LUX (2017)
Image: Self-portrait after the Sacred Heart by Michelle Boyle www.michelleboyle-artist.com
A TINY WHITE FEATHER
A LACE STAR
LES NYMPHEAS
A GLASS OF RED WINE IN A STILL LIFE
THE STUDIO
SETTLING
CALENDAR: DECEMBER
GHOSTS AND RUINS
AUTUMNAL WALKERS
HOUSES
ROOTS
THE LANE
BOTTLES
A RUN OF DISTANT NOTES
HANDS
EARTH
A WALK IN THE COUNTRY
ALTITUDES
THRIFT
A CRUMBLING CHIMNEY
LUX
EVERYTHING IS WHITE IN THE HARBOUR
A BLUE-ROOFED CHURCH
SHEDDING
REFLECTORS
DOORWAY
WETLAND SWANS
BUTTERFLIES
WHAT IS SHE LOOKING AT?
THE FAREWELL SHIP
BREAKING THROUGH
ORANGE BOWL
SMOKE
PAPER HAT
ALREADY
WAITING FOR THE WORD
CARGOES
A TANGLE OF RAINBOWS
THE VANISHED
SUGAR CUBE
GLASS
THE SWING
ECLOGUE
BOYS
STATE OF THE WORLD
A TINY WHITE FEATHER
A tiny white feather
from a migrating bird
has fallen among the pines -
a world minute,
a world entire.
Yannis Ritsos
A LACE STAR
Thread upon thread, a whiteness builds;
a bud, a rose, star-points on a bed
that will be velvet when night comes
and this great whorl is unveiled,
a spiral formed in the warmth of supple fingers
curved as if to honour memory.
No pen leaves as sure a tracery.
And at its heart is the first piercing,
light pricking the astonished mind, the pupil’s
jolt into the rush of consciousness
of needlepoint and flow:
a solar haze, ideas, arteries.
LES NYMPHEAS
The girl in front of Monet's
lilies stands as though before a screen
where every iridescent colour plays
the music of her teens,
losing herself in violet, or perhaps
dreaming of the first girl Monet kissed.
So still is she, the light
turns and envelops her; she seems to be
assuming a far lily's almost-white,
the dark weeds' mystery,
as if she were discarding layer by layer
herself, the self she thinks herself, that other
the moment lays upon her,
and suddenly how slim she has become,
spectral even, her breath the merest tremor:
she takes the colours' warmth
with her into the foggy Tuilieries,
its gravelled lines, its sharp October trees.
A GLASS OF RED WINE IN A STILL LIFE
Thick as mud close up,
choppy as a sea, the dark settles into blood
on a black background. The eye is held
by pricks of light on grapes,
each one a perfect white
the thickness of a bristle, and the sliver
of the glass's rim could cut a finger.
Only the eye, still bright,
of a hare rebukes us,
it seems to be peering out in judgement
at our sad world of trickery and pigment,
something in its look
strikes us as more than human,
such as we read in tales of speaking animals
where the teller, like the artist, has distilled
in an incidental touch
a truth he only sees
on stepping back. And from the distance
of another yard, time floods the canvas
and the crystal's transparency
is an act of looking past
the moment, into the depth of a mirror
or the hollow of a bowl, or any other
kind of emptiness.
A slight shift, patterns on enamel,
chased silver, reassume the form we need
and midday settles gently, like a hood
as the room fills
and becomes a murmur.
But the mind is drawn back to the wine
that caught the light then, the rim's hairsbreadth line,
and the first hovering tremor.
THE STUDIO
Hands flow through gestures -
half-moon, peacock,
flag, mountain-peak,
then the body dog-folds
and the back like Atlas holds
the world in posture.
Noon in the studio.
The floor is warm
to the toes and palms
of those who wish to go
into the East, or into a self
that will endure, as if
their own world, cleft
from shoulder to heel,
could be made whole
by the crane, the flower,
and a stretched, held hour
would heal that rift.
SETTLING
A table on the Rue de l'École.
The angels on the Sorbonne wall
fold their wings as night advances,
a diner reaches for his bill
as if for something that convinces.
Silence. A distant scuff of bottles
as light retreats along the bend
toward the square. And something settles
between the bistro window, and
the shadow where the future falls.
CALENDAR: DECEMBER
The lens has purpled winter sky
more deeply-rich than sun-scattered pink.
Car lights swerve as on a rink,
skirting the threshold of a mystery,
disappear round a shop-lit corner
into nothingness. Junkerngasse,
the Bundeshaus, guessed-at in darkness,
do not exist. Mind's eye goes no farther.
Summer scene, vineyard by the river,
fades to an urban frost, as if to warn
how, even in picture-postcard Bern,
men die from cirrhosis of the liver.
GHOSTS AND RUINS
Ghosts are what we make in the mind
of townlands not passed through,
names like Clovis, New Mexico;
faces put on people never met,
known by name alone, living and dead;
vision of rock before quarrying,
sand bodied, unscattered;
whatever never seen, touched, tasted,
never experienced, put to waste;
odd forms, born of a need to speculate.
Memories are ruins,
walls crumbling, foundation fixed,
decayed from first fusing of bricks;
confined without, impossible to restore,
even with ghostly help, to a former glory.
AUTUMNAL WALKERS REMEMBER
THEIR GARDEN IN SPRING
'Laughter,
there was laughter playing about the lips,
the most delightful meetings
where faces exuded the light of the world
and the undulating water sparkled as it danced
beneath the living pendulum of kisses.
There were tongues,
columns like llamas born of twilight,
and a blazing ivory presided over
a meeting of longed-for flesh.'
~
Don't say desire, no, don't say spring.
They are words which sour our mouths.
And don't say garden.
Let's walk on quietly and contemplate
the bank of this pool inhabited by statues,
where dreams fall silent and evening beds
the calm of their voices,
this lukewarm banishment,
with a muffled tone that covers our eyes.
Andrés Blanco
HOUSES
One by one the houses
like lights, are flickering off and on.
A life goes out, another takes possession.
That list of names that rolled off your tongue
those years ago - Toye, Cartwright, Galvin -
where have their faces gone?
Like fields, their boundaries pulled down,
those ditches we used jump, filled in.
And you, somewhere behind us,
your moon not yet risen;
the stars you recalled from memory
years ago, are simply stars again,
the patterns you helped us see,
merged with the past, that dust, infinity.
Old maps I've read suggest
we played pitch and toss above a river.
I followed its unseen trickle and twist
along the bottom of abandoned gardens,
reaching a point where nothing seemed solid.
It runs still, I'm sure,
not as a dream or ghost, but like an animal
at night - or an eel, drawn
by something pagan, some unfathomed navigation.
ROOTS
After the ward grows hushed,
broken vaguely by the creak of wheels,
whispers at the desk, a distant flush,
or the half-footfall
of a dragging leg, I sit and think
of you before your mind assumed its dark.
That flat bush by the gate
you leapt with barely a run-up, is a tree
so densely packed and twisted it must die
under its own weight.
Remembering how we bent its limbs like bows,
it's hard to grudge it that grotesque repose
except I find its calm
a kind of mockery of your hollowed state,
it leans aside and waits a final storm
while your forever night
remains undrawn, unmeasured. That a mind
should simply vanish, is beyond unkind
but what are we to do?
Say plainly this is how it was and is,
that whether we know or not, the same day passes,
but pay what reverence is due
to memory broken like a stepped-on shoot,
the dark-green tracery of withered roots.
THE LANE
A day heavy as this, the lane between cuts,
damp, closing, crab-apples like bullets.
A hum as if from heat, the sky a tunnel,
grass rough against my shins – what age was I? –
too grown-up to be scared, but still uneasy,
and on and down, toward the broken ditch,
a patch of gold. Then suddenly a cat,
a corner of its head a bubbling purple
exploding into countless flies. I retched
but couldn’t move. It raised its head and spat
then lay back glazed among the bullet-apples,
in its eyes the knowledge of good and evil.
BOTTLES
I grew up in a time of subtle
change, when bringing back bottles
for thruppence each was going out
of fashion. Their thick tapering necks,
their mouths, had the perfection
of a volcano, and the stale,
sticky perfume of sugar or stout.
How heavy they were in the hand!
Dark, brown or green, they reminded
me for some strange reason
of velvet, thick, rich, impenetrable;
was it the forgotten smell
of brandy at a card table?
Money of our own for bringing back bottles.
It was a time when everything was possible.
A RUN OF DISTANT NOTES
Through corridors just wide enough for one,
walls cool and smooth, we file into a room
that once was two nuns' cells.
I look out at a February lawn,
grass roots split as if by an act of will
by snowdrops almost too frail to bloom.
Sick too long, the aunt who hasn't been
herself for thirty years, the aunt we knew;
swaddled in starch and drips,
her breath so shallow it may well have stopped,
her eyes dilate in light but give no clue
of what goes on within;
who long ago became a memory
even as she lost hers. This is the end,
this time, and no conjecture
on mental emptiness, that dried-up river,
gives any comfort; nor infinity:
the sun sets never to rise again.
