HOUSE (2024)
I
MIDWEEK AT THE FOREST PARK
EELS
AND IN ONE HALL
METEORITES
LACQUER
MAGPIE
HERE AND NOW
WINGED VICTORY HOLDING A GOLDEN TRIPOD
SOLDER
AMMONITE
THREE POEMS BY SAMUELE GIANETTI
A WEEK IN MARCH
II
THE MEANING OF HOME
WIDOWERS
FATHER’S DAY
GHOST SHIPS
OIL
PAST THE LAST HILL
PORTRAIT OF A GIRL IN A RED COAT
ALTAR WINE
NO MAN’S LAND
THE ORANGE GROVE
1976
OPPOSITE
SNAKESKIN
III
ON GROSSE HAMBURGER STRASSE
MARIN MARAIS
A VISITATION
ROLL CALL
ARGOS
FEW HOUSES
THE PARTING GIFT
FISH
THE CHAIR
HOUSE
IV
THE GOD OF UNIMPORTANT LIVES
BURNT WALLS
KAPPELHOFF
DOCKSIDE SHIPS
STRINGS
THE GERMAN LETTER
OXEN
CONSTELLATIONS
ISLANDS
THE DEAD SIGH
THE LAST NUN
AT THE END OF A WHITE LANE
IN THE LONG GRASS
I
MIDWEEK AT THE FOREST PARK
Drawn by a warmth beyond the temperate,
some creature has been rooting near a culvert,
patient, persistent, methodical – a scrape
long and straight as a brake mark.
Leaves tell where it scattered,
surprised by morning and voices.
How many joggers passed,
eyes fixed, wishing unease
could be diverted like floodwater,
that only the tangible be real?
It works; they become their own rhythm,
all stitch and breath, the cushioned joint
on gravel.
Not for us. Turn down
toward the cool where moss has swallowed
the tracks of mushroom-foragers, the year’s fad
already dead. Here light
is never whole, there is a heart
unmapped, it shifts like a portal
to a dream of the primal – wild boar
fattening on beech mast; a litter of acorns
where pine needles are a threadbare fabric
on mud.
It is always the lost now
we feel on air. Are we too old
to be thinking of the timeless?
Is there too much to remember?
EELS
The fog is thinning out, like ribbons, like eels.
The worm of forgetfulness is eating
but only at the good - the rest
are night-tatters, their parting
is a promise of return.
Farther than a drive away now, the stream
where they moved, those eels, from stone to stone
like weeds, but upstream,
languid, barely hiding.
And something whiskered, barbelled,
dashed in a scud of silt: was it there
at all? One by one, our facts
are becoming myths. Where do we
end up - is it beyond or before truth?
AND IN ONE HALL
So different then.
Not the week of late shops,
the mill and rustle, the tear
of bolts of wrapping paper.
It was, remains, the stillness.
In every second window, a huge
star, its barley sugar heart
sharpening to points of amber.
And lights strung in odd
spots above the streets,
colours deep, almost industrial.
It seemed a hand had painted
each – red, green, orange, blue,
to trap, not release,
as if afraid pure light
might be devoured, an innocence
overwhelmed by night.
And in one hall
a thick, handmade crib,
its clear bulb, bead-sized,
surrounded by a proper pagan dark.
METEORITES
Driving alongside dawn
from an all-night airport run,
summer spectral at that hour,
towns asleep, not even yawning
at first - it was a time brfore
motorways, of cutting across country -
they started to appear in fours
and sixes - debs couples
blinking at day, or maybe
simply dazed at having come
from underground into their future;
blank suits; dresses, their sheen mineral
away from strobes. They waited,
pale or flushed, for taxis,
chatted farewells, then stepped
from whatever had been pledged
in early hours, at table,
or down the years; they mimed
the unease of something being over.
A few sat on garden walls
like separate stunned birds,
others here and there moved
with the fizz of energy
summoned from exhaustion.
On narrowing main streets
they thinned to twos, leaning
close or out; some dribbled
the last flat champagne, one lad
played slow guitar on a buckled,
king-sized lyre.
They were so young, the road
pulling them away as they clung
in heels, or stood sheepish,
hands in pockets. I couldn't
think. It had been too long a day.
And there they were,
disappearing. Cars began to file,
the sky brightened, empty - the promised
shower of meteorites too late.
LACQUER
News is the drone of a guitar
feeding back into itself
through a wave of speakers.
The music of the day becomes a whine
and all I can offer you it seems
is the blessing of separation
and the hope that sun
will touch the garden slope
where an orchard stood
a hundred years ago. I must
have felt its roots somehow,
gone but still there, ghost-tentacles,
a story incomplete, a series
of honeycombs where streams
ran dry. We move
a hair’s breadth from collapse,
what gift have we for each other
but fable – a lacquer for the brittle?
Thread a melody through it,
sing it into the storm.
MAGPIE
Day begins before it should;
a magpie calling somewhere near the window.
One saving grace of growing old
is that you're too tired for portents
or being ruled by someone else's superstition.
They're strangely untroublesome, the pair
that visit - sparrows peck at food, ignoring them,
we must be at the far reach of their territory,
where blood is at the centre.
What has alarmed it, driven it
here in the near-dark?
No creature's night is free from disturbance.
Think of your own rising, looking across
a gap of pitch - always the dim square
of a window somewhere in the town,
a dog stirring uneasily, growling in its sleep.
And sealed kitchens here and there; a figure
held by a screen as once
they would have been by something
called a spell. The bite of loneliness:
we can name it endlessly
like a star, can weave a constellation
of stories round it; its light
is tiny, cold. There is no flight,
no approach, only the wait
for morning and the same view, but for
a lone bird orbiting an empty bush.
HERE AND NOW
My brother frozen in mid-stair. This then
is the beginning we have tried not
to expect. He can be
coaxed back down, step by step
but there can be no coaxing ourselves
back into the past. Yes, say it was just
one of those things, but no, it’s the first
or the latest. The world has shifted
visibly, it settles into its old spin
but with a tremor underfoot.
It’s the way it is.
Say it again. It’s the way it is.
And yes, it’s always been like this.
But this is here. And now.
WINGED VICTORY HOLDING A GOLDEN TRIPOD
Perhaps we all died then, when we were young.
John Williams - Augustus
There have been too many trips upstairs
to scribbled pages, books soon to be gone,
their tired spines like faces lined
along the margin of an underworld
or weeds along both sides of the lane
we walked to stories of night waits
and anaesthetic; a third party fallen in step,
talking in turn with the ease
of men at an age when illness
is currency in conversation.
And we didn't have to say
that with bad news of someone else
part of our being flakes off,
becomes dust in a breathless air,
a mild day suddenly too hot.
Different for each of us
that shocked first time we knew
ourselves diminished, unspoken since,
buried as under ash.
Perhaps that quote was true. Perhaps
we all died when we were young.
I have it in my hand, the book
it came from, cover a cracked wall,
rich and red as carpet.
Victory risen from Pompeii,
frail, fine and beautiful,
her face untouched by tragedy,
human in her nearly-perfect
poise - how can such slender wings
hold Victory aloft?
SOLDER
He could have written in solder,
his daughter too, even at eight, her eyes
unerringly following the line, lava-slow,
as it curved along the crack
in the euphonium bell. Her hand
moved in time with his, ghosting,
each stop and start perfect as ballet.
They both stood back when it was set,
he, you could see, reading
an invisible stave, the promise of a phrase
heard properly for the first time in years.
I took a chance and played it
once or twice. In secret, not from fear
of what he’d say, but a strange shame
for something not my fault – that after
his accident, that thin scar on his brow
mirrored a greater, deep within; and
the instrument, mellow for me, became
its old cracked self for him. No one
dared challenge his claim to play
or said a word about the gap
between the note and where it should be.
Never mention of the faltering fingers.
I was too young. Then I began
to understand, too late, that of all
the sounds we made, between them alone,
scarred bell and brain a millisecond
slow, was perfect sympathy.
AMMONITE
Students, guitars, garlands. Such heat
that even in the portico leaves go limp
before the last whirr of the camera.
