From the Neanderthal Read online

  Up, down, down, up. Horizontally speaking,

  the infinite depends on our feet.

  There is nothing we could do that we cannot.

  Only the tiger appals us more

  than our own intelligence. Even the thought

  of its big pelt shaking off snow

  might bring one leaping through a clever brow.

  12

  There are various matters to be seen to,

  but I need the landscape to swallow

  more than procreational activity

  this afternoon, so I drift to the boulder.

  Great danger attends the lone one, as once I

  will be old. Anyway, here is the view.

  Tundra. White birch holding purple thickets

  either before or after. Whin, too.

  Right now it’s in a crucial phase of sheer

  lichen. When I stand up, the sky does too!

  13

  The fuss attending the corpse is birds.

  Meat is everyone’s prerogative.

  We’re hauling on tendons with our teeth

  at least twice since, plus the singe of moss.

  Your lights bother me at times, in my sleep.

  They criss-cross and spear and dazzle

  as up they growl or grind like bears

  the crag of my nightmares. Our refuge must be

  plumb in the way, just as over the grasslands

  clouds make their shadows move swifter than them.

  14

  In the upside-down bit of the lake

  the plovers are just as good at swimming

  as their aerial partners: they imitate

  so exactly I have the heretical thought

  that they might be the same, that a being

  can occupy two places without splitting

  and roar to scare the weakness away.

  My partner, struggling with a duck, looks up

  and hisses. I have brought, of course, a now

  extinct genus of wolf the width of my fear.

  15

  From the moment she invented the cradle, perhaps.

  Where our vague recognition, advance,

  took shape and wing, fluttering in our heads.

  Our heads became cages before the cage was invented.

  Now we think in these flocks of geese and starling.

  Some with the arrow-heads of geese.

  Some with the twirling scarves of starling.

  I think the geese are a head ahead, frankly,

  barking the ghosts to their slumbers.

  The noise these thoughts make affronts, but they pass.

  16

  The wind hauls the dawn into our home

  for the night, making us leave it

  for fear of ceasing on the spot. The boulders

  here bear smiles of lichen: inviting types

  between whose tufts of emergent firs

  all manner of cracks might open up

  into chasms: we keep to the tops, leaping

  like goats, the type with curious hind legs

  that swiftly dissolved through the following epoch,

  the one that was merciless with oddities.

  17

  In the period of the juniper berry’s ripeness

  and the blue bilberry, we confronted a fire.

  A high bluff of air had decided to flame.

  It flamed and walked. Pine trees toppled

  towards us. It flamed and walked quite steadily on

  through the bilberry fields and the ripe juniper.

  The sky took it as its lover. The procreational

  activity of wind and flame was a wonder

  that singed our foreheads and brought us the pain

  continuance entails and which death runs from.

  18

  The seer said here will be traffic. Where the pipeline

  runs unattended, legends of Yetis. The rocks will smile

  and many people will tumble in a heap. Big ideas

  will replace the long-toothed tiger in nightmares

  and many the mammoth never born, herds and herds of them:

  like a great inconvenience to the earth

  bravely borne, the great pelts trailing juniper branches

  and literally quivering at each percussion

  of ice on hoof not equipped for something

  he can’t quite see, but is longer than an afternoon.

  19

  The shrubs are gathering in

  their signs and symbols:

  it is winter again.

  So frail, the summer,

  I would like to plait it

  like grass, and keep my place

  in the book of my life

  forever, now, here.

  I’ve noticed this is not possible.

  Something is always ushering us.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following:

  Critical Quarterly, Hablar de Poesia, Independent, Jellyfish Cupful,

  London Review of Books, Poetry Review, Sibila.

  ‘Ghosts’ was commissioned by the South Bank Centre.

  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.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446498156

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Jonathan Cape 1999

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  Copyright © Adam Thorpe 1999

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

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Jonathan Cape

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