But when thin morning breaks, she will at last
become complete and human as the dead,
more than she is at present, giving
us leave to remember how at first
she filled her years with music, slowly moving
toward the silence in her head,
and how, when all else failed, a run of distant
notes could stir something more - or less -
than memory; and how like smoke
it vanished. But that phrase, never forgotten
by those who heard it, lingers somewhere, like
a promise or a hope of bliss.
HANDS
A sharpness of stars on glass
when I called too late
the shop all but shut,
the slicer dismantled,
its great blade taken out.
Those big hands, how delicate
their touch, as the fine cloth
slid like a skater
along the edge. Under the bulb
those nicks on his fingers
were fresh as gills -
and how suddenly the steel
flashed as he lifted it level,
a bowl, an offering, the first wheel!
EARTH
Now that the long forgetting is over,
let thoughtless earth receive you, as is proper,
but know that you have become entire
again, at last like every other.
A WALK IN THE COUNTRY
Now the bushes are beginning to green
and mud is trampled and hardened in tracks
where the city comes up sharp against mountain.
There are places I promised myself I'd walk
and haven't yet. Time is moving on,
sometimes the reward for steadiness is to be stuck
in the commonplace. Names like Ticknock
and Sugarloaf have lost their allure;
the last time I drove past, that sky was thick
with autumnal mist or an air
of disappointment. Why this reluctance
to shake off a feeling that clings like an ache
but is surely the insidious lapping of complacency?
I think back seven years to the raw pleasure
of breathing cold-sharpened air, feet
and fingers numb in upland-hugging snow;
how brittle everything was, how tentative, and yet
as full of possibility as potential for disaster;
and the fact that everything was just so slightly
out of reach was reason enough for letting it all go.
And what came into that space? A picture
of an old schoolhouse, restored now; that wonder,
stupefaction almost, that when a thing is gone,
it's gone; the full or empty lives of children
not children anymore; this vague future,
its measure changed for good, a day, an hour.
Now comes again the time for impatience,
for wishing paths and walls to be overgrown,
a day-lived dog rose among crumbling brick.
Everything quickens, yet every year the sense of urgency
takes longer to kick in, but is no less keen
for it - is it that knowledge of time running out takes
the sting out of its own pain? Does it matter?
Maybe it's all as Beckett says - fail better.
Ah no, it's easy for the great to say that,
the rest of us struggle to put value on our failure.
Only when we do can we surrender to the hour:
the judgement of history is always the silence of the forgotten,
read between the lines by us who are forgotten in turn.
ALTITUDES
Here, in this small space,
is as high as you can go,
far enough for breathlessness
and that powdery blue
leaching from sky onto land.
Everything is at the edge of sight
and here it is - the astonishment
at being where nothing belongs,
not even the hardiest goat
worries the grass in cracks
sheltered by an overhang.
A moment for the head
to clear, the lungs to fill.
Nothing more shouts transience
than a place where nothing changes,
where, away from it all,
there is nowhere to hide.
This morning contours were ridges
on a fingerprint, green
giving way to yellow, to brown.
Now the eye sweeps across counties
slipping into each other, like age
or that thin cold no sun shifts.
White floats like smoke round
the edge of a wood, limed
fields are a remnant of frost,
and it takes a little longer each time
to shake off tiredness and thirst
as if the mountain was filling out
like the young as you drift
away from them, each summit
reached now with no more than a sense
of having won in spite of weakness,
which is still enough, as it was once,
that first climb, exhausted, giddy,
adrenaline pumping its joy through the body.
THRIFT
Viewed from across the bay
it’s not as it was thought, another country,
merely the same, seen through the glass cage of years
or the pain of freedom, the feet immediately
rooted to old fears
and the knowledge that no dream
can turn the past into a clay you smear
between fingers – a wanderer scrabbling the soil of home;
that time is a scattering of losses better
left where they are.
Except of course we can’t,
and at that stage when goad and leash are one
the only comfort lies in whispering that it doesn’t
really matter – what is there left to want
that’s not already gone?
A patch of colour moves
barely within sight, a purple gash
in the sea wall, hanging by thin roots above
the bite of salt, rocked by every lash
of wind, each tidal rush.
Hooked on the immediate,
its sustenance the crumbling of a rock,
a continent of moving ice its food and drink,
its swaying there’s a miracle of thrift;
if wind dies its own weight,
top-heavy, would loose and cast
it into nothing; the apparent pain
of being forever pummelled both ways is a must,
a sufferance that perfectly maintains
the balance of unrest.
A CRUMBLING CHIMNEY
In the morning the footpath is flaked
with red chippings, red dust,
that deep rich orange that comes
only from a certain age of brick
and in the crumbling only the slightest
hint remains of its shape, its packed
wholeness. The fire it seems
has shed itself in the last storm.
This is the way a house sometimes
dies, from the outside in,
obvious like a lesion on the skin
with a fullness of life enclosed, not caring
or keeping a fast grip on joy, at home
in the fading littleness of cheerful rooms
where nothing that matters is beyond repair
and the creak of decay is happening anywhere.
Remember the brickworks at night,
fields white and starched like a fresh sheet?
In the middle of nowhere red stars glowed
through ventilation chinks. Trees nearby stayed
green longer, budded out early
and birds in winter squabbled for a warm roost,
or is that another trick the mind played
when everything shut down? There have been so many,
and even now at times the body snaps awake
at four in the morning say, in a panic
over something that will never come about,
a memory that's finally escaped,
or from a dream of an irreparable leak.
The world must make its way through the tightest
seal, brick weather, ridge tile slip,
the mind, however terrified, fall back to sleep.
Last night's lash of wind and rain leaves a trail
of mortar-grit and flakes of red
across the roof; a galaxy of damp has spread
along the attic wall. Now begins the inevitable
patching up that will one day be one
too many. But in my life's eye I have it still,
that first long sight of brick, far-stretching, beautiful,
sunset and a sea to sail on.
LUX
I
Half-promises to meet again,
hired cars shifting into gear.
A hall empty to wind and rain,
grass where it hasn't grown for years.
The final argument rehearsed,
familiar, no conclusion drawn,
stories like broken slates dispersed.
A dozen parting waves, each one
wondering how they missed the bomb
inside that shell of reticence.
An unseen image of you, gone
at last where there is no pretence.
II
Between hero and anti-hero is a line
almost invisible, like a fault in the brain
seen only after its rupture;
how earnestly, how often you tried
to move from one side to the other
but never managed to leave the middle,
slightly unbalanced like a tightrope walker.
When did that imagining yourself a fraud
begin? When did it veer toward the fatal?
There are fields, streets, music, which from
this moment will never again be complete,
a sense of wholeness has been taken away
and not just now, but retrospectively,
by the admission of what we never guessed
nor were meant to. Was it that maturity
became a flowering of thorns and stings,
knowledge face to face with its own uselessness,
a voice confronting the futility of song?
III
Moonlight wanders through that empty site
where you'd hoped to plant exotic trees.
Someone will come across a sheet
pricked with green whorls and Latin tags
in your peculiar sloping hand.
Tonight that field sits like an abandoned prize
in the lottery of a mind
that saw the world just once perhaps
as an enormous park, neat, clipped,
gently contoured, perfect except
with trees instead of people, no plastic bag
littering with its truth a random twig.
And only in that nowhere country, Love,
would such a park flourish or even exist,
only there, those watercolour leaves
open on a day clean as a page
never exposed to air. The best
of your story is that you were capable
of hope; that it was never purged,
and when it was abandoned it was left whole.
And trees will never be the same
for your having looked on them
differently. The light they feed on is nothing
but itself, the dead shot through the living.
IV
Your ear was always too fine for the clutter
of music; it listened for the space
between notes, that pace where scent
floats unnoticed between flower and passing senses.
Today the sun risen on fields no longer white
calls me to that ridge where the river
drops the last of its mud, flood-swept
from the uplands, stirring the spring trout,
and broadens out to insect-swarming banks,
sudden patterns of bewildering light,
the mystery of clarity and depth.
You trawled that hidden shelf, holding your breath,
balancing float and weight yet losing both.
And later, coming back, the bend grape-dark
in twilight, you tried to conjure up
an hour in the irretrievable past
remembering that the river keeps its shape
by rejecting every atom of itself,
that it exists because there is no self
only an outline, a path, a flow,
backwaters calm in a hole where the bank
crumbled. I can trace in air that stone
where your feet rested, the hour a slow
humming of countless tiny lives
and that far song, riding a broken wave,
carried off like an unweighted line.
V
You left us your belief in the immediate
as if it could be passed on, but it seems
impossible ever to see the unfamiliar for the first time;
what you said about beauty holds true
only for you, and it's scant consolation to admit
you were right; that a child's astonishment at the new
never disappears, we refine it almost to the point
of non-existence, but it persists, is the irritant
in the oyster that makes the pearl. But what you knew
wasn't enough in the end, you tried to conjure
the child-miraculous by an act of will and failed.
I often wonder how it must have felt
out there, stranded, with a sense of everything underfoot
crumbling from the bottom up. That long steady wait
you passed without a word, left sadness but no void -
birdsong catches us by surprise as we did before,
the child-miraculous coming back - just once.