A couple, newly graduated, step
from an alcove, as from another century.
The young are discovering the ancient
as we before, as if they’d invented it.
A strange, heady mix, the language
and laughter of optimism: for a moment,
better than the sun. But on turning
toward the street, all becomes instantly
oppressive, the breath arid, the ground
threatening blisters.
And so, again, into the cool
of the geological museum. A nod
from the desk, a high doorway, and everything
is eighteen-eighties – dark wood, glass, air
still yet charged with the shock
of the first discovery – this is what the world
was like without us. Yes, this is where
we come, fascinated above all by how
meaningless we are. No pottery, no pared flint,
a bird’s egg more than football-sized,
petrified thighs like pillars, slips of yellowed
paper, a hundred million years in casual copperplate.
It’s like looking at the stars without becoming dizzy.
More silent than a church, these long rooms
rarely visited, untouchable relics older
than any god we could imagine -
how we wish we could remain solid
forever, some part of us, tooth, vertebrae.
It can stop us in our tracks, knowing
a fragment of a claw will be more alive
than we in a handful of hundred years;
the way an edifice dedicated to time
annihilates time, while neighbouring cathedrals
do the opposite. How the same space
reigns in both.
But here, no sun.
How would it be to touch like Midas
the oldest ammonite and make it blaze?
Why are we like children,
drawn to the gilt; why feel so keenly
the lack of gold leaf? Suddenly these rooms
are, more than anything, unadorned,
maybe the thirst for knowledge
is no more than that – the same recurring dryness
we feel on waking to an empty day.
The partygoers have moved off; they pass,
processing. One of them breaks into song,
brittle, sharp, and joyous. The medieval gate
is on the edge of earshot; a timbrel beat, no more,
as I step out and midday bites the eyes.
THREE POEMS BY SAMUELE GIANETTI
The Eyes
(Gli occhi come)
The eyes as prisons
where lives the entire sky.
It is a knot,
that memory, I don’t
lace anymore.
The Pin
(Hai nell’occhio lo spillo)
You have a pin in your eyes
in the red glass of satellites
in spring when the air darkens and slides –
always away – from you.
Oh how sweet to escape it
in the gleaming light
of evening.
AMONG THE INSOLUBLE THICKNESSES
(Tra gli insolubili)
Among the insoluble thicknesses
of morning, June’s vivid sun,
one lone desire remains far off from me…
A WEEK IN MARCH
Upstairs, a candle gutters out, unnoticed.
My father dead thirty-one years;
in twelve months I'll have overtaken
the age at which he died. Or maybe not.
So much of life is fixed in parenthesis,
random events bracketing how movement
is remembered – time as a series
of braids, of ribbons, their edges
stitched in overlap. Impossible to find
music which conjures nothing, which rests
complete within itself – such is the age
when everything is heard.
~
Simply never coming back again.
Why is this so hard to take in?
And then the body joins the chorus,
dribbling its many failings into the general truth.
Yet it's only in the deepest sleep
that the most vivid haunting comes -
this time, the yellow of a car. How incredibly
sleek it was when it took me to work,
richer than gold as it flashed, making night
even darker either side of its instant,
the way swans in flight grey the surrounding sky.
~
Highfield again. The way my feet
sounded in the small, unfurnished room;
going from door to window
was almost a song. I woke just now
with the feel of wood under bare feet,
but what preceded it was silence,
it was as though half my life
had leached away unnoticed. But not
the warmth of summer facing west
to long sunsets which promised
an endless future - it was all
man-made: wood, foam, plasterboard -
looking out at other walls that held
more lives setting out. Where are they now,
are any jolted awake by some
forgotten circumstance?
~
Hang up, check, and ask
What was restored? A voice
carried over old ground,
tentative, the speech of one
distracted by the everyday,
settling by default into the familiar.
Maybe. Or a sound
from the open earth, a coming out
into a moment where the only means
of living is forgetfulness
as if those underground years
which are today, tomorrow,
were no more than a kink
in the breath of a long conversation.
~
Where would we be without our ghosts
when the dead outnumber the living
and are nearer? Now, as in boyhood,
I seem to be trailing after people
who trailed in turn behind their reputations,
names big as frames, limbs
like striding tree trunks.
And walking along the street, how confined
each house, how great the gap
where one has fallen. I stop
and watch bodies move across an upper
storey – bodies, lives playing out
in air, light gliding through them
like a story.
~
Cor mihi dolet mane. Anonymous, lute.
I try to guess the words
imprisoned in his head, or when he first
knew they’d never be sung,
and how he made from incompleteness
something wholly his, one chord
breaking into the next, filling
the void of the abandoned lyric
that refused to yield, or broke
and tailed off into silence.
Frost has punished seedlings
withered by neglect of an evening sky,
some still barely green in parts.
Cover them up, and hope.
~
I walked last night in the orchard
I never got to plant. The trees
were shadows of those who’d kept me
tethered, out of love, to earth.
It was only when awake I dreamed.
It takes a life for gravity to do its work.
II
THE MEANING OF HOME
The year like all else
is on the turn. Spring carries
a sharpness like that behind the eyes
after sleeplessness. Everything within
should be like the wind, honed,
but in too long a wintering, unexercised,
the senses have coalesced to a weight
that drives you to walk and wonder
was there a chance to do better?
I recall children on their first day at school,
their faces glowing or freighted
with the burden of a life not yet lived.
How much of it all was fate?
The playground is grass, the walls’
swimming-pool blue is simply sky now,
open, grey, gentle on the odd day.
And those years, their tiny thousand
tumults, are a tinnitus merged
with the memory of greater joys and ills;
old joys which never come
unbidden – they must be grafted, grasped,
invented even, like that perfect
room you conjured once, in which
to puzzle the meaning of home.
WIDOWERS
At an outdoor table, widowers, their wives still living,
unreachable. Speech and silence are island and sea, each eating
into the other. Every noon, coffee dregs trickle through gravel, staining
like blood that has waited years for a drought to end.
This morning one mimes a casting out and reeling; the air twitches
with the shock of his catch, the moment floods
and flags, memory slight and useless, a line sheared through.
Night cannot come quickly enough to those long ago bends, dancing with
mayflies.
They could be in a city square, not here where trees glower
and the ground is a shingle beach for castaways,
where the constant passing of couples is a river of gold.
History claims them slowly, each story is a patch of garden claimed by
weeds,
where they walked at dawn once, at home in an alien neatness,
their minds supple, untroubled by the fear of light.
FATHER'S DAY
Silence beneath a noon skylight is different
to any other. Trees are bending as much
under the weight of birdsong
as breeze, branches rub like castanets.
Here nothing has stirred for an hour,
the air between glass and its square of floor
is an oven. Not so much as a fly
moves anywhere below. No tap drips.
The word no is like a rain
ringing inside the skull. Father's Day
is a litany of absence,
a long visit by the ghost of days
that never happened. A thin cloud stalls.
Even books are leaning against each other, exhausted.
GHOST SHIPS
There is a pub I pass – old style,
the front a shop, bar in a back room,
entered through what used to be
the hallway of the house – where men go
in early summer to escape the sun.
For them, winter is a womb; they became
a planet that never spun.
Perhaps they’re right. Maybe it’s better
to walk into the comfort of dark,
to feel it passing strange, enveloping
like those vapour fumes that pained the eyes,
forced the airwaves open.
And if you watch them all the way down,
they disappear from the feet up, less a trick
of the light than the merest slope. Nothing
in this town is on the level,
houses on one side are out of true, like boxers
leaning back just enough to dodge a punch,
frozen, astonished, doomed to fall toward the centre.
Now they come out to smoke, in twos,
squinting even on the shortest days. Passers-by
are craft on a river, even neighbours,
their greetings have the hurried ring
of foreign languages. And the men converse,
monosyllables rich as fables; the air
at their backs is thick with trapped histories.
A dry cough and they turn again,
ghost ships heading into port.
OIL
Your parting shot the other day
smells of the town growing up
not forgotten, but those
which don’t exist anymore.
