Nine Lessons From the Dark Page 4

  snagged in boiled-sweet amber

  I roll in my palm. A glimpse

  of coincident eternity, chance

  rendering a flicker immortal, less

  likely even than some still-room full

  of these whiffs of olives and wine,

  our prattling voices over the church bell,

  the tremble of the melon man’s

  hands weighing, the weight of potatoes

  in the basket, the sheepfold

  shiftings of the crowd, or the sourness

  of the mayor (with his clutch of gourds

  and honey-pots) who hates me;

  all these frailer than a whale’s ear-bone

  or this spiral galaxy of ammonite

  in its jet-black slate . . . Far frailer,

  in fact: for these are written for good

  in stone, these trails of tails and burrowings

  or the pricier ancient fish

  dimly X-rayed on plates of sand

  where they sank to, drowned, flat as plaice

  and boned from oblivion to be a souvenir

  sheer chance rescued from time as we

  will not be, now, crowding here

  between the summery stalls and smiles

  and the sour hatred of the mayor.

  MIGRAINE

  1

  Inadequacy: caries of the brain,

  sugared by loneliness. Roots so deep

  it conjures an iron crown

  bolted to the bone, but growing,

  growing. Migraine’s grey house.

  The brilliance of snow on fake trees

  and the flash of jingles.

  And what if this was said to be enough

  for a whole lifetime?

  The skull a sarsen of its own pain

  like the girl’s skidded into by the car

  who said, on France Inter,

  that every second now

  was une vraie galère for good,

  and that she couldn’t forgive.

  And what if she could?

  Would the stone be lifted by a flight of angels?

  Would the undulations flatten to a calm?

  2

  The pain’s organised, like crime:

  the feel it has of cool forests

  falling and falling inside me –

  my head a cartoon Earth, perhaps,

  with vinegar and brown-paper

  poultice, the sun beating down

  on the clear-cut forests, my eyes’

  two washed-up fish that are the bad sign.

  SNOWED UP

  for Kim

  Roads erased, but the milk warm

  from the one farm a way was dug to,

  the ladle tinkling on the churn we queued for

  like Alpine herds. ‘The Lapps

  lined their boots with sennegrass,’

  someone chuckled, stamping his.

  Stranded, becalmed in a glacier’s air,

  news from nowhere, all tidings gone,

  the TVs flickering to candlelight alone.

  Tsunamis of drifts, with shrieks going down;

  the pond and green become the same swell.

  Seraphs of flint-glass, three days old,

  their carrot noses pockmarked by the birds

  and starlight glittering on the dared-on downs.

  The fresh grew stained, and crunched

  like apples. Shovels ringing instead of phones.

  And the butcher was down to brains,

  trotters, eyeballs (‘which I recommend’),

  when, in the drift-bound bus stop, you brushed

  its times into view like a buried capsule

  and sat there waiting for the Swindon one,

  determined to leave, late already.

  And patient for the purr of an engine

  as you were, gratefully mistaken,

  you might have sat it out till nightfall

  clutching your backpack, ready with the change,

  but for the unnerving fathoms of the cold

  and the looks, amazed, from those who saw.

  PRODUCTIVITY

  after George Ewart Evans

  To bring the bloom onto the horses’ coats

  at dawn, each day, before the ploughing . . .

  tansy leaves rubbed between the hands

  and sprinkled in the bait; or sweet

  saffron, baked to dry

  and fed in the same way – though not too much

  or the sweat would bring the powder out

  and the horse would smell of saffron.

  Or cut-up bryony root, fed

  into the chaff; you’d come across it

  ditching, and grate it on the wife’s

  nutmeg grater: it cleaned the skin wonderfully, men

  and beasts. Or a wet of piss on the chaff

  would make the coat shine.

  Or black antimony to get that bloom,

  or rubbing him down lightly with a rag

  dipped in paraffin – that also

  kept the flies off and held him steadiest in the show-ring.

  Or a few leaves off the box hedge

  dried and fed in a powder in the chaff

  kept the sweat down that spoiled the shine.

  And gentian or felwort to keep his appetite,

  bring him back to the rack

  and manger. Mangels from the bullocks’ barn

  ground up, that toned them up, too,

  April time, just after coming out of the clamp.

  And into the open field

  after two hours’ grooming, turning out to plough

  at 6.30 a.m. with a shining team

  for the strong loam and leaving the furrows

  without a wrinkle to mar the whole length of it . . .

  that kept you on your toes, that did,

  they did, did the horses.

  PLAY IT AT FORTY-FIVE

  Too like a Dutch town, my mind:

  well-behaved, no sudden ululations

  of grief or despair, no wild

  shaman dances of admiration

  for the attendant gods; more

  the discreet frown that hinges on propriety,

  my bill of care the slight pucker

  of indigestion, of life going down

  too easily, too fast. I am rarely

  startled, these days, and my dreams

  are an iconography of trains

  I’m always running for but seldom miss

  though they never arrive where I think

  they might, amid the dated hiss

  of everything I ought to have done

  beyond the sign of caution, slowing down.