Sometimes, in spite of ourselves, we see beyond sense.
VI
Driving back, I slow to watch
a house's innards being tossed
into a skip, each cast a retch,
the grey walls vomiting their dust
and I remember photographs,
their edges curled, exposed to air,
the ghosts and rubble of a life
tipped into a hole somewhere
or fragments rescued as we pick
through dreams and rubbish in the rain,
our thoughts locked on a wishing back,
the broken re-imagined clean.
EVERYTHING IS WHITE IN THE HARBOUR
Everything is white in the harbour
and the wandering souls,
the outcasts, the exiles
catch hold of the ephemeral
though each one
has their story, their dream
hard like a pebble
but the insolent pointed wavelets say
there is nothing more to write on the surface of things
and that still nothing is accomplished
Michel Cosem
A BLUE-ROOFED CHURCH
A cut ridge on an ancient stumbling hill,
grass on thin clay; the river valley, parched,
snakes up through twisted olive groves, between
scattered bone-white walls.
A gathering of green, and then
a distant blue-roofed church
whose sky-reflecting dome put me in mind
of Louth spires, small and sharp above the tree-line
like slender thorns drawn gently from the skin;
they need no blue to set
themselves before the eye, no sun
to plant them opposite
their thousand years. The placid stretching land
gives back its bone in thicker cereal
than on the hills of Crete. Mid-morning sighs,
old men like Ailill’s bull,
breathless, coming to the end,
wake and struggle to rise.
SHEDDING
Of what, these too many years,
we learned, this is the surface,
the berg above water,
those bright contours of recall,
exposed, shifting, malleable.
And the remembered -
the dark mass of the glacier
moving toward an inevitable tropic,
its yet-unbroken ice
dying at the edges, locked
in a network of streams devoured
by being made whole.
And so we move, restless,
shedding more than we gather,
diminishing as the years pass,
shedding, yet gathering still.
REFLECTORS
Jeanne and Robyn with reflectors
swirl Atlantic light
like Californian prospectors
panning for a fruit no one can eat.
Near as we get to sun and moon
their gold and silver,
and not the slightest tremor
when silence falls and the lens
pierces like a pin the moment;
and what it mines,
what flickers on the instant,
is balanced in their hands.
DOORWAY
Living with the truth of changing light
you move in the moment or sit with it
knowing nothing will ever be as planned,
that old men at a doorway mending nets
are narrowing their vision to a knot
like masons chipping to an unseen end,
and that skinny girl, all braids and nerves
who served you tea when you were twenty-one
will open her eyes on a world you can’t conceive.
WETLAND SWANS
Wetland swans now gone,
how dear a green
we drive past on a road
no longer furrowed,
smooth fields a layer
of plastic over skin.
Where are those wrinkled drains
so deep an errant fish
could hide and grow
too fat to turn? We go
from Carrick to Dundalk
over brick and bone
as if we were
a seam through silk.
Wide eastern sky,
the land level, lush,
almost it seems, miraculous,
an outstretched lie:
there is no we. A lone
car accelerates, is gone,
the sky more grey than dark,
that passing skein of white
unlike those swans of Yeats,
never to return.
BUTTERFLIES
After forty years the sacristy
still hides the smell of incense in its wood,
the air, as now, is never really empty.
The abandoned always claims the space it should.
A young girl’s fingers glide and butterfly
the line of silence into a swirl of verse.
I saw a red admiral once, too small, too high,
flap itself to death on coloured glass,
its unheard whirr drowning the ritual
of sign and song, the guess at what they meant.
That butterfly, that girl, the instant traced,
were they ever really more than air displaced?
Their ghosts weave through the seeming miracle
of birdsong and the cochlear implant.
WHAT IS SHE LOOKING AT?
(Self-portrait after the Sacred Heart:
Michelle Boyle)
What is she looking at, whose heart
is an upturned drop of blood, defying gravity?
Beyond the body and the simple
fact of eye locked on eye
or the trompe l’oeil of a level gaze
following from wall to wall
there is the question, and the look
even the painter can’t directly see,
fastened on a space above your shoulder
where a bird perhaps attempts to alight,
fluttering in a room whose paper,
petalled, circular, is a memory of tiles,
and the riddle: What is light?
Given that the body, gravid, internal, lives
in darkness like the earth’s core, moves
as planets, to avoid disaster, where
does it come from, this embrace
of the non-existent wing, the coil
of gold about a sainted head?
And the captivating blank that turns a skein
of air into a stream where pool
or flicker dim suggestions of
the self we recognise from spells
of being someone else: they weave
and fade long past their being true
to leave us with that point where no
hearts meet. Such are we, such the universe
but for our less than physical: two pins of oil,
pupils fastened on their emptiness
as if to say Let it be so.
THE FAREWELL SHIP
I am the child who plays with the foam
of erased seas
For this beach tattered with gulls
I stretch my arms like sluggish nets
while the waves pinch my dreams
and a lone tear breaks against the rocks
The reefs appear on the shore
dancing barefoot on my soul
and lips of algae and coral
bring the yeast of the sea turned into a kiss
I move my feet with the rhythm
of two old oars
my heart is an ocean of faces and hands
I enter it without realising
with my baggage of sand
stuck to the helm of the wind
to the prow of the years
where a voice that is not my voice
raises the anchor of this small ship
that moves away with my childhood on board
Mario Meléndez
BREAKING THROUGH
Give the wall a summer, maybe; thunder
will swell mortar to sundering, alder
and beech reclaim their own, the maple floor
green from narrow breech as far
as the hand of rain can reach. More
exotic now than when we were left out
or ventured through the first uprooted fencepost
because we share its matter, it has kept
pace with the dying of its figures, the strew of cut
glass in the hall. Slow, hidden rapping is the trot
of long-ago horses, the beat of child-hearts.
We are inside now and going the same way at last,
let us sit once and for all where the long dance
goes on, dock leaves shading like palm the plaster-dust.
ORANGE BOWL
Morning among the silent, solid fields,
hedges hanging white, each breath like mint,
and out of sight and sound, the sea in motion,
water slipping along the sides of ships:
how thin a wall of steel to keep us buoyant,
like tight-held hopes that line our little lives,
fragile as blown glass – that fire-orange basket
where every nuance of a changing sun
is resting in a cool and buckled bowl
as summer is hugged close in cold-pressed soil.
And glass and earth alike are scored; the joy
of making leaves a subtle, errant trail.
The flaws we gave our gods litter the sky.
Our lives are memories of a glimpse of gold.
SMOKE
He takes a photograph
then burns the canvas.
Smoke in the garden rises
like a kind of incense
then fans out toward
sunset and the fens.
This is the only knowledge
the day demands.
After the first glimpse
nothing really remains
but a near-flawless record,
a string out of tune.
Better the small ritual
on a quiet evening,
the fire’s dying crackle,
the long understanding.
PAPER HAT
A wide shore,
the square. A child leans back
into the huge shell of a hand,
trusting to the granite fingers to break
his fall. He turns and grins
at his baby sister
as noon chimes
and the crowd strain to where
two figures merge: time eating time.
True, it’s been played before
but old and child alike
can’t help but look
until the dull
ache that draws sight down.
But someone is always lost, has stepped
into a moment of their own
and stands there, rapt,
as if land fell
away like time
an inch beyond their feet.
The grey hand opens like a blossom,
a tattered paper hat takes flight
tracing the ragged rhythm
of the instant,
the heat that traps
or buoys it on a whim of breath,
keeping it gently out of grasp,
a juggling of trance and breeze,
the moment studded with
infinities.
ALREADY
That generation finally gone
who, growing up, we thought would live forever,
we turned to find
you drifting off, gently, on a river
still a long way from the rapids.
Friend of my childhood, when
did it happen, that pain of having slipped
your moorings, knowing it too late?
And you were always placid.
We assumed the stillness in your mind
was as it had ever been,
if slightly deeper, born
of tragedy and tiredness. Once your eyes
flickered in hesitation
before the commonplace, an instant, gone.
I missed the far confusions;
restless in your house, that view
I always thought as Mediterranean,
you saw the bay eating its way toward you.
Our town falls, slate by slate,
into its thousand years - but you, so soon,
memory and what it should outlast taken
by that most hateful thief; and now too late
to miss you, already here and gone.
WAITING FOR THE WORD
The monastery gable under glass
for fear of the faithful; a thousand years
have rubbed it black. Shoulder-high they trace
the fingertips’ infinities of hope
as the chant pitches its half or quarter
tone, either way for love or war.
Outside, a thin procession threads the slope
while groups trade cakes and drinks by the south wall,
dazzled by quartz, speaking of visions: Gabriel
wielding the sword of the Annunciation,
the saint who leaves his tomb to place a coal
on lips whose soul struggles to find a voice.
How many of them came expecting bliss
only to waver on misshapen stones?