So many: horse dung, rare
even then; more recent,
smoke from an open pub door
as you pass; paraffin heaters,
and most suddenly, the interior
of abandoned cars, leather
dried to cracking, oil
thick as sludge, its rich
hint of metal – it made
you think of the earth’s core;
and the feel of steering wheels,
their ten-to-two worn
to the smoothness of sea-glass.
You never see them now,
those cars; the last
was in a July field
as if the hand of God
had set it down gently
in the long grass.
PAST THE LAST HILL
Past the last hill darkness becomes sleek,
long, unbroken. You could stroke it
if logic gave you leave. I’m almost afraid
to count the years since I first came here
sensing my feet and nothing between them and the sea ,
confused by the suddenness of a new depth
in black. I was standing in the middle
of a Neil Young song, a prairie measureless, unstarred.
And what astonishes tonight isn’t the vastness of it all
but simply how young I was. The chords that swam
in my head outside Killanny Hall, carry now not space
but speed – those years, a blur passing into night’s
evenness, the shadow on the last hill barely
there, as if silver could become a sigh.
PORTRAIT OF A GIRL IN A RED COAT
Above all, a portrayal of that time
when we shed and grow into ourselves,
when both are equally valid. And because a painting
takes longer to complete, it is more authentic
than a photograph, capturing as it does
the movement – inner, or external but happening
so slowly we can’t be aware of it –
from one state of being to another,
alike but different as identical twins.
So too, the girl who posed
and she of the completed work: forever
a work in progress.
ALTAR WINE
The square is full of names you first hear
in later life; others, you come across them in books,
now living, carried on the breeze between footpaths.
The air in Switzerland was thin, even in summer,
language rich like clotted cream. Now it seems
nothing is strange; every music can be plucked
from nowhere, conjured like souls. Only the dead,
so long familiar, comfortable, are receding.
And stumbling on two uneven stones, cobbles laid
on thin bedding, alignment worn too soon,
brings to mind not Venice but some old
Hapsburg town, modern, bickering across a stream – say
Gorizia, Nova Gorica – neighbourly, nearly understanding,
both haunted by the ghosts of plumed helmets
or rare and common tragedies – death in childbirth,
a father’s mind clear and still unreadable.
No two people look the same on a leaden sky.
Voices from a shop door are indifferent. Their lives
are a narrow room, a walk to work with strangers
for whom wine was never a luxury, exotic,
who never knew the smell of altar wine
as an explosion in the senses of a boy too small
to drink – it was past and future, already
Dionysian, an unconsecrated sacrament.
NO MAN’S LAND
Here
in the middle of the road signs
Italia, Slovenija
here
on the railway embankment
bushes grow
They were young, they were seeds
they had the roots and patience
to embrace this land
once called no one’s
Now it’s theirs
Francesco Tomada
THE ORANGE GROVE
An orange grove – seemingly miraculous
the way they thrive in a dry plain -
lights the switched-on screen on a foggy morning.
Every year there is a first picture
to remind that summer is gone for good,
that it has passed beyond remnants.
Is that why the attic box
of photographs remains untouched?
The multitude of tiny fruits are tongues of fire,
the greens seem to give off the only heat
in the room. Click on. A meadow. Normandy,
maybe, the sea just past a dark uneven ridge.
Why are we, so afraid of death, so enamoured
of dead things – a season, a scene
dried onto a board a hundred years ago?
As if the apple, bitten twice, had withered
in front of their fascinated eyes.
Elvis. Diana. Bowie. They make us feel like God,
blessing them in retrospect. We step for a moment
out of the stream that carries us all.
We shiver, briefly. We dry in the sun.
1976
Engrossed in the story, I looked out
to see night had fallen as I read.
The dark of the Atlantic was mine now,
the written fields of a broken girl’s tears and those
of Monaghan were the same ink. A power cut:
the bus moved through an absence of light
as complete as any. Hills might have been sea.
Every welcome and shunning waited,
those years that would unroll
and gather up behind each of us,
strangers who gazed out, unspeaking,
waiting the first bright dot. No journey since
has passed with night as ambush –
how complete, how comforting it was,
Ireland blanketed in dark, Ireland itself a blanket.
OPPOSITE
Ice on the cars has thawed and frozen
again, it has a strange, furred tinge
under the street lights. Opposite,
behind stiff curtains, comes a soft
glow, a lamp on a timer set
to deter burglars. I can name,
with my eyes closed, half a dozen such
along this road that was once
familiar as cloth against the skin.
They say somewhere, that you can never
enter the sea without the world
around you changing. For me, here
at my front door, it is, however
briefly, the opposite; everything is
as it once was, they are all suddenly
moving in and through, those families,
their homes are a message I can’t decipher
yet, but it doesn’t matter,
the moment is whole, each blurred interior
patient as the night, and waiting.
SNAKESKIN
March, I think, a touch of indigo
in the sky, toes and fingers just
this side of numbness, and, job done,
rose slips regular as stakes
In a square of clay between gable
and garage – most sun, least wind.
But no amount of care
could shelter them from the restless
hand that planted. So it went on,
always some corner more churned
than dug, the rough and ready praised
– in truth it was beautiful in its own way –
and always like a sore, that dull
impatience which has its root in fear
of failure, which it always brings about.
Failure and uprooting.
Which is why
I need as counterweight
this recollection – it came from nowhere,
a gift – a day in the foothills
of the Jura, in search of a Roman well
(we finally found it, capped and padlocked)
the town a picture postcard, all streets
visible, church a white barn
in a siding. The air hot and thinning.
Corn stubble at wood’s edge buoyed
our feet, it felt like walking on water.
And almost stepped on, a snakeskin,
long shed, too stiff and dry to fit around
the wrist; but held to the sun,
worn almost translucent, shades
and patterns as if it were a atrip
of cellulose. And through a tear
wide as pin, light was the gold
of a chalice. The moment had that stillness
you know after it’s passed.
And the uncut fields were a sea,
the snake somewhere, its perfect self, moving,
air like electricity hissing on the tongue.
III
ON GROSSE HAMBURGER STRASSE
Hatless, I passed by last time.
Today, emptiness and overgrowth
erases the eloquence of the city.
Ahead, a lone figure, tall, in a white
yarmulke, makes his way along the wall.
He has the silent purpose of a pilgrim,
one who belongs, for whom
no gesture is necessary.
He has walked through an outcast
world to be here; the gap
between each step is a distance
that overshadows the likes of us
as the word infinity crushes
the imagination. At the gate of such
a tabernacle of suffering, what can we do
but don a cap – a lungful of air
in the face of a crashing sky.
MARIN MARAIS
On such a morning everything is on delay.
The laptop coughs into life
as if from a long sleep: a chaconne
by Marin Marais. From the marsh.
Nothing could be more appropriate:
the windows are fogged by the tail-end
of a New England blast which shuddered
and split. Now it spends itself.
You can imagine it: dizzy, old,
at some great altitude.
And the earth waiting
to be soaked and pounded.
Sometimes it seems to call
punishment on itself – the landscape,
that is: we two-legged ants,
carry on regardless. Plough
and shrapnel are one, we churn
where river-courses have been turned away.
And in the end what is there
but the dizziness that comes
from watching the sky too long?
VISITATION
Yes, there are at least
a thousand natural shocks:
some travel on the air,
others from the worm of memory
and this, a goad
in the depth of night –
the weight of my children
when I gave them a piggyback
home from the park.
ROLL CALL
The front bar of the Tower, raucous
even on a Sunday morning.
A band playing what passed for jazz,
footballers gathering. One knocked
his studs against a table leg;
no drink was spilled. Cars parked
both sides; a lorry-width, no more.
The counter rapped. A row about the noise.
Set list, roll call. Who would have guessed
at desolation – cell-ravaged bodies,
the street outwardly intact but gutted,
stories wrenched from a generation,
one by one, like teeth?
ARGOS
Glassed-over ruins, sea-green in the afternoon,
the quay a thin strip between ribbons of sun.
