crew, potato-sacks and gossip,

  too small for a car. So the tiny island bred

  its own species: unlicensed, dented, mirrorless,

  treads as if sea-smoothed, the milometer

  seized from lack of use, like a swift’s legs –

  there was nowhere to go but round,

  quicker to walk it from here to there.

  Yet their elders were everywhere, abandoned

  where they’d died whining or kept />
  for the hens; dashboards losing their toggles

  and wires, mudguards curved in the rust

  of autumn ferns . . . while the whole place,

  it seemed, champed to be further off

  from the other isles, like abandoned

  St Kilda with its birds. And now? The causeway

  cuts the choppy water in a marriage-

  knot: no longer the longing of sea miles

  but a few hundred yards on sound tyres.

  PRINTS

  The dollardom shore of big Lake Michigan

  finds him doing what he did as a boy

  by real seas, running alongside them:

  the land’s hem stitched, he’d look

  back upon a long beach emptied

  by twilight (his spoor blurred as if already

  old), and turn it to Avalon, or Crusoe’s island.

  Even on the edge of Central Africa

  he had to change into somewhere else

  what they would always be alone with

  after the bush-drive; imagining this

  not ever seen, not watched, kept

  locked from eyes like a schoolgirl’s journal –

  older than lungs, earlier even than gill slits

  or the hair-like cilia of bivalves, the sea-edge

  stroking backwards through deep time

  and the blasts of geology, silvering his prints

  from laval sand with the stands of palm-trees

  cupped from sight by his hand . . . then find,

  on the slow walk back, an impress or two

  the sweeps of foam had missed: fossils

  of some unknown future, or ears listening

  through billions of years of hiss for the delicate cry.

  LAGO NERO

  Solitary, a steep two-hour walk

  up the snow-limed, winding track

  to the lone chapel with its locked

  clutter of pews in the gloom,

  its painted Mary emerging

  far, one felt, from her home:

  a rumour of someone known.

  Old notices, as in some English porch.

  A worn-out cross in the stone.

  I spot a scintillant of jet

  in the sheer sky above the soft

  white outcrops of mountain, the black

  lake disguised as a deer-tracked

  flatness under a glare of snow,

  the jet’s suggestion of a roar erupting

  like an afterthought, the truth

  arrived at! I have, instead, a sudden

  hunch – the faintest scar of worry, really –

  that even heights like these are the hour’s

  stooge: the grandest mountains give

  in time. And I see it like a diagram,

  almost educational — moraine,

  landslip, friction, wind: the solid

  gleam of the perpetual as sheer idea

  and thought its isopleth, that links

  like point with like point

  until we become what we meant

  to be all along, but did not dare.

  NERVE

  in memory of Sébastien Houix

  1

  ‘I’m immensely privileged,’ you say, paralysed

  from the neck down and hardly able to speak.

  Your hands rise to the mouse in mine, are left

  there; their twitch shifts the arrow round

  the on-screen keyboard. Your fingers feel like snow

  crust, but the words you coax from them

  are warmed with care, each laid down like leaves

  of gold by time (a day to phrase a thought) –

  and pain, no doubt. Your cup of tea with its straw

  turns cold, resting on its book. The weeks

  are up and down, but you’re aware in writing

  (I quote from the poem) of your steady aim: ‘to stay

  alive until the cows come home’. A dream, we know:

  the doctors said you wouldn’t see the summer

  I’m looking out for on the breeze like a sign:

  the fragrance of thyme against the burning odds.

  2

  The heat’s full on, the cicadas brimming,

  a slow slap of coldness in the stone bassin.

  My brilliant student, ten years on from London you’re lying

  in the shade of your Aleppo pine, being read to again.

  You’re always smiling. Now it’s the turn of the breath

  to come with an effort. Next week they’ll bring

  a machine with its mask’s relief. ‘It’s very tiring

  to breathe,’ you tell me in gasps, ‘but I think

  it’s the heat.’ Everything else – the nerve-logged

  muscle, loss of weight, the way the head now lolls

  too heavy for you – you have taken on board; but you

  refuse this slack from the lungs. So the cool of autumn’s

  looked forward to: Brittany, a trip to the sea.