A lone bell tells the end of afternoon
and in their silent cells, God’s infantry
wrestle with truth, neither overthrown,
waiting for the word while silently
word ascends the mountain. Put a stop
to time, the passing heart prays, blistered steps,
a counterpoint to monks’ arthritic knees,
who left alone, straight-backed and still, have learned
that only in intimacy is time confounded,
the instant of conception, word made flesh
is each complaint of bone on knotted board;
the saints appear not at command or wish
but when everything is shattered, in the hush
of the heart abandoned, waiting in the void.
Somewhere the stars are out, somewhere the sun
is fattening blossoms on the olive trees.
A labyrinth of skulls beneath their feet,
they wait in blacked-out rooms for mystic light
to wrap itself around their ecstasies
and draw them from themselves into the One.
And what do they become when light is gone?
Alone with only the heartbeat’s company,
not knowing the simplicity of touch,
fingertips conduct eternity,
funnel it to a point no heart can reach -
the sudden terror of the truly clean,
the world turned upside-down where mystics pitch
their crucifix of outstretched arms and spine.
Noises outside. It must be daylight still.
The turning of a book, an opening door,
the sky cascades along the corridor
like pain and pain’s release. An even breath.
The pilgrim dust is settling on the path.
Blue light at the bottom of a hill,
a bend where one prayer merges with another.
CARGOES
How easy it is to miss
the remarkable as it passes
even in a place like this,
a Sunday shopping centre
where trolleys click and veer,
avoiding one another;
wire ships, laden
with as rich a cargo
as those of which we read
a lifetime ago,
Cypriot, Phoenician –
I still see you thread
your pencil through the rigging –
bushels, gold, green flasks,
the sea flat as paper.
Once I heard you ask
about trade winds. No answer.
And now look: along
the tiles, moves more freight
than we ever imagined,
each vessel piloted
between enchanted islands
by adventurers, as helpless
and persistent as Odysseus.
A TANGLE OF RAINBOWS
No tangle of rainbows
when time ended for you.
Instead the sun was low
even at noon,
corridors dull and clean.
The angels came with morphine,
an old scooter
barked, a lone messenger
with the usual pile of papers
among side-streets.
No radio, no drop to wet
your lips, no last sweet
to call home
Sundays in long bright rooms,
the smell of fresh loam
in worn pots.
Outside, the slow silent fight
between wild and cultivated
has been
decided in your absence. Soon
those rows of hard-won
perennials will bend
to the inevitable; the odd strand
wave, but like a drowning hand.
But the whistling air
among the tough grass will stir
itself into song, as if you were still there
shaping the discord
of your life into something heard
when the heart’s beyond the reach of words,
like that strange music
you always affected to dislike
but couldn’t get away from; it took
root and flowered
in your distress, your mute despair,
the last stricken look at the front door.
A tangle of rainbows
before the angel who goes
announcing the end of time? No:
I would pray the white walls
of your house came like snowfall
to envelop you, and the silence of petals
on well- tended lawns
soothed like the last bar of a song,
shimmering after you’d long gone.
THE VANISHED
Molten silver, brushstrokes,
fragrance of apples,
grass wet underfoot. A snapping
awake, called by half-broken
day; a fish slips
its hook, melts in the deep
as the town stirs
in the cold, turns over
but for a truck at the lights, the hiss
of its brakes pricking
an ill-at-ease silence,
the sky empty of swifts
which come later each year;
the beautiful, the vivid, fled
with sleep. Yet somewhere
birds are scything through dark, led
as we are, by a future
behind them, the vanished ahead.
SUGAR CUBE
There is no thirteenth floor where they sit
watching the river carve its way to the wetlands
past warehouses that could be the ghosts of mills,
their streaked walls the pale
sludge of used salt,
past brown broken chains
perpetually swaying where tide and current meet,
but soundlessly. A sudden burst of laughter;
a woman puts a sugar cube on her ring finger,
shows it to the company
then drops it in brandy.
A scrape of sharp on sweet,
someone glimpses themselves in a far mirror,
looks away hurriedly. A waitress hovers,
nervous beside an empty table. Lateness
descends; the galaxy
is screened by muffled lights,
night’s arrival merely
a fact on a clock-face. Time is glacial,
the drip of ice on the far side of the world,
a mountain inching every hundred years
along an unplumbed line,
and life the cheerful
course of wine through veins;
since we, of all creatures, must make our own
certainty, ruby in warm light will suffice
for the here and now, all a matter of tone:
aromas, clink of glass,
the soft glow of a face
hunched over an iPhone
straight from seventeenth century chiaroscuro.
The pianist plays - will you still love me tomorrow? -
but almost mute, as if to reassure that nothing
can possibly go wrong,
and as the notes elide,
boats shift with the tide
but rest secure at anchor. The great shoals
sleep at the centre, vigilant at the edge,
night has the rhythmic breath of well-fed cattle,
soft rustle of sedge.
And here the hour spills
over at last; restlessness, the bill,
the room clears with vague promises to keep
intact the evening, carry it about
as if it were a charm or amulet,
and the sugar lady yawns,
she and her company lingering on
as if afraid to sleep.
GLASS
The train waits. Through a yard in disarray,
a cat is nosing cautiously. Two children
are soundlessly exploring
a long-abandoned garden,
pushing at a buckled greenhouse door
that will not yield, its bindweed tracery
the only tie that holds its panes together,
those that remain. The rest they crunch like ice
under trampled grass.
You have to wonder,
when their turn comes, will they too know the loss
in busy lives, their sense of self or place
bent and choked by what creeping undergrowth
our littered time has left them? On they go,
heads bobbing beneath
an arch of brambles. Now
is all that counts, for them if not for us.
They look and wave, hands stained with blackberry juice.
THE SWING
And when I let you go
you were too young to know.
The swing described in air
the never coming back
to where we were;
you only felt the rush
of wind, and that first lurch
in your insides as you fell,
as the squeal
of terror lifted into joy.
The park like years flew by.
With every push
I felt a hand behind me,
sure between the shoulders
of my three-year-old body;
I didn’t turn to look.
The world came to a point
in your rapture at each height,
the whooshing in your ears,
every breath you’d ever take.
ECLOGUE
Tell me old man, what it’s like to be someone else
walking the same path. Where did that stoop come from,
that handclasp – did you get them from a book?
Do you become unrecognisable to yourself?
The impossible is happening elsewhere all the time,
everything changes but me. Is this why
only the most ancient ground seems solid underfoot
with its fantasy of somehow taking root
against the future, the shock of unknown years?
In the imagined past there is no terror.
Do you still remember your way around here
among the stones hidden by grass? Since then
I’ve seen it mown more than forty summers,
traced names, or guessed from consonants and dates,
never knowing I mapped myself by others’ lives.
There was a bench in that patch of shade. I sat
there one morning, watching the factory take shape,
its steel walls green and sea-smooth.
Bells on one side, hammers on another,
a breeze rose and fell like riffled pages.
All I know of myself is fear of water
and shame at being afraid. Others as young
have outgrown me: only here where no one comes,
in the town’s heart yet cut off from it,
can I walk through the grass rippling knee-deep.
Something tells me it will always be like this,
that life will be overhead, a sky sometimes touching
as rain does, sending me running for cover,
half-in, half out of shelter, torn between birdsong
and music humming through a half-closed window.
Look, a plane is banking slowly, yet so far off. Yes,
you’ll still be hypnotised by that unseen crescent
it describes, as I am by the memory of chalk
rustling like silk on an old blackboard, led
like a horse in a circle by a compass-point.
You too will become your memories, a constellation
held by invisible gravity, dying until only
the brightest remain; suns, complete, and all
you’ll need, content at last to be a satellite
compelled to move along the long-lit dust.
And how long will I have to carry this sense
of my own incompleteness, being who my betters
tell me I am? I seem to move each morning
through a forest of words not mine
in search of a clearing, a place to stay and look.
Then I see you alone and knowing your way
without looking; unreachable, as if you were walking
the opposite bank of a river. Is there a space
between you and everything you see? Does the thought
of death terrify you more than it does me?
There is a time years reach, when solace is found
inside a dream looking out at the sleeper
neither knowing which is which, like bones
clothed in the words of a song, speaking through a tree
or the breeze in pipes cut from its stem;
a passing sight of fields where the town now stands
turning to fields again; a solitary chime
which is both sleep and waking, a shaking off
at the threshold of a decade as the body shivers
in an unexpected dew; a summoning of bones.
BOYS
Boys, here I am,
the spoiled child
having wintered out
the violence or exhaustion
of your passing,
still near as the smell
of snuffed candles
in a birthday kitchen
as the front door closed,
the last guest gone.
At seven the rain lashed
like bullets on the shed roof;
we ducked behind curtains,
our fingers cake-sticky
on cap-gun triggers,
heads ringing with the sounds
of an elsewhere world,
our lives the act
of taking to ourselves
that first imagining.
Drunkards lie, and old men
living in a tense
that has no grammar;
the sentence of the mind.
I pass empty entries
we loitered in,
gateways to a forgotten Troy,
I hold those memories
like dust in a cramped hand.
Blow gently, wind; rain, take them home.
STATE OF THE WORLD
On the table
a fruit bowl filled with apples
smooth and red,
grapes, bread and water
which have waited too long
to be shared.