Figures move across offices. A perfect hour:
every sore, it seems to say,
can be bandaged by wealth.
When I got off the bus, everything
was huge as sunflowers to a child
in his first garden,
crowds were a river in flood
pushing at windows, lapping
in and out of doors.
I had been away too long,
had forgotten that people, like water,
erode obstacles by almost avoiding them.
Slowly it came back, the old familiarity
where nothing is quite the same
and you begin to assume
from the inside out
the guise of a stranger,
a face in a painting looking down
from a gallery wall.
A city is a great skin
stretched like canvas, its surface
a patina, fresh and dry by turns,
changing light is simply the past
forever returning. I thought, as I stepped
into the street, of a clot suddenly
blasted into radiance, the way
the tail of a comet is always there,
even in the darkest of reaches.
This is a moment. A step
among millions, forever old and new,
miraculous, like blood.
And here, five minutes’ walk away,
the hulk of an old ship
in a green dock, its wood
the colour of a bruise, birds
scouring for insects between planks.
Silence so close to the heart
as Jason found
lying in the shelter of a past
that would topple and devour him.
FEW HOUSES
There are few houses which are not unlucky,
into which misfortune doesn't fall,
the pinch of disappointment or the lash of madness.
Do they know, in their compact rooms,
that they're under siege, that a great,
inarticulate envy surrounds them? A child's
shell in a flowerbed, whitened to ivory,
has the pricked light of a distant beacon
reminding of every recent shipwreck. Pass on,
bury the notion of smiling gods and rocks,
you who have learned that each inhabits the other.
THE PARTING GIFT
(i.m. Paddy Gifford)
Suddenly the city was elsewhere,
a river running both sides.
Even the air was different, as if
I were inhaling silence; the apartments
too, empty but not abandoned,
waiting an evening return.
It was one of those moments
when you think of something
completely unconnected: this time
you, Paddy – how perfect you seemed
growing up, how your outpacing us
was measured in those snippets sent
from Devon – school photos, clippings,
you in blazer and crest, or holding
a trophy above a paragraph of newsprint.
Your smile, although we couldn't put
our finger on it, had the ease
of a child of Empire, who saw
red on an atlas with no sense
of envy or disturbance, for whom
countryside was to be raced, not worked.
Where did they go, those countries of ours?
I know you walked the foreign landscape
if illness particular to oneself,
how dark and bare I only guessed
from photographs before and since.
Nor did I understand what Ireland
meant to you; it was the country
I thought I'd outgrown: you kept it
whole. It never crossed my mind
that you'd had letters too, from here,
that we'd seen each other not across a sea
but through the same glass, not quite clear,
not smooth, but true in its own fashion.
I always thought you'd be back once more,
one of those ideas we hold as a given
in spite of age and logic. Instead,
this summer I'll head south
and stand above your ashes sheltered
by our great-grandfather's name.
There may be life beyond; there is,
it seems, no word beyond thanks.
Your children's visit was your parting gift.
ETA-Hoffmann-Promenade, Berlin, November 2022
FISH
He turned as far as his waist allowed,
his arm sweeping. And you knew
he could see every church
within a five mile radius, the modest stone
of the barn-like, the two Gothic rivals.
His hand dropped, not from tiredness
but an empty weight; the indifference
of children, baptized but unbaptizing.
This was an exile no prayer
had foreseen: a kingdom moving
from under his feet while he took his rest
or worked to and from
each Sunday. You could hear
in his silence the sounds of infants
moving towards a maturity his mind couldn't shape.
He straightened and told of rowing across the lough,
the boat filling, oars moving as through treacle,
the moment at which floating and sinking
were one. He settled back: in that sigh
was the long last pull to beaching,
sodden clothes that still vex the odd dream,
and the chill of certainty having failed to buoy,
the crack unseen until it bubbles.
Souls, he said, were no longer fish,
at home where we didn't belong,
but old hymnals piled up who knew where.
That they were opened and flew
through the eyes to the throat and out into melody
was enough. They were safe from damp,
they honoured their own dust.
THE CHAIR
It has taken you all your life
to picture this chair
in the middle of a field - unchanged,
its surroundings dissolved
as if they had never been.
Isn't this what you wanted -
purity? Every deed a tightly-stitched
thread, fabric flawless from end to end.
You can never be the eyes that saw this space
empty, and measured in his head
the lineaments of what would confine you:
plumb line and string, the terrace stepped
as animals looked on, and rivets
hammered the air across an untarred fence.
You were born with a mania to collect -
or so you thought. It was nothing
more than a desire to dismantle:
you gathered so much it toppled
and demolished all around it
and left you here, no walls
to walk through, no roof to be repaired.
How does it feel, now there is at last
no keeping in or out?
Look at the chair. Guard it in your mind
before the rain comes, and the crows.
HOUSE
Rest
It is the year's first morning
of a six o' clock sunrise.
You move through silence
as though picking your way across snow,
other presences are ice underfoot,
to be acknowledged and respected
and the air's very stillness
makes you aware
that it's never still,
it merely seems to settle, has cushioned
the ticking of the clock. You too, are part
of the moment's illusion - house or home,
here at a small square table,
in the turmoil of a head
that is a house – your only house -
is the remoteness of rest.
House
Once you understand that the house
is a being; that you inhabit it
as an organism inhabits a body,
you can begin to move freely.
Not just that:
it comes to you that the house
is male and female, at times
interchangeable, at times one.
And that your memories
have as much solidity in this place as you,
that you are indeed little more
than the seed of a future memory,
here and without.
The Stairwell
There is a point on the stairwell,
the tenth or eleventh step,
where warm and cold air meet
and hold each other fast,
the change in temperature so slight
as to be unnoticed.
Here scents linger or emerge
like characters in once-treasured books.
Don't name them, pass on,
for every sewing-up there must
be a tear. Here an energy manifests,
wells like a wave of embarrassment,
here some day you'll come across
your other self. Both bewildered,
wondering which is which.
Presence
Something stirs. Something below
the level of the body senses it -
a warding off, as with flies or persistence.
It is the house, fighting off
the sense of its own failure,
it mimics you, or perhaps has drawn
you into itself more completely
than you'd imagined.
And that it's your presence
bringing it to life, igniting
a passion older than the railway,
longer lasting.
Athenian
A glimpse in the night
of an old father, an Athenian
or rather the rustle of his name
smooth like a drawer opened
on chalked rollers
in a corner of time where night
and sound move through each other
like sleep and wakefulness,
an instant where importance
is of no matter.
Tiredness is at bay, dammed
for the duration of a stanza.
The first bird has begun; something
in his blind eye recognises
the dark lifting.
Names
And sometimes it's as if
lying out in a desert,
counting invisible stars,
remembering them with names
you were afraid to use back then
but which were always true.
It is the pain of conviction
which enables you to utter them.
The furthest were a fine sugar -
how many years since you held that taste?
It ran across your tongue tonight,
a fugitive, a fox.
Where had it been hiding?
Under the Roof
Rot beneath the floorboards, fire under the roof.
An interruption short of terror.
Every sound has given way
to the heart's pounding. An instant
lost to logic - yes, this is how we pay
for calm, yesterday's or tomorrow's -
or a purging of some childish misdemeanour,
hidden wormlike all these years
or the price of original sin -
not death, but knowing the inevitable;
morning will sweep clean, the air
taste of cold, of renewal,
all will begin, as though
the night had never been.
But first there is the sinking back
Trucks
Trucks rumble. The earliest
are unseen, imagined, like subsidence
you know they cause; the house shifts
a grain a year. But all remains intact
as far as can be measured.
And what does it matter to be noted,
as if the calendar mattered to the earth
or a cog wheel to the sun?
What counts is the silence between rumbles,
the way it stretches like a restless nerve.
An itch that can't be scratched.
.The Ear Fixes on a Sound
Puzzled by darkness
the ear fixes on a sound
of its own making,
the bark of a seal
miles inland,
reminding that we're all stranded.
And when dawn washes like a tide
there will be no obliteration
but a mere sweeping away,
a return to be waited upon.