  ‘To watch the storms,’ you explain. A simple

  phrase that leaves you beached, choking. Just

  turned thirty, scalloped to the bone, you’re fighting

  for the right to return to your element: air,

  love, movement. I see you there in the teeth

  of some Atlantic gale, spindrift flying by your chair,

  grinning on a cliff-top. Outfacing the bare

  facts, the unjust laws that sink a survivor.

  Your wit, for instance, still makes me laugh,

  each word retrieved from some deep mine

  of life. If wit alone was sufficient to stall

  whatever’s pinned you here, choking in its creep,

  you’d pick up your chair and walk, Seb,

  running your voice through the resinous

  sotto voce of the pines and the river, then diving there.

  3

  I’m reading you Shelley. A tiny fly

  flickers on your face. I brush it off.

  It returns through the verse, crawls over your forehead

  undisturbed, as if you’re dead; even in sleep

  your hand can’t lift to scratch, or brush away –

  though you tell me you dream of it, and of moving

  like the young man you are through bars and streets.

  4

  You’d shape the garden from your seat,

  the bamboo sheared halfway, the flowers

  scattered with precise care

  along the paths your electric chair

  bumped on, the old pond scoured

  and put to fish, each order gasped

  in Spanish. You called yourself

  ‘Lord’, with that mischievous grin,

  reckoning you had ‘all the power

  of a petty despot’ (unable to lift a finger

  at whim – or anything). Most times you were

  stilled, contemplating, so quiet

  it was hard to make you out

  under the chênes verts. ‘I’m the luckiest

  man alive,’ you’d claim, when you could still

  speak; ‘I can watch the light, actually

  watch it move through an entire day.

  You see? Watch how the sun creeps leaf to leaf,

  the shadows, the birds, the sounds. I feel

  at one with everything,’ you’d add, in hoarse

  gasps, dappled there in the trees and become

  your own sundial, stilled, slowing things

  down until they might go back as they were.

  5

  Soon you spoke only through the letters

  clustered in groups on the square of perspex

  I’d nestle on my lap, peering over it

  as you moved my finger with your eyes’ roll,

  patient as dry-point: your four languages

  stroked out of it, the mother-tongue French

  reserved for your mother – commanding her

  like an infant’s tell-tale cries, aga
in. There was

  a magic, though, in that slowed-down spell:

  PERT . . . IN . . . what? IN . . . what? IN . . . ENTL?

  Ah! LY! PERTINENTLY SAID, you’d said,

  and were saying it now with that ventriloquist’s grin

  that brooked no short-cuts, not even TEA? – as if

  the grammar’s knitting of a full-blown phrase

  (HOW ABOUT A CUP OF TEA

  or, WHOS TO SAY IT WOULD HAVE MADE

  MUCH DIFFERENCE I AM HAPPY NOW)

  was itself a shield, see-through but unshatterable . . .

  along with the jokes, of course: as when those two distant

  relatives from Aix, stooped over you, were shouting

  questions for the deaf, the slow (‘Et comment vas-tu?

  Tu as tous qu’il tefaut?), and my finger’s

  acknowledgment built from your eyes

  THEYRE GHASTLY, in English disguise.

  6

  The day you had to go to the hospital

  for the stomach tube, you were asked

  if you wanted to take anything

  and you said, letter by letter on the perspex

  page (I translate), MY TENNIS RACQUET. And then,

  signalling something more to be added

  through the laughter of those who could move

  and speak and breathe without pain,

  you had them pluck from the strings of letters

  DO YOU RECKON THEY HAVE ANY BALLS

  AT THE HOSPITAL. Two days later you were dead.

  Your last words to the nurse? BON COURAGE.

  MARKET DAY

  I always stop before the fossil stall

  when the market comes round to summer

  like a fleet of sampans and billows

  with striped awnings that shade

  gewgaws, baubles, things only

  the slow magpie tourists need –

  curios for the bored who believe

  it is like this here all the time.

  And what do I know? Nothing.

  I think this again, on pause

  before the simple trestle

  of the fossil stall. There must

  somewhere be abundance of them

  for they are the same each time,

  authenticated in a string of zeroes,

  a hand-written Cambrien or Carbonifère –

  even the dinky, idling teeth

  deleted from early sharks, or the gnat