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  my fingers are free to wander (an invisible stitch

  of desire): a country where nowhere is a deviation.

  PANIC

  Hitting Cuisines in the new IKEA,

  besieged by hobs, I was paralysed

  by the arrows on the floor.

  This is the only way, they claimed,

  through the rooms’ pretence

  where couples were dimpling beds

  with practice bottoms, yanking

  at fairy-lights, stocking up on

  what my mother would call,

  as far as I remember, ‘sundries’.

  I started to walk against them,

  counter to the flow, knowing

  those shelves only had books as a sop

  to types like me who don’t

  exist in the real world: solecistic

  in the perfect grammar of hob and bed.

  Incorrigible, I emerged in daylight

  as someone might who, escaping

  from a theatre’s fug mid-scene,

  finds himself out on stage,

  dazzled; pretending to be gratified

  by his own applause.

  CHECKING BLOOD PRESSURE

  It’s the same old trick: making you think,

  as the cuff goes on, that each puff up

  to the squeeze and squeeze and squeeze

  is a tender thing: the reassurance

  of the bloated god with time

  on his hands, a helpful hand on the arm,

  a kind teacher’s touch:

  not the blood cut off, the clasp

  that’s overdone, or the relief when,

  sighing in that same old rubbery way,

  he is gone for another year, and it’s all

  retrenchment behind the bonhomie.

  MARGINALIA

  History breathes in silence,

  watched from afar. Ordericus Vitalis,

  ‘benumbed with winter frosts’,

  lays down his weary, twelfth-century pen

  in his Historia Ecclesiastica

  I’m reading in Dean Church’s translation

  from a Cambridge compilation of sources

  dated (the soundless shell-bursts!)

  1918. A long telescope

  of scholarship, yet the bench

  creaks as the old monk labours

  over his letters in the cold.

  The smews tuck in their wings

  on the abbey’s frozen lake

  where grey lags, blurred from wind,

  say kark, kark. Their arrows soon

  to puncture all that laborious

  prose as usual, heralds

  to ‘the soft air of spring’

  and all that he would rather sing of

  transfigured into leaf

  before the gadfly heat

  of summer, the wafts of dung,

  the craving again for frosts.

  IN COURT

  Nîmes, December 2007

  The accused turns her head and our eyes meet:

  two bore-holes face me, ringed by fatigue. Le vide.

  Manipulatrice. I feint a smile; the family don’t.

  Always a terror, huge, built like a man. Even her son,

  ashamed of his dad’s loose ways with the girls,

  says he regrets what she did. A gruelling

  July heat over three days, the neighbours

  noticing a smell. From under the stairs,

  newly sealed with a sheet of plasterboard

  and a lick of paint, something leaked. A body

  is mostly water, the judge declares. Did you

  not know that? Or really think your

  husband would simply shrivel and dry

  like a fig? She whispers, ‘I did’. And the family

  around me stir and smile (knowing her well),

  while she stays put in her own leak-proof hell.

  But you can see the logic in it, I think, as the witnesses

  speak, sob, praise him like the lover he was,

  no doubt, of several among them … the divorce

  meant everything divided, from the little dream house

  to the pool she’d dug, the neighbours said,

  with her own bare hands. And what do you share with the dead,

  who take nothing with them, and never return?

  The logic of bare hands, that: or history’s slow burn.

  PUNCTURED

  The taut membrane, nail-splittable,

  of my brother’s Fokker back in ’64:

  ready for the maiden after months of until, now

  waiting for him to take the bus from school.

  Stretched so taut, tappable, like a drum. Such

  temptation. All it would take was my only thought,

  like later leg-overs separated from me

  by the last and impossible distance of lunge.

  ROADS THEMSELVES ARE SILENT

  The motorway’s sough beyond the hill’s beech

  is not motors so much as tarmac and rubber,

  a word like indubitable over and over,

  failure only in the skid’s squeal –

  that tell-tale scar like a dark ladder.

  And what if the urubu of wooden wheels,

  the Xhosa clicks of hooves on cobbles,

  the smack of the loose manhole cover

  that keeps us awake, or the morse

  after midnight of those lone high heels

  might betray themselves to speech:

  what would they say? That roads

  themselves are silent; they make us

  speak. Even the fervent pressure of pilgrims

  on the bleak ways between dangerous wastes

  leaves behind it – what? A silence.

  Like that quiet of the museum

  with its stretch of peat-pegged track,

  dark from its bog and forlorn, as mute

  as a rim-impression in Roman marble.

  And what a frightening thought, that everything

  is always on its way to somewhere else,

  whatever route we pick – eternally

  advancing to the promised goal

  like armies whistling over the trapped

  boots’ drum, their standards flapping,

  their knees as one. Though silence

  is following them, as well.

  VOLUNTARY

  North Wootton Common, Norfolk

  Pools are spreadeagled

  and the near marsh

  suggests itself oozily under the grass, but a flock

  of geese straddles

  the raised pass

  on which I’m heading

  for the one gate

  in the long alder-mess of hedge: I

  hesitate and then

  walk on, watching

  the birds levitate

  en masse into a clear

  blue winter sky on a broken-harmonium

  medley of cries

  to shape, if vaguely,

  their conventional V

  and head towards the delta

  I cannot see. A few separate like rebellious

  adolescents,

  flecks I track

  across the sky’s screen

  as if fretful for them,

  until they wheel with a suitable insouciance

  and join the group,

  its wake already

  dissolving in distance

  (the flock’s shadow

  bounced by the grass, grey as ash, less

  uniform and swifter as it sweeps

  over me and screens

  the sun in a flash).

  All but one, that is – who’s

  doggedly travelling the other way, so completely alone

  I could give it a name,

  consider its fate.

  I feel like shouting

  out but can’t.

  Tough luck swerves for no one: probability’s

  the curve it pursues

  until its dot

&nbs
p; assumes its own

  extinction … a voluntary

  exile, free at last – or condemned to a lonely

  end in some oil-slicked

  pool, garbage tip

  or waste of choppy sea

  I can so easily

  imagine as I carry on regardless to the rusty gate,

  its top cross-bar

  garlanded with barbed wire,

  its latch a palliative I cannot take.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following: Times Literary Supplement; Poetry Review; ATOL – Art Therapy Online; Alhambra Poetry Calendar; Love Poet, Carpenter – Michael Longley at Seventy.

  ‘Via’ and ‘Roads Themselves Are Silent’ were commissioned for broadcast by BBC Radio 3’s Between the Ears.

  I am deeply grateful to the Estonian Writers’ Union for a grant towards the writing of this volume as well as generous accommodation at the Union House in Käsmu.

  The brief quote in ‘Second Homers’ is from the last lines of ‘Rite and Fore-time’ in David Jones’s The Anathémata (1952).

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Published by Jonathan Cape 2012

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  Copyright © Adam Thorpe 2012

  Adam Thorpe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

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  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  Jonathan Cape

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