A Lock of Hair
What is a house? Look at what
will be taken out when the time comes -
books, albums, photographs; a stamp collection
blank beyond the second page.
Bed linen, old furnishings.
What are the walls but skin?
The house is what will be carried off.
Remember that morning, clear and chill,
a lock of hair, golden
in the clay of a flower pot;
a child's curl, perfectly cut,
not wind blown, too tight for that,
dropped by a bird on its way
to this year's nest.
And a breeze shook the roses,
they shivered, temporary, resolute.
Almost a Sound
It could almost be a sound -
the souls of your parents
breaking through, like an answer
to a question you dared not ask
or the warmth of childhood,
universal but always elsewhere
now - does the wolf feel it,
stretched on his last snow?
Carpet
Stairs, that distant night. Ascending,
descending like a child, for fear
of a split brow or broken neck
and of being discovered so -
there's something about indignity,
the shame of it, that keeps us alive
without our realising.
The close smell too, of carpet -
once, in an infant fever, I lay my cheek
against it, by the fire -
it came back to me, a comfort,
something older, something beyond,
it carried more stories, more lives
than I could hold in my befuddled head
so that mine wasn't diminished,
but dwindled somehow; it became
a kind of air that suddenly held
the possibility of drifting out
and settling, altered but almost whole.
Those to Come
Earth will take its due
but in the end it is air
that will carry your last remnant,
borrowed and kept beyond its time,
held in suspension, flaring
as an unaccounted shock
or sudden flood of warmth
in someone years hence
turning onto the landing,
a flash, a memory of tingling skin
from a time when photographs
were sunburn red.
Go through each room. Everything
you touch will be uprooted.
Think kindly while you can
of those to come: their hopes,
their strained joints,
the void they're to inhabit briefly.
Think back. Never did you waken
in utter darkness,
there was always a patch,
pale, benign,
moonlight with no moon
and a familiar breath
from an empty room.
IV
THE GOD OF UNIMPORTANT LIVES
The secret, he said, is passivity,
not to pray for good weather
when rain refuses to clear for days on end,
to accept the stubbornness of clouds
as a reminder of our insignificance.
To step out, fastening our small buttons.
But I pray as I must to the contrary,
assuming always that a storm pushes
against your morning door; that in you
is contained all stretched on the altar of betrayal
or the inadequacy of the few they trusted.
Come snow, come sun, you face down
the god of unimportant lives
every time you wrap the day around you.
You for whom constancy has been misfortune,
a planet in a clumsy universe.
We hear the same bell from different distances.
It doesn't reckon time, it's the centre
of the surrounding sky, tolling that truth
is absence, that gravity means above all
immense emptiness, the loneliness of satellites.
Silence returns, that wave of air flatlines.
If only the heart's restlessness could subside
with such grace, if we could be stilled
by something short of illness. Instead, calm
brings anxiety, an imagined sound of thunder.
Only at night - I remember one, in March,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter a pendant
hung above the lime trees - does sky, body,
earth, align, the breath steady,
a fine mist disappearing.
The voice comes back. Prayer he saw
as a flock of birds, twisting, spiralling,
dispersed before ever finding roost,
its beauty in whatever patterns
coincidence made. I think of it
as rooted, like those surrounding fields
you made your own. The grass springs back,
perfectly in place, each blade
never quite the same for your having
brushed against them; the bruised sweetness
they release, we never sense. Evening settles,
a fox sniffs the dew from an opposite hill.
BURNT WALLS
Who will come after those who come
after us? We can never be so certain
as the first who listened to Homer,
the smell of burning timber
sharp in their nostrils,
or our own, who pinned rags above a well
that had seeped for a thousand years,
their tossed coin rusting, its iron
feeding the roots of a quicken bush.
This morning birds fell silent
after the first hour.
What were they waiting for? All you could tell
through the hairline-open window
was rain under the tyres of early trucks:
it too had stopped. Already the day
was falling through itself, inside-out,
afternoon unfastened and fleeing.
Was there ever before a time
when children's chldren were as unreachable?
No imagination can wrap itself round
the possibility of their lives,
the very act of trying makes us ghosts,
we feel ourselves melt or shatter like ice.
And when all this has passed
there will ever be the fright of failure.
What will they become,
faced with their own burnt walls?
KAPPELHOFF
The void is a series of pinpricks
not yet joined, their darkness
spells no word. Such density,
spreading like blotted ink,
a perfect O, unthinned.
Among it all, a flash
of how it once was: opposite,
random sounds gradually patterned
in a constellation of sentences,
and out, ad infinitum.
Until the merest tilt, a novelty,
a millisecond's pleasant dizziness,
an inner pins and needles.
Then - how it refused
to go away - olive and olvidar.
So easily it scatters, knowledge,
vanishes and bobs like numb
fingers clutching at a spar.
The first bars of the Stabat Mater,
Doris Day's real name.
DOCKSIDE SHIPS
Now, towards the end,
after a long half-chaos,
things are arranged for others,
sorted, ready for dispersal:
the long rows of books,
dockside ships waiting on a high tide.
Eyeing them, corner to corner
from the centre of the room,
they become hours, days, years,
time and how it could have
otherwise been spent.
Why have I read?
How much of it has been
to gain the knowledge of others?
And how much of it was knowledge?
No - it was to be led by the hand
by different fathers, mothers,
to feel their palm immense and warm
around my infant fist; their pace,
it seemed, slowed to mine;
the stillness, when they were done,
of standing alone and sturdy.
And those from whom I learned little if anything,
they threw me in the air and caught me.
And I'm forever grateful for that giddiness.
STRINGS
First there is the surprise of age and rust.
It always catches you; a chapter falls away
like a rope bridge in front of your eyes,
and you think of the inner workings
of your body - is it as badly maintained?
Discard the old strings. They lie dead
across each other, necks wrung, but one
having left its mark across the back of a hand.
Now the new, pliable at first, soft
as a fontanelle. Once and once only
light catches them unwound, their looseness
a kind of innocence. Still no more
than the thinnest of wires, they know nothing
of music, no more than a chrysalis
can conceive the colour of its unformed wings.
Slowly. As the machine heads turn
something like mercury runs through them,
they come alive, resisting like children
the perfection of harmonics. And every movement
is minute, almost hushed, the moment tightened
to fractions of fractions, the breath held
in fear of a snap and lash - no, the last
adjustment is easy as a sigh. And now
with the first strum, balanced, plain, comes
an echo of all those songs
you'll never get to play, beyond the reach
of clumsy fingers, lodged in the ear
that misses nothing. Hold the guitar
to the skylight; the strings' shimmering
is impatience. In your grip it's a ship
waiting to be launched. Each chord
in someone else's hands will be
a sea with its necklace of islands.
THE GERMAN LETTER
No mornings stranger
than those familiar
in every respect but one.
Coffee in a renovated shop,
poring over a German letter
in a school primer.
How it all comes back,
the struggle, the expectation,
every language a river
guarding its fish.
New year, old traffic
hurrying to the zebra crossing
while it's clear. The drivers
are eyeing that empty space
as if it was an open goal.
How it all comes back
to them - mornings,
cold fields, the slap
of a ball on the face.
A loss that will not let go.
Was ist deine Meinung dazu?
OXEN
Once every dozen years or so,
springs here run dry. The ground
around the cattle trough
is baked, part powder, part brick.
I wonder about the nettles I pulled
a lifetime ago, my gloved knuckles
stiff for days. How far have those roots
travelled in search of water?
And I marvel at their acquaintance
with depth, how they could outlast us,
clumps in a corner older than monuments.
And the million spiders floating invisible,
their voyages more hazardous
than that of Odysseus beyond the Cyclades,
from what cold height
do they descend to find shelter
at the butt of dock leaves?
Hedgerows are holding their green
tenaciously as we our youth, they give
little of themselves to the dead air.
