Nine Lessons From the Dark Read online

  for hours, sometimes: branch, blossom, bird, berry. Unfortunately born,

  to arrive at the moment when promise was burned, exile,

  family not buried, smoke above the ghetto, the Ukrainian colonel

  head-tapping casually the queue, every other man, to the firing squad

  (closest friend so tapped in front of him), Dante survived

  to fire in ash his bowls that require (he said) a whole wall of white

  emptiness behind, limned by the ash-breath of art.

  7

  Lead mines such as they were dug by Romans

  on moors where the Thorpes had land, mute tussocks

  coming to no more than a few acres ‘somewhere up there’ –

  my father waving his hand in the car as we passed

  and me yearning, on grassed slopes mottled by cow’s dung gazing

  and on the buckled barbed wire about the lead mines

  ‘fallen into disrepair’, deep and dangerous, harbouring

  skulls of those who called for a while, and no one to hear them.

  8

  Bramble-hid, the little fall of stream that no one sees,

  night-noise of tiny Niagara roar under the clear stars

  and smell of water. I once made love under a tree

  with a clear view over pasture heights

  and was barely screened, wincing at roots

  and acorns, the clue of dead leaves on the duffel

  brushed before home. The origin of writing is indents

  in bare skin, verse of water under the covers hidden,

  love-cry under the sky’s openness in March’s Berkshire cold,

  lying on uncomfortable roots and sheep-dung, exposed to one’s land.

  9

  I knew waiting for school’s boarding by the bingo hall in Watford

  the coach would come, the inevitability of deathly things,

  sad things, the sadness in me always like a thorn, coach-sick –

  then staring at my reflection in the coach’s glass

  as it trembled up the broad road past homes and windows

  to the black Wiltshire spaces, downs, like space itself

  a vacuum into which I am thrown, the pure unknown,

  reluctant, sickly with fear, bullies’ thrones on knees before,

  sick for home or for my own career, not bred for this,

  England-outsider, not quite stranger but not friend either, nor foe.

  10

  Vapour hazing the valley, mournful all morning, though

  at two in the afternoon the sun breaks through

  and curtains the view in shafts below dark cloud,

  hill after hill descending to the plain in blues and greys,

  watercolour country today, but oil usually,

  sharp, though all grey shades say painters when the sun’s not

  glittering on the leaves of ilex, every

  hill draped with ilex as downlands with grass,

  the breaks of vines autumnal in red and orange,

  the impossible-to-capture groves of olives

  puffed like smoke, and the sharp little flames of poplars.

  Countless times I’ve been up here behind

  our house, yet never described it; Blanche’s castle

  sitting on its saddle over haze like a conning tower

  and sprawled around it the sea-green pines and ilex,

  the odd half-buried roof of a farmhouse down to the village

  and way out sometimes the line of silvering sea when the light is clean

  and the sharp little teeth of the Alps on their mimicking cloud.

  11

  Not surer than this as stone is, slabs of it,

  sunlit in Nîmes where a Roman company

  slumped to from Egypt conquerings, notable massacres –

  war-excused as always have been, bombs and civilians

  marrying in pain’s ensign of smoke, ghastly

  wet wounds glimpsed then talk only of equipment,

  Rome’s hardware the same though not these planes,

  not the finesse screwed up to such destruction, quarry

  a pinpoint number, heartbeat turned to vague green star

  and out of it all Nîmes’ beauty coming like a captured woman

  freed on the plain, not crocodile at all on its lead

  but a woman, graceful, in ivory of old stone

  and olivey skins, Spanish-Arab, French like an afterthought,

  the water whelming there in the Jardins de la Fontaine

  that Henry James thought perfect in its way,

  the mysterious source of water poured like a blessing,

  oasis in the dry plain of suddenly-pointless mammoth aqueduct

  as some time we shall have no use for anything essential now.

  HONESTY

  Lunaria rediviva

  There is honesty everywhere, we see,

  on our long road back from Germany

  this Easter of war; sprawled on verges

  and road-banks, scattering its lilac,

  honesty was even in that grey village

  with its two routiers and the alcoholic chef

  (thundered through by lorries escaping the tolls),

  where we searched for a bed. It’s rained all day,

  and honesty thrives on the wet slopes

  and the earth-spills near those broken sheds

  of some long-abandoned enterprise

  or in the slim gleam of the beechwood.

  Honesty, though wild, is rare in the wild

  yet here it seems to outdo the rest,

  the ramsons and knapweed and stitchwort.

  A few days back in Germany we saw it

  garden-tamed, filling a bed

  in a village encircled by the Teutoburg forest

  where Arminius fell upon the legions of Rome,

  whooping and wailing and wheeling

  into them until they were as gone

  as extinct species, felled like trees

  under the darker trees, armour

  thumping on the soft pine-mould

  through the screams and moans, the snortings

  of gored horses. The honesty

  was serried into a square between

  a pink rose-bush and the mown lawn

  where plastic toys were liberally

  scattered; it was almost a statement,

  the toys and the honesty, though the villa

  itself was as trim as could be. I wondered, then,

  whether honesty’s look – gawky stems

  where petals attempt some point and class

  against rough-toothed, careless leaves –

  is a fall from cultivated grace

  or one step up from a former state:

  is ascent or decline . . . At any rate, I allow it

  to flower where it will in my own

  garden; a wind’s cast off

  from last year’s blooms, the few always

  appear in a new position, half

  a surprise, half an expectation – their flat

  seed-pods gathered to be dried, silvery

  as coins once the film’s peeled

  then tarnished by months of household dust

  to something awkward caught on sleeves . . .

  as if honesty in all its states is made

  to be a not-quite thing, neither one

  nor the other, neither here nor there;

  a half-cock, an in-between, too common,

  too rare. I would have it sown

  in thick clouds everywhere, that honesty

  might rise, unexpected, from rifts and cracks

  in drifts of lilac, like thunder, like seas,

  happy with its wildness and not waiting on us

  to judge or decide, who know only lies.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With grateful thanks to the following publications where some of these poems first appeared: Hudson Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Metre, London Review of
Books, PN Review.

  ‘Honesty’ was commissioned for broadcast by BBC Radio 3’s The Verb.

  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.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446442746

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Jonathan Cape 2003

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  Copyright © Adam Thorpe 2003

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

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by

  Jonathan Cape

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  ISBN 9780224063852