Francis Combes
LUX (2017)
Image: Self-portrait after the Sacred Heart by Michelle Boyle www.michelleboyle-artist.com
A TINY WHITE FEATHER
A LACE STAR
LES NYMPHEAS
A GLASS OF RED WINE IN A STILL LIFE
THE STUDIO
SETTLING
CALENDAR: DECEMBER
GHOSTS AND RUINS
AUTUMNAL WALKERS
HOUSES
ROOTS
THE LANE
BOTTLES
A RUN OF DISTANT NOTES
HANDS
EARTH
A WALK IN THE COUNTRY
ALTITUDES
THRIFT
A CRUMBLING CHIMNEY
LUX
EVERYTHING IS WHITE IN THE HARBOUR
A BLUE-ROOFED CHURCH
SHEDDING
REFLECTORS
DOORWAY
WETLAND SWANS
BUTTERFLIES
WHAT IS SHE LOOKING AT?
THE FAREWELL SHIP
BREAKING THROUGH
ORANGE BOWL
SMOKE
PAPER HAT
ALREADY
WAITING FOR THE WORD
CARGOES
A TANGLE OF RAINBOWS
THE VANISHED
SUGAR CUBE
GLASS
THE SWING
ECLOGUE
BOYS
STATE OF THE WORLD
A TINY WHITE FEATHER
A tiny white feather
from a migrating bird
has fallen among the pines -
a world minute,
a world entire.
Yannis Ritsos
A LACE STAR
Thread upon thread, a whiteness builds;
a bud, a rose, star-points on a bed
that will be velvet when night comes
and this great whorl is unveiled,
a spiral formed in the warmth of supple fingers
curved as if to honour memory.
No pen leaves as sure a tracery.
And at its heart is the first piercing,
light pricking the astonished mind, the pupil’s
jolt into the rush of consciousness
of needlepoint and flow:
a solar haze, ideas, arteries.
LES NYMPHEAS
The girl in front of Monet's
lilies stands as though before a screen
where every iridescent colour plays
the music of her teens,
losing herself in violet, or perhaps
dreaming of the first girl Monet kissed.
So still is she, the light
turns and envelops her; she seems to be
assuming a far lily's almost-white,
the dark weeds' mystery,
as if she were discarding layer by layer
herself, the self she thinks herself, that other
the moment lays upon her,
and suddenly how slim she has become,
spectral even, her breath the merest tremor:
she takes the colours' warmth
with her into the foggy Tuilieries,
its gravelled lines, its sharp October trees.
A GLASS OF RED WINE IN A STILL LIFE
Thick as mud close up,
choppy as a sea, the dark settles into blood
on a black background. The eye is held
by pricks of light on grapes,
each one a perfect white
the thickness of a bristle, and the sliver
of the glass's rim could cut a finger.
Only the eye, still bright,
of a hare rebukes us,
it seems to be peering out in judgement
at our sad world of trickery and pigment,
something in its look
strikes us as more than human,
such as we read in tales of speaking animals
where the teller, like the artist, has distilled
in an incidental touch
a truth he only sees
on stepping back. And from the distance
of another yard, time floods the canvas
and the crystal's transparency
is an act of looking past
the moment, into the depth of a mirror
or the hollow of a bowl, or any other
kind of emptiness.
A slight shift, patterns on enamel,
chased silver, reassume the form we need
and midday settles gently, like a hood
as the room fills
and becomes a murmur.
But the mind is drawn back to the wine
that caught the light then, the rim's hairsbreadth line,
and the first hovering tremor.
THE STUDIO
Hands flow through gestures -
half-moon, peacock,
flag, mountain-peak,
then the body dog-folds
and the back like Atlas holds
the world in posture.
Noon in the studio.
The floor is warm
to the toes and palms
of those who wish to go
into the East, or into a self
that will endure, as if
their own world, cleft
from shoulder to heel,
could be made whole
by the crane, the flower,
and a stretched, held hour
would heal that rift.
SETTLING
A table on the Rue de l'École.
The angels on the Sorbonne wall
fold their wings as night advances,
a diner reaches for his bill
as if for something that convinces.
Silence. A distant scuff of bottles
as light retreats along the bend
toward the square. And something settles
between the bistro window, and
the shadow where the future falls.
CALENDAR: DECEMBER
The lens has purpled winter sky
more deeply-rich than sun-scattered pink.
Car lights swerve as on a rink,
skirting the threshold of a mystery,
disappear round a shop-lit corner
into nothingness. Junkerngasse,
the Bundeshaus, guessed-at in darkness,
do not exist. Mind's eye goes no farther.
Summer scene, vineyard by the river,
fades to an urban frost, as if to warn
how, even in picture-postcard Bern,
men die from cirrhosis of the liver.
GHOSTS AND RUINS
Ghosts are what we make in the mind
of townlands not passed through,
names like Clovis, New Mexico;
faces put on people never met,
known by name alone, living and dead;
vision of rock before quarrying,
sand bodied, unscattered;
whatever never seen, touched, tasted,
never experienced, put to waste;
odd forms, born of a need to speculate.
Memories are ruins,
walls crumbling, foundation fixed,
decayed from first fusing of bricks;
confined without, impossible to restore,
even with ghostly help, to a former glory.
AUTUMNAL WALKERS REMEMBER
THEIR GARDEN IN SPRING
'Laughter,
there was laughter playing about the lips,
the most delightful meetings
where faces exuded the light of the world
and the undulating water sparkled as it danced
beneath the living pendulum of kisses.
There were tongues,
columns like llamas born of twilight,
and a blazing ivory presided over
a meeting of longed-for flesh.'
~
Don't say desire, no, don't say spring.
They are words which sour our mouths.
And don't say garden.
Let's walk on quietly and contemplate
the bank of this pool inhabited by statues,
where dreams fall silent and evening beds
the calm of their voices,
this lukewarm banishment,
with a muffled tone that covers our eyes.
Andrés Blanco
HOUSES
One by one the houses
like lights, are flickering off and on.
A life goes out, another takes possession.
That list of names that rolled off your tongue
those years ago - Toye, Cartwright, Galvin -
where have their faces gone?
Like fields, their boundaries pulled down,
those ditches we used jump, filled in.
And you, somewhere behind us,
your moon not yet risen;
the stars you recalled from memory
years ago, are simply stars again,
the patterns you helped us see,
merged with the past, that dust, infinity.
Old maps I've read suggest
we played pitch and toss above a river.
I followed its unseen trickle and twist
along the bottom of abandoned gardens,
reaching a point where nothing seemed solid.
It runs still, I'm sure,
not as a dream or ghost, but like an animal
at night - or an eel, drawn
by something pagan, some unfathomed navigation.
ROOTS
After the ward grows hushed,
broken vaguely by the creak of wheels,
whispers at the desk, a distant flush,
or the half-footfall
of a dragging leg, I sit and think
of you before your mind assumed its dark.
That flat bush by the gate
you leapt with barely a run-up, is a tree
so densely packed and twisted it must die
under its own weight.
Remembering how we bent its limbs like bows,
it's hard to grudge it that grotesque repose
except I find its calm
a kind of mockery of your hollowed state,
it leans aside and waits a final storm
while your forever night
remains undrawn, unmeasured. That a mind
should simply vanish, is beyond unkind
but what are we to do?
Say plainly this is how it was and is,
that whether we know or not, the same day passes,
but pay what reverence is due
to memory broken like a stepped-on shoot,
the dark-green tracery of withered roots.
THE LANE
A day heavy as this, the lane between cuts,
damp, closing, crab-apples like bullets.
A hum as if from heat, the sky a tunnel,
grass rough against my shins – what age was I? –
too grown-up to be scared, but still uneasy,
and on and down, toward the broken ditch,
a patch of gold. Then suddenly a cat,
a corner of its head a bubbling purple
exploding into countless flies. I retched
but couldn’t move. It raised its head and spat
then lay back glazed among the bullet-apples,
in its eyes the knowledge of good and evil.
BOTTLES
I grew up in a time of subtle
change, when bringing back bottles
for thruppence each was going out
of fashion. Their thick tapering necks,
their mouths, had the perfection
of a volcano, and the stale,
sticky perfume of sugar or stout.
How heavy they were in the hand!
Dark, brown or green, they reminded
me for some strange reason
of velvet, thick, rich, impenetrable;
was it the forgotten smell
of brandy at a card table?
Money of our own for bringing back bottles.
It was a time when everything was possible.
A RUN OF DISTANT NOTES
Through corridors just wide enough for one,
walls cool and smooth, we file into a room
that once was two nuns' cells.
I look out at a February lawn,
grass roots split as if by an act of will
by snowdrops almost too frail to bloom.
Sick too long, the aunt who hasn't been
herself for thirty years, the aunt we knew;
swaddled in starch and drips,
her breath so shallow it may well have stopped,
her eyes dilate in light but give no clue
of what goes on within;
who long ago became a memory
even as she lost hers. This is the end,
this time, and no conjecture
on mental emptiness, that dried-up river,
gives any comfort; nor infinity:
the sun sets never to rise again.