Even flowers have withdrawn their scent
but for some faint aroma lingering
among the dust. How quick I am
to find oppressive what I counted
down to all winter, many winters past;
the more we dream of excess,
the more we baulk at anything
beyond moderation. And the itch
of dissatisfaction is more corroding
that the harshest sun. Those fat oxen -
how I longed to hear the long grass
rustle as they made their way
placidly to the altar. Such gold,
blues, greens! I forgot the serpent
ready to strike at the passing ankle,
I was too young that first time
to know we die from inside out,
our extremities unblemished. Take back
this more than perfect heat, leave us
the vision of a copper sea.
CONSTELLATIONS
I could never figure out
what others saw at night.
The stars coalesced into patterns
older than the written word.
But they weren't my shapes - mine
were different, the dream of an oddity.
They're gone now. And I wonder
which is the greater loss, those outlines
or the boy who stitched them together?
It took me years to understand
that there are different ways of not knowing.
Night wheels uncaring above our infinite
roofs, our lives singular
and insignificant as plankton.
A lit city is less than a pinprick,
its heat no more than that of a red cell
in a thread of veins no one sees.
There are no constellations.
They're all lone stars,
strangers to each other.
Their names are a monument
to our hunger for speech,
how without stories, we're bereft,
particles of life like blobs of mercury
fated never to fasten on each other.
ISLANDS
I
The Moon, those nights, mattered
when there was a man in it -
was he benign, trying to peer through
those thin curtains?
And then at about
seven, he became Greek and she,
many-named, patient as a hunter.
The hours we spent watching each other!
With the odd star too dim
to steer by. Then Armstrong, and what
my mother called those big Yankee boots.
II
The moon sank beneath the horizon
the first morning after
she died, my mother.
I was Odysseus navigating
a starless sky. What did it matter
that the sun of adulthood attempted
to make good a deficit?
It was too low in the sky to blaze,
could only blind.
At night now, a far-off piston
breaks the plane of silence,
a boat engine traversing a sea
known only to strangers long disappeared.
May they break unexpectedly into a dawn
of mangroves and parakeets,
a sweeping of sound and colour
denied the asthmatic schoolboy reader,
his feet perpetually cold.
Suddenly the air has a hum of oil
and the wind picks up, slightly.
A full moon those winter evenings meant
we could stay out a little longer,
our fingers past the pain of numbness,
but I wanted more, the freedom of suspension,
to be as it was, just there, neither hung
nor floating, to possess its unnerving stillness.
This is what I've tried so often since
to put into words - the unsayable,
the riddle of being. Now that it's no more
than rock, the moon, a hardened blob
among countless, why cling to mystery?
I'm growing tired of the battle between story
and ststistic. There are too many billions.
I'm forever drawn to those stars hidden
behind hills, scattered like seeds across
the edge of the Mediterranean, or the unsung
music of conjecture.
III
Frail as a reed, a bird calls
to a waning crescent
in a sky almost blue.
The last song is the first
as though night had never been.
There is no new moon
and all that ever happened
is lodged in that unlit fact.
And still there is the word - new,
light, full - and the vision it affords,
the space to believe the sun
will always rise. And so it will,
sufficient for the animal, and the eye
which sees beyond noughts
to that figure, salt-skinned,
wind-lashed. Alone in that emptiness,
sea pitch, sky sulphur, he found
light to steer by. What else was there?
Even as a child
it was never enough to drift,
a course had to be plotted,
each thought a random, jagged island.
THE DEAD SIGH
It happens sometimes:
the lungs, half-full at death,
contract, expelling air
in a dead sigh,
air ripples a last time
over vocal cords
still and finally unique.
What did it mean, that sigh?
For I knew it was more
than mere air,
it was, above all, you.
You'd been almost away all day,
more than sleep, less than death.
There was one small device
keeping track of your fading
as we assembled,
each to ourselves,
a mosaic of your life -
it shifts like fog,
disperses and gathers
but always at its centre
the dying pulse, that stillness
and then the sigh
and its coming out of nowhere.
Others, I've read since,
have jumped on hearing it,
jolted by an eeriness
they can't shake off.
I knew it then, remember it
as a summing up -
a life, a final gift.
THE LAST NUN
Long-dressed, the last nun peers
as morning dribbles light along the horizon.
She wonders what coat God will wear today,
what face - those old familiars
or that boy she so soon forgot?
One of them visited in sleep
and spoke. All that remained
when dawn broke was the hum of an incantation.
She ponders the body.
Christ almost weightless on the cross,
his ribs two boats meeting at the prow,
hers, shrinking into sleeves and waistband
like an old nut in a shell
and she is struck by the notion of wisdom
as a force circulating in a sealed space,
a prowling animal, an unearthed charge.
And she in eternity, losing her grip on years.
There was joy, though, of a kind, in waiting
for enlightenment that would not come,
the toil of prayer in the end little different
from that of planting - the sense of hope,
the same ache in the back on straightening.
When did it begin to loosen,
her early grasp of the hereafter?
When did prayer become a meditation
on edges forever worn away?
She could wish for the world's one advantage,
its immediate reckoning - credit, debt,
a balance shifting but always visible,
there to be counted. The weightlessness
of faith stings now, like clean air in frost.
The town stirs, still drowsy.
Those prayers and the life
which prompted them: where have they gone?
Whether they rose as incense
or dissipated like days, there is,
as all draws to a close, the fact
that they were offered.
And what of being the last? It means
having lasted, endured, upheld by the pain
of durance - Christ buoyed by nails,
defying the drag of the earth.
AT THE END OF A WHITE LANE
(Au bout d’une allée blanche)
At the end of a white lane
as though lost
surrounded by forests,
humped like a shaved backbone
with some apple trees thrown into the wind,
a tiny fragment of the abbey,
its frail, tight arches
given over to silence,
to contemplation.
Only bird song populates empty walls.
No more prayers -
full-natured Dawn is henceforth goddess,
in the mud of the river
sparse deer prints tell of her cult.
Michel Cosem
IN THE LONG GRASS
I hang up, or whatever they call it now;
a red dot, not even a button.
And everything is silent, astonishingly so.
Such sunlight, flooding; the top of the stairs
casts a jail-cell shadow on the landing wall.
And imagining carries all the effort
of escape. I cast around the alien haze
and wish the day could end
with a gold halo. Instead, evening sinks
into the long tropes of absence -
a dog calling in the long grass,
the ground hard under your feet.
HOUSE (2024)
I
MIDWEEK AT THE FOREST PARK
EELS
AND IN ONE HALL
METEORITES
LACQUER
MAGPIE
HERE AND NOW
WINGED VICTORY HOLDING A GOLDEN TRIPOD
SOLDER
AMMONITE
THREE POEMS BY SAMUELE GIANETTI
A WEEK IN MARCH
II
THE MEANING OF HOME
WIDOWERS
FATHER’S DAY
GHOST SHIPS
OIL
PAST THE LAST HILL
PORTRAIT OF A GIRL IN A RED COAT
ALTAR WINE
NO MAN’S LAND
THE ORANGE GROVE
1976
OPPOSITE
SNAKESKIN
III
ON GROSSE HAMBURGER STRASSE
MARIN MARAIS
A VISITATION
ROLL CALL
ARGOS
FEW HOUSES
THE PARTING GIFT
FISH
THE CHAIR
HOUSE
IV
THE GOD OF UNIMPORTANT LIVES
BURNT WALLS
KAPPELHOFF
DOCKSIDE SHIPS
STRINGS
THE GERMAN LETTER
OXEN
CONSTELLATIONS
ISLANDS
THE DEAD SIGH
THE LAST NUN
AT THE END OF A WHITE LANE
IN THE LONG GRASS
I
MIDWEEK AT THE FOREST PARK
Drawn by a warmth beyond the temperate,
some creature has been rooting near a culvert,
patient, persistent, methodical – a scrape
long and straight as a brake mark.
Leaves tell where it scattered,
surprised by morning and voices.
How many joggers passed,
eyes fixed, wishing unease
could be diverted like floodwater,
that only the tangible be real?
It works; they become their own rhythm,
all stitch and breath, the cushioned joint
on gravel.