  GHOSTS IN THE BATHS OF CARACALLA

  The gloom beyond the roadside planes expands

  to a Chicago skyline of shattered brick,

  a labyrinth of half-domed halls that sounds

  with the squeals of swifts, like children, like a trick

  of light on polished, fish-drawn tiles; we’re almost

  persuaded. We wade through clumps of grass instead,

  stand on the marble lips of a dried-up past

  and try to find what the guidebook said

  about tepidarium, noting the pipes and drains.

  Steam-bath vapours, hazed windowlights,

  the fear of verrucas and showing the stains

  on your underpants, changing; the boards’ heights

  higher than your vanity; the sting of bleach

  gathering like crumbs under the eyelids. The girl

  who drowned on Opening Day in Amersham, unable to reach

  air through the ganglion legs and turning to pearl,

  lying unseen all day at twelve foot six while

  life thrashed above her in its usual style,

  lies here, too: Roman, now, and dignified

  by all these who’ve enjoyed themselves and died.

  BLUEBERRY PICKING IN MICHIGAN

  for Lucy and Hugo Wistreich

  Along with the o
rchards’ Main Street-straight straight rows

  and the Pick-Your-Own bunch of families’ cries

  (‘Where are you, honey . . .?’ ‘I’m here, right here!’)

  through the stripes and shots of sunlight between the leaves

  the farm’s to be sold, we’re told. ‘Lucy, I’m beat.

  It’s sixteen hours a day and I’m gettin’ old.’

  The final harvest and it’s hard to believe

  when all it takes is a twist and a squeeze

  for each fat pap to be tumbled to fruit

  that peppers neck-slung panniers or spills to be juiced

  on the ground: how crazy to think this can all be razed

  where abundance itself’s a kind of law, a right!

  Our baskets are heavy, the day too warm. My son’s

  showing me how the blue rubs off to a shine as black

  as a mouse’s eyeball (though black is really blue, deep down) . . .

  Sorcerer-lipped, indigo-woaded, we grin like clowns

  as the farmer ribs us on our return: the original

  sin in the garden, and how we’d ‘better git up

  on the scales, too, you guys, judgin’ by your faces!’

  The Last Day beckons in the sign erected there already

  on the road: Prime Land for Real Estate with so

  many acres. Orchards just don’t pay, you say, these days –

  ‘even in Michigan, Garden of the World’: the coming season’s

  mashed-up soil ruled off to plots, zoned for the diggers.

  It’ll ripen to something though, I suppose: lawns in the blueberry

  light of dawn; glistening sidewalks under snow; seep

  of fries and hysteria of TVs (‘While they’re

  too nice with curd,’ the farmer’s saying), or a dim phone

  continuing on through the middle of an afternoon.

  CORDIAL

  (Corrèze)

  The stuffed fox’s cobweb runs from its nose

  to the rusted tins of sugar on the chimneypiece;

  the black pot’s slung above the smouldering log

  and pulses steam. The walls have been smoked out of whiteness

  to the rusty brown of a windfall, almost golden;

  hold dated calendars and beehived nudes

  pinned and curling like bills in Dutch still-lives.

  He was feeding the pigs outside, the bent old man;

  now we are with him among the dark benches,

  the one big table hidden under a welter of papers.

  The sign may be broken but he’s hung on here for fifty years,

  ‘toujours ouvert’. We order some sirop for the kids.

  Glugged out of a dusty, retro-labelled bottle

  swirling with sediment, it leaves a corona

  where the level’s stayed put too long, it seems;

  smells vaguely methyl, though it’s grenadine.

  He thins it down tumbler by tumbler under

  the doddery tap. ‘There’s something wrong,’ Josh hisses,

  ‘taste it!’ Like a forest floor it’s fermented

  into strength, mellow as island malt

  from not being asked for for God knows

  how many years. He’s telling us of his stretch,

  ‘during a man’s best time’, as a prisoner of war –

  come back too old for ‘les filles’, he stayed

  celibate, uncourted; the unstirred spirit steeped

  only in its own hour, here between the trees.

  We walk back home in awe, unsteadied by a

  child’s drink: that someone can just live

  there where it is good, accreting the years like leaf

  fall, altering nothing, strikes me as rare and fine –

  if only that strength could be foreseen, like wine.

  EXILE

  England, royal-revelation-awash,

  (muck’s sluice-tide) barely holds her head

  above the waters of her own front page,

  the rustling, thrown-away woods of her mind.

  Murrain. War. Fame. What was it Eliot

  said? Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog . . .

  One day you will show me a perfect creature

  of small cornfields and vales, sunlight

  on spires, towns cosy behind their walls

  and love at the sharp end of age.

  TRACKS

  Up in the Alps

  on a fair day of snow-sheets

  we tracked a rabbit

  to a sudden hiatus

  of blood and fur.

  Fox, I said – not knowing

  any better, but excited

  by something vinous and heady

  to show the kids:

  as if life doesn’t

  always come

  spotting the bland snow

  with its bright

  abruptness – or doesn’t

  so clearly now,

  pound-foolish

  with beast, bird and forest,

  drawing the curtain

  like a white drift

  over the way (mistaken

  for the hard path underfoot)

  to the blizzard’s cliff.

  SCRATCHINGS

  Jour enselevi que la poésie dégage comme la bêche la source

  Yves Bonnefoy

  1

  If America, her spirit of anywhere lives

  it is here, on Rockford’s frayed edge

  of diners, malls, neon, cross-stitch freeways.

  Rained on in storm and exhaling the burnt offering

  of summering cement, tarmac, the lawn surround

  of a Burger King on its midnight strand of parking.

  The woman, skin-ruffed, grimly at the counter

  with headphones, lipmike, lonely in the fall

  of frosty light, takes our orders and calls.

  Lonely Hopperish all-night brightness,

  lonely buzz of the kitchens’ electrics like anxiety.

  Madness. Madness in the absence of prairie, here –

  something deadly numbed not there that should be.

  Is this precisely where (this spot) the Sioux,

  for instance, spied their non-gods

  in loneliness of fasting, creatures of earth and air,

  the solemn hide-flap of the tipi opening

  to a universe speeding from the eyes like horses

  to no known end but the end of breathing?

  2

  Gods? Have done with them.

  Gods obscure the woods, the stones, the moon,

  on a hanging edge the beech golden that combs down to the coomb

  or the fox fleeting narrowly beneath it that one morning.

  The sparrow-hawk spotted by us tree-nursery workers

  knelt to the inching oaks, their leaves frost-dotted,

  dawn then like a polished stone, flint

  to fire all along, goaded us to pray but we didn’t.

  Or the Essex marshes by the Sainsbury depot

  from the train like something consoling seen, waving

  rushes and the blades of floods over acres.

  Have done with them all in majesty of sea water, woods.

  3

  Shuttered laundrette in a morning haze,

  damp’s vaseline and the smell of feet

  in the shop where the news is baled

  on the floor to trip me up, the shuffle

  of the old black guy at the corner with his Asda bags:

  all this unchanging, as if in Latin, a tower-block

  merely the interruption of the laconic barbarian,

  Bedlam still there where it stood, bottom of Eastcheap,

  my suitcase careering on its wheels

  behind me, running, late (bomb scare on the Tube),

  stopping this guy – an Australian – to check,

  who tells me with great concern

  not to go further than Waitrose, mate.

  Everyone whelmed by what’s under,
not above, old

  places for burial whose skeletons resemble the insane

  screaming through portholes, silenced, in pain going down.

  In the train’s funnelling fury I find

  a fresh language, as London once after fire did,

  ransacked, gutted: What was doing it was that open

  sea-chest. And the speaker serious in a grey suit.

  4

  The school’s gull-cries even from the stumbling path

  down to where my daughter’s already alight with release,

  coming home. My own home-comings in Chesham,

  long levelled light of evening, the bus windows misting

  so blankly one day I missed the stop and went right on

  to where I didn’t know, no longer crack-hopping on familiar ways

  but abandoned to my own whereabouts in a large road; and remained

  but to walk, ask, vague directions right to my mother’s alarm that lateness

  made dream of things no child should know, mist-bound and blissful.

  5

  So close to madness the scooter accelerated of its own accord,

  braked at the roundabouts and junctions, took me to my place.

  So mad the electric heater beamed itself to life, clicked off

  while you were thinking of me. Aglow enough with longing.

  So mad I might be, oblivion’s second chance, the hedgerow

  becoming a maze, feeding off wood sorrel and lapping at where

  the brambles touch me. So mad I might be, in the dim

  twilight of woods, your deadleaf-coloured stroke of fortune

  falling into sunlight or far-off clash of trolleys like wind-stroked wheat

  where once wheat was – and before that the madness of pure trees.

  6

  Dante your uncle, kind, who looked into the snake eyes

  of the SS guard in Warsaw, kin to oblivion, sudden; chance luck;

  lost all his family who didn’t mind the omens deep in the spine,

  who survived on berries in Polish woods, daring himself down for bread,

  has died, is burned to ashes and his ashes spread in Kenwood under a particular tree

  by the gravel walk he loved and will always remember,

  his pots the colour of pools and trees and moments one remembers

  as moments, his swift brush-strokes strokes of memory one waits for