But when thin morning breaks, she will at last
become complete and human as the dead,
more than she is at present, giving
us leave to remember how at first
she filled her years with music, slowly moving
toward the silence in her head,
and how, when all else failed, a run of distant
notes could stir something more - or less -
than memory; and how like smoke
it vanished. But that phrase, never forgotten
by those who heard it, lingers somewhere, like
a promise or a hope of bliss.
HANDS
A sharpness of stars on glass
when I called too late
the shop all but shut,
the slicer dismantled,
its great blade taken out.
Those big hands, how delicate
their touch, as the fine cloth
slid like a skater
along the edge. Under the bulb
those nicks on his fingers
were fresh as gills -
and how suddenly the steel
flashed as he lifted it level,
a bowl, an offering, the first wheel!
EARTH
Now that the long forgetting is over,
let thoughtless earth receive you, as is proper,
but know that you have become entire
again, at last like every other.
A WALK IN THE COUNTRY
Now the bushes are beginning to green
and mud is trampled and hardened in tracks
where the city comes up sharp against mountain.
There are places I promised myself I'd walk
and haven't yet. Time is moving on,
sometimes the reward for steadiness is to be stuck
in the commonplace. Names like Ticknock
and Sugarloaf have lost their allure;
the last time I drove past, that sky was thick
with autumnal mist or an air
of disappointment. Why this reluctance
to shake off a feeling that clings like an ache
but is surely the insidious lapping of complacency?
I think back seven years to the raw pleasure
of breathing cold-sharpened air, feet
and fingers numb in upland-hugging snow;
how brittle everything was, how tentative, and yet
as full of possibility as potential for disaster;
and the fact that everything was just so slightly
out of reach was reason enough for letting it all go.
And what came into that space? A picture
of an old schoolhouse, restored now; that wonder,
stupefaction almost, that when a thing is gone,
it's gone; the full or empty lives of children
not children anymore; this vague future,
its measure changed for good, a day, an hour.
Now comes again the time for impatience,
for wishing paths and walls to be overgrown,
a day-lived dog rose among crumbling brick.
Everything quickens, yet every year the sense of urgency
takes longer to kick in, but is no less keen
for it - is it that knowledge of time running out takes
the sting out of its own pain? Does it matter?
Maybe it's all as Beckett says - fail better.
Ah no, it's easy for the great to say that,
the rest of us struggle to put value on our failure.
Only when we do can we surrender to the hour:
the judgement of history is always the silence of the forgotten,
read between the lines by us who are forgotten in turn.
ALTITUDES
Here, in this small space,
is as high as you can go,
far enough for breathlessness
and that powdery blue
leaching from sky onto land.
Everything is at the edge of sight
and here it is - the astonishment
at being where nothing belongs,
not even the hardiest goat
worries the grass in cracks
sheltered by an overhang.
A moment for the head
to clear, the lungs to fill.
Nothing more shouts transience
than a place where nothing changes,
where, away from it all,
there is nowhere to hide.
This morning contours were ridges
on a fingerprint, green
giving way to yellow, to brown.
Now the eye sweeps across counties
slipping into each other, like age
or that thin cold no sun shifts.
White floats like smoke round
the edge of a wood, limed
fields are a remnant of frost,
and it takes a little longer each time
to shake off tiredness and thirst
as if the mountain was filling out
like the young as you drift
away from them, each summit
reached now with no more than a sense
of having won in spite of weakness,
which is still enough, as it was once,
that first climb, exhausted, giddy,
adrenaline pumping its joy through the body.
THRIFT
Viewed from across the bay
it’s not as it was thought, another country,
merely the same, seen through the glass cage of years
or the pain of freedom, the feet immediately
rooted to old fears
and the knowledge that no dream
can turn the past into a clay you smear
between fingers – a wanderer scrabbling the soil of home;
that time is a scattering of losses better
left where they are.
Except of course we can’t,
and at that stage when goad and leash are one
the only comfort lies in whispering that it doesn’t
really matter – what is there left to want
that’s not already gone?
A patch of colour moves
barely within sight, a purple gash
in the sea wall, hanging by thin roots above
the bite of salt, rocked by every lash
of wind, each tidal rush.
Hooked on the immediate,
its sustenance the crumbling of a rock,
a continent of moving ice its food and drink,
its swaying there’s a miracle of thrift;
if wind dies its own weight,
top-heavy, would loose and cast
it into nothing; the apparent pain
of being forever pummelled both ways is a must,
a sufferance that perfectly maintains
the balance of unrest.
A CRUMBLING CHIMNEY
In the morning the footpath is flaked
with red chippings, red dust,
that deep rich orange that comes
only from a certain age of brick
and in the crumbling only the slightest
hint remains of its shape, its packed
wholeness. The fire it seems
has shed itself in the last storm.
This is the way a house sometimes
dies, from the outside in,
obvious like a lesion on the skin
with a fullness of life enclosed, not caring
or keeping a fast grip on joy, at home
in the fading littleness of cheerful rooms
where nothing that matters is beyond repair
and the creak of decay is happening anywhere.
Remember the brickworks at night,
fields white and starched like a fresh sheet?
In the middle of nowhere red stars glowed
through ventilation chinks. Trees nearby stayed
green longer, budded out early
and birds in winter squabbled for a warm roost,
or is that another trick the mind played
when everything shut down? There have been so many,
and even now at times the body snaps awake
at four in the morning say, in a panic
over something that will never come about,
a memory that's finally escaped,
or from a dream of an irreparable leak.
The world must make its way through the tightest
seal, brick weather, ridge tile slip,
the mind, however terrified, fall back to sleep.
Last night's lash of wind and rain leaves a trail
of mortar-grit and flakes of red
across the roof; a galaxy of damp has spread
along the attic wall. Now begins the inevitable
patching up that will one day be one
too many. But in my life's eye I have it still,
that first long sight of brick, far-stretching, beautiful,
sunset and a sea to sail on.
LUX
I
Half-promises to meet again,
hired cars shifting into gear.
A hall empty to wind and rain,
grass where it hasn't grown for years.
The final argument rehearsed,
familiar, no conclusion drawn,
stories like broken slates dispersed.
A dozen parting waves, each one
wondering how they missed the bomb
inside that shell of reticence.
An unseen image of you, gone
at last where there is no pretence.
II
Between hero and anti-hero is a line
almost invisible, like a fault in the brain
seen only after its rupture;
how earnestly, how often you tried
to move from one side to the other
but never managed to leave the middle,
slightly unbalanced like a tightrope walker.
When did that imagining yourself a fraud
begin? When did it veer toward the fatal?
There are fields, streets, music, which from
this moment will never again be complete,
a sense of wholeness has been taken away
and not just now, but retrospectively,
by the admission of what we never guessed
nor were meant to. Was it that maturity
became a flowering of thorns and stings,
knowledge face to face with its own uselessness,
a voice confronting the futility of song?
III
Moonlight wanders through that empty site
where you'd hoped to plant exotic trees.
Someone will come across a sheet
pricked with green whorls and Latin tags
in your peculiar sloping hand.
Tonight that field sits like an abandoned prize
in the lottery of a mind
that saw the world just once perhaps
as an enormous park, neat, clipped,
gently contoured, perfect except
with trees instead of people, no plastic bag
littering with its truth a random twig.
And only in that nowhere country, Love,
would such a park flourish or even exist,
only there, those watercolour leaves
open on a day clean as a page
never exposed to air. The best
of your story is that you were capable
of hope; that it was never purged,
and when it was abandoned it was left whole.
And trees will never be the same
for your having looked on them
differently. The light they feed on is nothing
but itself, the dead shot through the living.
IV
Your ear was always too fine for the clutter
of music; it listened for the space
between notes, that pace where scent
floats unnoticed between flower and passing senses.
Today the sun risen on fields no longer white
calls me to that ridge where the river
drops the last of its mud, flood-swept
from the uplands, stirring the spring trout,
and broadens out to insect-swarming banks,
sudden patterns of bewildering light,
the mystery of clarity and depth.
You trawled that hidden shelf, holding your breath,
balancing float and weight yet losing both.
And later, coming back, the bend grape-dark
in twilight, you tried to conjure up
an hour in the irretrievable past
remembering that the river keeps its shape
by rejecting every atom of itself,
that it exists because there is no self
only an outline, a path, a flow,
backwaters calm in a hole where the bank
crumbled. I can trace in air that stone
where your feet rested, the hour a slow
humming of countless tiny lives
and that far song, riding a broken wave,
carried off like an unweighted line.
V
You left us your belief in the immediate
as if it could be passed on, but it seems
impossible ever to see the unfamiliar for the first time;
what you said about beauty holds true
only for you, and it's scant consolation to admit
you were right; that a child's astonishment at the new
never disappears, we refine it almost to the point
of non-existence, but it persists, is the irritant
in the oyster that makes the pearl. But what you knew
wasn't enough in the end, you tried to conjure
the child-miraculous by an act of will and failed.
I often wonder how it must have felt
out there, stranded, with a sense of everything underfoot
crumbling from the bottom up. That long steady wait
you passed without a word, left sadness but no void -
birdsong catches us by surprise as we did before,
the child-miraculous coming back - just once.