Not for us. Turn down
toward the cool where moss has swallowed
the tracks of mushroom-foragers, the year’s fad
already dead. Here light
is never whole, there is a heart
unmapped, it shifts like a portal
to a dream of the primal – wild boar
fattening on beech mast; a litter of acorns
where pine needles are a threadbare fabric
on mud.
It is always the lost now
we feel on air. Are we too old
to be thinking of the timeless?
Is there too much to remember?
EELS
The fog is thinning out, like ribbons, like eels.
The worm of forgetfulness is eating
but only at the good - the rest
are night-tatters, their parting
is a promise of return.
Farther than a drive away now, the stream
where they moved, those eels, from stone to stone
like weeds, but upstream,
languid, barely hiding.
And something whiskered, barbelled,
dashed in a scud of silt: was it there
at all? One by one, our facts
are becoming myths. Where do we
end up - is it beyond or before truth?
AND IN ONE HALL
So different then.
Not the week of late shops,
the mill and rustle, the tear
of bolts of wrapping paper.
It was, remains, the stillness.
In every second window, a huge
star, its barley sugar heart
sharpening to points of amber.
And lights strung in odd
spots above the streets,
colours deep, almost industrial.
It seemed a hand had painted
each – red, green, orange, blue,
to trap, not release,
as if afraid pure light
might be devoured, an innocence
overwhelmed by night.
And in one hall
a thick, handmade crib,
its clear bulb, bead-sized,
surrounded by a proper pagan dark.
METEORITES
Driving alongside dawn
from an all-night airport run,
summer spectral at that hour,
towns asleep, not even yawning
at first - it was a time brfore
motorways, of cutting across country -
they started to appear in fours
and sixes - debs couples
blinking at day, or maybe
simply dazed at having come
from underground into their future;
blank suits; dresses, their sheen mineral
away from strobes. They waited,
pale or flushed, for taxis,
chatted farewells, then stepped
from whatever had been pledged
in early hours, at table,
or down the years; they mimed
the unease of something being over.
A few sat on garden walls
like separate stunned birds,
others here and there moved
with the fizz of energy
summoned from exhaustion.
On narrowing main streets
they thinned to twos, leaning
close or out; some dribbled
the last flat champagne, one lad
played slow guitar on a buckled,
king-sized lyre.
They were so young, the road
pulling them away as they clung
in heels, or stood sheepish,
hands in pockets. I couldn't
think. It had been too long a day.
And there they were,
disappearing. Cars began to file,
the sky brightened, empty - the promised
shower of meteorites too late.
LACQUER
News is the drone of a guitar
feeding back into itself
through a wave of speakers.
The music of the day becomes a whine
and all I can offer you it seems
is the blessing of separation
and the hope that sun
will touch the garden slope
where an orchard stood
a hundred years ago. I must
have felt its roots somehow,
gone but still there, ghost-tentacles,
a story incomplete, a series
of honeycombs where streams
ran dry. We move
a hair’s breadth from collapse,
what gift have we for each other
but fable – a lacquer for the brittle?
Thread a melody through it,
sing it into the storm.
MAGPIE
Day begins before it should;
a magpie calling somewhere near the window.
One saving grace of growing old
is that you're too tired for portents
or being ruled by someone else's superstition.
They're strangely untroublesome, the pair
that visit - sparrows peck at food, ignoring them,
we must be at the far reach of their territory,
where blood is at the centre.
What has alarmed it, driven it
here in the near-dark?
No creature's night is free from disturbance.
Think of your own rising, looking across
a gap of pitch - always the dim square
of a window somewhere in the town,
a dog stirring uneasily, growling in its sleep.
And sealed kitchens here and there; a figure
held by a screen as once
they would have been by something
called a spell. The bite of loneliness:
we can name it endlessly
like a star, can weave a constellation
of stories round it; its light
is tiny, cold. There is no flight,
no approach, only the wait
for morning and the same view, but for
a lone bird orbiting an empty bush.
HERE AND NOW
My brother frozen in mid-stair. This then
is the beginning we have tried not
to expect. He can be
coaxed back down, step by step
but there can be no coaxing ourselves
back into the past. Yes, say it was just
one of those things, but no, it’s the first
or the latest. The world has shifted
visibly, it settles into its old spin
but with a tremor underfoot.
It’s the way it is.
Say it again. It’s the way it is.
And yes, it’s always been like this.
But this is here. And now.
WINGED VICTORY HOLDING A GOLDEN TRIPOD
Perhaps we all died then, when we were young.
John Williams - Augustus
There have been too many trips upstairs
to scribbled pages, books soon to be gone,
their tired spines like faces lined
along the margin of an underworld
or weeds along both sides of the lane
we walked to stories of night waits
and anaesthetic; a third party fallen in step,
talking in turn with the ease
of men at an age when illness
is currency in conversation.
And we didn't have to say
that with bad news of someone else
part of our being flakes off,
becomes dust in a breathless air,
a mild day suddenly too hot.
Different for each of us
that shocked first time we knew
ourselves diminished, unspoken since,
buried as under ash.
Perhaps that quote was true. Perhaps
we all died when we were young.
I have it in my hand, the book
it came from, cover a cracked wall,
rich and red as carpet.
Victory risen from Pompeii,
frail, fine and beautiful,
her face untouched by tragedy,
human in her nearly-perfect
poise - how can such slender wings
hold Victory aloft?
SOLDER
He could have written in solder,
his daughter too, even at eight, her eyes
unerringly following the line, lava-slow,
as it curved along the crack
in the euphonium bell. Her hand
moved in time with his, ghosting,
each stop and start perfect as ballet.
They both stood back when it was set,
he, you could see, reading
an invisible stave, the promise of a phrase
heard properly for the first time in years.
I took a chance and played it
once or twice. In secret, not from fear
of what he’d say, but a strange shame
for something not my fault – that after
his accident, that thin scar on his brow
mirrored a greater, deep within; and
the instrument, mellow for me, became
its old cracked self for him. No one
dared challenge his claim to play
or said a word about the gap
between the note and where it should be.
Never mention of the faltering fingers.
I was too young. Then I began
to understand, too late, that of all
the sounds we made, between them alone,
scarred bell and brain a millisecond
slow, was perfect sympathy.
AMMONITE
Students, guitars, garlands. Such heat
that even in the portico leaves go limp
before the last whirr of the camera.
A couple, newly graduated, step
from an alcove, as from another century.
The young are discovering the ancient
as we before, as if they’d invented it.
A strange, heady mix, the language
and laughter of optimism: for a moment,
better than the sun. But on turning
toward the street, all becomes instantly
oppressive, the breath arid, the ground
threatening blisters.
And so, again, into the cool
of the geological museum. A nod
from the desk, a high doorway, and everything
is eighteen-eighties – dark wood, glass, air
still yet charged with the shock
of the first discovery – this is what the world
was like without us. Yes, this is where
we come, fascinated above all by how
meaningless we are. No pottery, no pared flint,
a bird’s egg more than football-sized,
petrified thighs like pillars, slips of yellowed
paper, a hundred million years in casual copperplate.
It’s like looking at the stars without becoming dizzy.
More silent than a church, these long rooms
rarely visited, untouchable relics older
than any god we could imagine -
how we wish we could remain solid
forever, some part of us, tooth, vertebrae.
It can stop us in our tracks, knowing
a fragment of a claw will be more alive
than we in a handful of hundred years;
the way an edifice dedicated to time
annihilates time, while neighbouring cathedrals
do the opposite. How the same space
reigns in both.
But here, no sun.
How would it be to touch like Midas
the oldest ammonite and make it blaze?
Why are we like children,
drawn to the gilt; why feel so keenly
the lack of gold leaf? Suddenly these rooms
are, more than anything, unadorned,
maybe the thirst for knowledge
is no more than that – the same recurring dryness
we feel on waking to an empty day.
The partygoers have moved off; they pass,
processing. One of them breaks into song,
brittle, sharp, and joyous. The medieval gate
is on the edge of earshot; a timbrel beat, no more,
as I step out and midday bites the eyes.
THREE POEMS BY SAMUELE GIANETTI
The Eyes
(Gli occhi come)
The eyes as prisons
where lives the entire sky.