Sometimes, in spite of ourselves, we see beyond sense.
VI
Driving back, I slow to watch
a house's innards being tossed
into a skip, each cast a retch,
the grey walls vomiting their dust
and I remember photographs,
their edges curled, exposed to air,
the ghosts and rubble of a life
tipped into a hole somewhere
or fragments rescued as we pick
through dreams and rubbish in the rain,
our thoughts locked on a wishing back,
the broken re-imagined clean.
EVERYTHING IS WHITE IN THE HARBOUR
Everything is white in the harbour
and the wandering souls,
the outcasts, the exiles
catch hold of the ephemeral
though each one
has their story, their dream
hard like a pebble
but the insolent pointed wavelets say
there is nothing more to write on the surface of things
and that still nothing is accomplished
Michel Cosem
A BLUE-ROOFED CHURCH
A cut ridge on an ancient stumbling hill,
grass on thin clay; the river valley, parched,
snakes up through twisted olive groves, between
scattered bone-white walls.
A gathering of green, and then
a distant blue-roofed church
whose sky-reflecting dome put me in mind
of Louth spires, small and sharp above the tree-line
like slender thorns drawn gently from the skin;
they need no blue to set
themselves before the eye, no sun
to plant them opposite
their thousand years. The placid stretching land
gives back its bone in thicker cereal
than on the hills of Crete. Mid-morning sighs,
old men like Ailill’s bull,
breathless, coming to the end,
wake and struggle to rise.
SHEDDING
Of what, these too many years,
we learned, this is the surface,
the berg above water,
those bright contours of recall,
exposed, shifting, malleable.
And the remembered -
the dark mass of the glacier
moving toward an inevitable tropic,
its yet-unbroken ice
dying at the edges, locked
in a network of streams devoured
by being made whole.
And so we move, restless,
shedding more than we gather,
diminishing as the years pass,
shedding, yet gathering still.
REFLECTORS
Jeanne and Robyn with reflectors
swirl Atlantic light
like Californian prospectors
panning for a fruit no one can eat.
Near as we get to sun and moon
their gold and silver,
and not the slightest tremor
when silence falls and the lens
pierces like a pin the moment;
and what it mines,
what flickers on the instant,
is balanced in their hands.
DOORWAY
Living with the truth of changing light
you move in the moment or sit with it
knowing nothing will ever be as planned,
that old men at a doorway mending nets
are narrowing their vision to a knot
like masons chipping to an unseen end,
and that skinny girl, all braids and nerves
who served you tea when you were twenty-one
will open her eyes on a world you can’t conceive.
WETLAND SWANS
Wetland swans now gone,
how dear a green
we drive past on a road
no longer furrowed,
smooth fields a layer
of plastic over skin.
Where are those wrinkled drains
so deep an errant fish
could hide and grow
too fat to turn? We go
from Carrick to Dundalk
over brick and bone
as if we were
a seam through silk.
Wide eastern sky,
the land level, lush,
almost it seems, miraculous,
an outstretched lie:
there is no we. A lone
car accelerates, is gone,
the sky more grey than dark,
that passing skein of white
unlike those swans of Yeats,
never to return.
BUTTERFLIES
After forty years the sacristy
still hides the smell of incense in its wood,
the air, as now, is never really empty.
The abandoned always claims the space it should.
A young girl’s fingers glide and butterfly
the line of silence into a swirl of verse.
I saw a red admiral once, too small, too high,
flap itself to death on coloured glass,
its unheard whirr drowning the ritual
of sign and song, the guess at what they meant.
That butterfly, that girl, the instant traced,
were they ever really more than air displaced?
Their ghosts weave through the seeming miracle
of birdsong and the cochlear implant.
WHAT IS SHE LOOKING AT?
(Self-portrait after the Sacred Heart:
Michelle Boyle)
What is she looking at, whose heart
is an upturned drop of blood, defying gravity?
Beyond the body and the simple
fact of eye locked on eye
or the trompe l’oeil of a level gaze
following from wall to wall
there is the question, and the look
even the painter can’t directly see,
fastened on a space above your shoulder
where a bird perhaps attempts to alight,
fluttering in a room whose paper,
petalled, circular, is a memory of tiles,
and the riddle: What is light?
Given that the body, gravid, internal, lives
in darkness like the earth’s core, moves
as planets, to avoid disaster, where
does it come from, this embrace
of the non-existent wing, the coil
of gold about a sainted head?
And the captivating blank that turns a skein
of air into a stream where pool
or flicker dim suggestions of
the self we recognise from spells
of being someone else: they weave
and fade long past their being true
to leave us with that point where no
hearts meet. Such are we, such the universe
but for our less than physical: two pins of oil,
pupils fastened on their emptiness
as if to say Let it be so.
THE FAREWELL SHIP
I am the child who plays with the foam
of erased seas
For this beach tattered with gulls
I stretch my arms like sluggish nets
while the waves pinch my dreams
and a lone tear breaks against the rocks
The reefs appear on the shore
dancing barefoot on my soul
and lips of algae and coral
bring the yeast of the sea turned into a kiss
I move my feet with the rhythm
of two old oars
my heart is an ocean of faces and hands
I enter it without realising
with my baggage of sand
stuck to the helm of the wind
to the prow of the years
where a voice that is not my voice
raises the anchor of this small ship
that moves away with my childhood on board
Mario Meléndez
BREAKING THROUGH
Give the wall a summer, maybe; thunder
will swell mortar to sundering, alder
and beech reclaim their own, the maple floor
green from narrow breech as far
as the hand of rain can reach. More
exotic now than when we were left out
or ventured through the first uprooted fencepost
because we share its matter, it has kept
pace with the dying of its figures, the strew of cut
glass in the hall. Slow, hidden rapping is the trot
of long-ago horses, the beat of child-hearts.
We are inside now and going the same way at last,
let us sit once and for all where the long dance
goes on, dock leaves shading like palm the plaster-dust.
ORANGE BOWL
Morning among the silent, solid fields,
hedges hanging white, each breath like mint,
and out of sight and sound, the sea in motion,
water slipping along the sides of ships:
how thin a wall of steel to keep us buoyant,
like tight-held hopes that line our little lives,
fragile as blown glass – that fire-orange basket
where every nuance of a changing sun
is resting in a cool and buckled bowl
as summer is hugged close in cold-pressed soil.
And glass and earth alike are scored; the joy
of making leaves a subtle, errant trail.
The flaws we gave our gods litter the sky.
Our lives are memories of a glimpse of gold.
SMOKE
He takes a photograph
then burns the canvas.
Smoke in the garden rises
like a kind of incense
then fans out toward
sunset and the fens.
This is the only knowledge
the day demands.
After the first glimpse
nothing really remains
but a near-flawless record,
a string out of tune.
Better the small ritual
on a quiet evening,
the fire’s dying crackle,
the long understanding.
PAPER HAT
A wide shore,
the square. A child leans back
into the huge shell of a hand,
trusting to the granite fingers to break
his fall. He turns and grins
at his baby sister
as noon chimes
and the crowd strain to where
two figures merge: time eating time.
True, it’s been played before
but old and child alike
can’t help but look
until the dull
ache that draws sight down.
But someone is always lost, has stepped
into a moment of their own
and stands there, rapt,
as if land fell
away like time
an inch beyond their feet.
The grey hand opens like a blossom,
a tattered paper hat takes flight
tracing the ragged rhythm
of the instant,
the heat that traps
or buoys it on a whim of breath,
keeping it gently out of grasp,
a juggling of trance and breeze,
the moment studded with
infinities.
ALREADY
That generation finally gone
who, growing up, we thought would live forever,
we turned to find
you drifting off, gently, on a river
still a long way from the rapids.
Friend of my childhood, when
did it happen, that pain of having slipped
your moorings, knowing it too late?
And you were always placid.
We assumed the stillness in your mind
was as it had ever been,
if slightly deeper, born
of tragedy and tiredness. Once your eyes
flickered in hesitation
before the commonplace, an instant, gone.
I missed the far confusions;
restless in your house, that view
I always thought as Mediterranean,
you saw the bay eating its way toward you.
Our town falls, slate by slate,
into its thousand years - but you, so soon,
memory and what it should outlast taken
by that most hateful thief; and now too late
to miss you, already here and gone.
WAITING FOR THE WORD
The monastery gable under glass
for fear of the faithful; a thousand years
have rubbed it black. Shoulder-high they trace
the fingertips’ infinities of hope
as the chant pitches its half or quarter
tone, either way for love or war.
Outside, a thin procession threads the slope
while groups trade cakes and drinks by the south wall,
dazzled by quartz, speaking of visions: Gabriel
wielding the sword of the Annunciation,
the saint who leaves his tomb to place a coal
on lips whose soul struggles to find a voice.
How many of them came expecting bliss
only to waver on misshapen stones?
A lone bell tells the end of afternoon
and in their silent cells, God’s infantry
wrestle with truth, neither overthrown,
waiting for the word while silently
word ascends the mountain. Put a stop
to time, the passing heart prays, blistered steps,
a counterpoint to monks’ arthritic knees,
who left alone, straight-backed and still, have learned
that only in intimacy is time confounded,
the instant of conception, word made flesh
is each complaint of bone on knotted board;
the saints appear not at command or wish
but when everything is shattered, in the hush
of the heart abandoned, waiting in the void.
Somewhere the stars are out, somewhere the sun
is fattening blossoms on the olive trees.
A labyrinth of skulls beneath their feet,
they wait in blacked-out rooms for mystic light
to wrap itself around their ecstasies
and draw them from themselves into the One.
And what do they become when light is gone?
Alone with only the heartbeat’s company,
not knowing the simplicity of touch,
fingertips conduct eternity,
funnel it to a point no heart can reach -
the sudden terror of the truly clean,
the world turned upside-down where mystics pitch
their crucifix of outstretched arms and spine.
Noises outside. It must be daylight still.
The turning of a book, an opening door,
the sky cascades along the corridor
like pain and pain’s release. An even breath.
The pilgrim dust is settling on the path.
Blue light at the bottom of a hill,
a bend where one prayer merges with another.
CARGOES
How easy it is to miss
the remarkable as it passes
even in a place like this,
a Sunday shopping centre
where trolleys click and veer,
avoiding one another;
wire ships, laden
with as rich a cargo
as those of which we read
a lifetime ago,
Cypriot, Phoenician –
I still see you thread
your pencil through the rigging –
bushels, gold, green flasks,
the sea flat as paper.
Once I heard you ask
about trade winds. No answer.
And now look: along
the tiles, moves more freight
than we ever imagined,
each vessel piloted
between enchanted islands
by adventurers, as helpless
and persistent as Odysseus.
A TANGLE OF RAINBOWS
No tangle of rainbows
when time ended for you.
Instead the sun was low
even at noon,
corridors dull and clean.
The angels came with morphine,
an old scooter
barked, a lone messenger
with the usual pile of papers
among side-streets.
No radio, no drop to wet
your lips, no last sweet
to call home
Sundays in long bright rooms,
the smell of fresh loam
in worn pots.
Outside, the slow silent fight
between wild and cultivated
has been
decided in your absence. Soon
those rows of hard-won
perennials will bend
to the inevitable; the odd strand
wave, but like a drowning hand.
But the whistling air
among the tough grass will stir
itself into song, as if you were still there
shaping the discord
of your life into something heard
when the heart’s beyond the reach of words,
like that strange music
you always affected to dislike
but couldn’t get away from; it took
root and flowered
in your distress, your mute despair,
the last stricken look at the front door.
A tangle of rainbows
before the angel who goes
announcing the end of time? No:
I would pray the white walls
of your house came like snowfall
to envelop you, and the silence of petals
on well- tended lawns
soothed like the last bar of a song,
shimmering after you’d long gone.
THE VANISHED
Molten silver, brushstrokes,
fragrance of apples,
grass wet underfoot. A snapping
awake, called by half-broken
day; a fish slips
its hook, melts in the deep
as the town stirs
in the cold, turns over
but for a truck at the lights, the hiss
of its brakes pricking
an ill-at-ease silence,
the sky empty of swifts
which come later each year;
the beautiful, the vivid, fled
with sleep. Yet somewhere
birds are scything through dark, led
as we are, by a future
behind them, the vanished ahead.
SUGAR CUBE
There is no thirteenth floor where they sit
watching the river carve its way to the wetlands
past warehouses that could be the ghosts of mills,
their streaked walls the pale
sludge of used salt,
past brown broken chains
perpetually swaying where tide and current meet,
but soundlessly. A sudden burst of laughter;
a woman puts a sugar cube on her ring finger,
shows it to the company
then drops it in brandy.
A scrape of sharp on sweet,
someone glimpses themselves in a far mirror,
looks away hurriedly. A waitress hovers,
nervous beside an empty table. Lateness
descends; the galaxy
is screened by muffled lights,
night’s arrival merely
a fact on a clock-face. Time is glacial,
the drip of ice on the far side of the world,
a mountain inching every hundred years
along an unplumbed line,
and life the cheerful
course of wine through veins;
since we, of all creatures, must make our own
certainty, ruby in warm light will suffice
for the here and now, all a matter of tone:
aromas, clink of glass,
the soft glow of a face
hunched over an iPhone
straight from seventeenth century chiaroscuro.
The pianist plays - will you still love me tomorrow? -
but almost mute, as if to reassure that nothing
can possibly go wrong,
and as the notes elide,
boats shift with the tide
but rest secure at anchor. The great shoals
sleep at the centre, vigilant at the edge,
night has the rhythmic breath of well-fed cattle,
soft rustle of sedge.
And here the hour spills
over at last; restlessness, the bill,
the room clears with vague promises to keep
intact the evening, carry it about
as if it were a charm or amulet,
and the sugar lady yawns,
she and her company lingering on
as if afraid to sleep.
GLASS
The train waits. Through a yard in disarray,
a cat is nosing cautiously. Two children
are soundlessly exploring
a long-abandoned garden,
pushing at a buckled greenhouse door
that will not yield, its bindweed tracery
the only tie that holds its panes together,
those that remain. The rest they crunch like ice
under trampled grass.
You have to wonder,
when their turn comes, will they too know the loss
in busy lives, their sense of self or place
bent and choked by what creeping undergrowth
our littered time has left them? On they go,
heads bobbing beneath
an arch of brambles. Now
is all that counts, for them if not for us.
They look and wave, hands stained with blackberry juice.
THE SWING
And when I let you go
you were too young to know.
The swing described in air
the never coming back
to where we were;
you only felt the rush
of wind, and that first lurch
in your insides as you fell,
as the squeal
of terror lifted into joy.
The park like years flew by.
With every push
I felt a hand behind me,
sure between the shoulders
of my three-year-old body;
I didn’t turn to look.
The world came to a point
in your rapture at each height,
the whooshing in your ears,
every breath you’d ever take.
ECLOGUE
Tell me old man, what it’s like to be someone else
walking the same path. Where did that stoop come from,
that handclasp – did you get them from a book?
Do you become unrecognisable to yourself?
The impossible is happening elsewhere all the time,
everything changes but me. Is this why
only the most ancient ground seems solid underfoot
with its fantasy of somehow taking root
against the future, the shock of unknown years?
In the imagined past there is no terror.
Do you still remember your way around here
among the stones hidden by grass? Since then
I’ve seen it mown more than forty summers,
traced names, or guessed from consonants and dates,
never knowing I mapped myself by others’ lives.
There was a bench in that patch of shade. I sat
there one morning, watching the factory take shape,
its steel walls green and sea-smooth.
Bells on one side, hammers on another,
a breeze rose and fell like riffled pages.
All I know of myself is fear of water
and shame at being afraid. Others as young
have outgrown me: only here where no one comes,
in the town’s heart yet cut off from it,
can I walk through the grass rippling knee-deep.
Something tells me it will always be like this,
that life will be overhead, a sky sometimes touching
as rain does, sending me running for cover,
half-in, half out of shelter, torn between birdsong
and music humming through a half-closed window.
Look, a plane is banking slowly, yet so far off. Yes,
you’ll still be hypnotised by that unseen crescent
it describes, as I am by the memory of chalk
rustling like silk on an old blackboard, led
like a horse in a circle by a compass-point.
You too will become your memories, a constellation
held by invisible gravity, dying until only
the brightest remain; suns, complete, and all
you’ll need, content at last to be a satellite
compelled to move along the long-lit dust.
And how long will I have to carry this sense
of my own incompleteness, being who my betters
tell me I am? I seem to move each morning
through a forest of words not mine
in search of a clearing, a place to stay and look.
Then I see you alone and knowing your way
without looking; unreachable, as if you were walking
the opposite bank of a river. Is there a space
between you and everything you see? Does the thought
of death terrify you more than it does me?
There is a time years reach, when solace is found
inside a dream looking out at the sleeper
neither knowing which is which, like bones
clothed in the words of a song, speaking through a tree
or the breeze in pipes cut from its stem;
a passing sight of fields where the town now stands
turning to fields again; a solitary chime
which is both sleep and waking, a shaking off
at the threshold of a decade as the body shivers
in an unexpected dew; a summoning of bones.
BOYS
Boys, here I am,
the spoiled child
having wintered out
the violence or exhaustion
of your passing,
still near as the smell
of snuffed candles
in a birthday kitchen
as the front door closed,
the last guest gone.
At seven the rain lashed
like bullets on the shed roof;
we ducked behind curtains,
our fingers cake-sticky
on cap-gun triggers,
heads ringing with the sounds
of an elsewhere world,
our lives the act
of taking to ourselves
that first imagining.
Drunkards lie, and old men
living in a tense
that has no grammar;
the sentence of the mind.
I pass empty entries
we loitered in,
gateways to a forgotten Troy,
I hold those memories
like dust in a cramped hand.
Blow gently, wind; rain, take them home.
STATE OF THE WORLD
On the table
a fruit bowl filled with apples
smooth and red,
grapes, bread and water
which have waited too long
to be shared.
Francis Combes