It is a knot,
that memory, I don’t
lace anymore.
The Pin
(Hai nell’occhio lo spillo)
You have a pin in your eyes
in the red glass of satellites
in spring when the air darkens and slides –
always away – from you.
Oh how sweet to escape it
in the gleaming light
of evening.
AMONG THE INSOLUBLE THICKNESSES
(Tra gli insolubili)
Among the insoluble thicknesses
of morning, June’s vivid sun,
one lone desire remains far off from me…
A WEEK IN MARCH
Upstairs, a candle gutters out, unnoticed.
My father dead thirty-one years;
in twelve months I'll have overtaken
the age at which he died. Or maybe not.
So much of life is fixed in parenthesis,
random events bracketing how movement
is remembered – time as a series
of braids, of ribbons, their edges
stitched in overlap. Impossible to find
music which conjures nothing, which rests
complete within itself – such is the age
when everything is heard.
~
Simply never coming back again.
Why is this so hard to take in?
And then the body joins the chorus,
dribbling its many failings into the general truth.
Yet it's only in the deepest sleep
that the most vivid haunting comes -
this time, the yellow of a car. How incredibly
sleek it was when it took me to work,
richer than gold as it flashed, making night
even darker either side of its instant,
the way swans in flight grey the surrounding sky.
~
Highfield again. The way my feet
sounded in the small, unfurnished room;
going from door to window
was almost a song. I woke just now
with the feel of wood under bare feet,
but what preceded it was silence,
it was as though half my life
had leached away unnoticed. But not
the warmth of summer facing west
to long sunsets which promised
an endless future - it was all
man-made: wood, foam, plasterboard -
looking out at other walls that held
more lives setting out. Where are they now,
are any jolted awake by some
forgotten circumstance?
~
Hang up, check, and ask
What was restored? A voice
carried over old ground,
tentative, the speech of one
distracted by the everyday,
settling by default into the familiar.
Maybe. Or a sound
from the open earth, a coming out
into a moment where the only means
of living is forgetfulness
as if those underground years
which are today, tomorrow,
were no more than a kink
in the breath of a long conversation.
~
Where would we be without our ghosts
when the dead outnumber the living
and are nearer? Now, as in boyhood,
I seem to be trailing after people
who trailed in turn behind their reputations,
names big as frames, limbs
like striding tree trunks.
And walking along the street, how confined
each house, how great the gap
where one has fallen. I stop
and watch bodies move across an upper
storey – bodies, lives playing out
in air, light gliding through them
like a story.
~
Cor mihi dolet mane. Anonymous, lute.
I try to guess the words
imprisoned in his head, or when he first
knew they’d never be sung,
and how he made from incompleteness
something wholly his, one chord
breaking into the next, filling
the void of the abandoned lyric
that refused to yield, or broke
and tailed off into silence.
Frost has punished seedlings
withered by neglect of an evening sky,
some still barely green in parts.
Cover them up, and hope.
~
I walked last night in the orchard
I never got to plant. The trees
were shadows of those who’d kept me
tethered, out of love, to earth.
It was only when awake I dreamed.
It takes a life for gravity to do its work.
II
THE MEANING OF HOME
The year like all else
is on the turn. Spring carries
a sharpness like that behind the eyes
after sleeplessness. Everything within
should be like the wind, honed,
but in too long a wintering, unexercised,
the senses have coalesced to a weight
that drives you to walk and wonder
was there a chance to do better?
I recall children on their first day at school,
their faces glowing or freighted
with the burden of a life not yet lived.
How much of it all was fate?
The playground is grass, the walls’
swimming-pool blue is simply sky now,
open, grey, gentle on the odd day.
And those years, their tiny thousand
tumults, are a tinnitus merged
with the memory of greater joys and ills;
old joys which never come
unbidden – they must be grafted, grasped,
invented even, like that perfect
room you conjured once, in which
to puzzle the meaning of home.
WIDOWERS
At an outdoor table, widowers, their wives still living,
unreachable. Speech and silence are island and sea, each eating
into the other. Every noon, coffee dregs trickle through gravel, staining
like blood that has waited years for a drought to end.
This morning one mimes a casting out and reeling; the air twitches
with the shock of his catch, the moment floods
and flags, memory slight and useless, a line sheared through.
Night cannot come quickly enough to those long ago bends, dancing with
mayflies.
They could be in a city square, not here where trees glower
and the ground is a shingle beach for castaways,
where the constant passing of couples is a river of gold.
History claims them slowly, each story is a patch of garden claimed by
weeds,
where they walked at dawn once, at home in an alien neatness,
their minds supple, untroubled by the fear of light.
FATHER'S DAY
Silence beneath a noon skylight is different
to any other. Trees are bending as much
under the weight of birdsong
as breeze, branches rub like castanets.
Here nothing has stirred for an hour,
the air between glass and its square of floor
is an oven. Not so much as a fly
moves anywhere below. No tap drips.
The word no is like a rain
ringing inside the skull. Father's Day
is a litany of absence,
a long visit by the ghost of days
that never happened. A thin cloud stalls.
Even books are leaning against each other, exhausted.
GHOST SHIPS
There is a pub I pass – old style,
the front a shop, bar in a back room,
entered through what used to be
the hallway of the house – where men go
in early summer to escape the sun.
For them, winter is a womb; they became
a planet that never spun.
Perhaps they’re right. Maybe it’s better
to walk into the comfort of dark,
to feel it passing strange, enveloping
like those vapour fumes that pained the eyes,
forced the airwaves open.
And if you watch them all the way down,
they disappear from the feet up, less a trick
of the light than the merest slope. Nothing
in this town is on the level,
houses on one side are out of true, like boxers
leaning back just enough to dodge a punch,
frozen, astonished, doomed to fall toward the centre.
Now they come out to smoke, in twos,
squinting even on the shortest days. Passers-by
are craft on a river, even neighbours,
their greetings have the hurried ring
of foreign languages. And the men converse,
monosyllables rich as fables; the air
at their backs is thick with trapped histories.
A dry cough and they turn again,
ghost ships heading into port.
OIL
Your parting shot the other day
smells of the town growing up
not forgotten, but those
which don’t exist anymore.
So many: horse dung, rare
even then; more recent,
smoke from an open pub door
as you pass; paraffin heaters,
and most suddenly, the interior
of abandoned cars, leather
dried to cracking, oil
thick as sludge, its rich
hint of metal – it made
you think of the earth’s core;
and the feel of steering wheels,
their ten-to-two worn
to the smoothness of sea-glass.
You never see them now,
those cars; the last
was in a July field
as if the hand of God
had set it down gently
in the long grass.
PAST THE LAST HILL
Past the last hill darkness becomes sleek,
long, unbroken. You could stroke it
if logic gave you leave. I’m almost afraid
to count the years since I first came here
sensing my feet and nothing between them and the sea ,
confused by the suddenness of a new depth
in black. I was standing in the middle
of a Neil Young song, a prairie measureless, unstarred.
And what astonishes tonight isn’t the vastness of it all
but simply how young I was. The chords that swam
in my head outside Killanny Hall, carry now not space
but speed – those years, a blur passing into night’s
evenness, the shadow on the last hill barely
there, as if silver could become a sigh.
PORTRAIT OF A GIRL IN A RED COAT
Above all, a portrayal of that time
when we shed and grow into ourselves,
when both are equally valid. And because a painting
takes longer to complete, it is more authentic
than a photograph, capturing as it does
the movement – inner, or external but happening
so slowly we can’t be aware of it –
from one state of being to another,
alike but different as identical twins.
So too, the girl who posed
and she of the completed work: forever
a work in progress.
ALTAR WINE
The square is full of names you first hear
in later life; others, you come across them in books,
now living, carried on the breeze between footpaths.
The air in Switzerland was thin, even in summer,
language rich like clotted cream. Now it seems
nothing is strange; every music can be plucked
from nowhere, conjured like souls. Only the dead,
so long familiar, comfortable, are receding.
And stumbling on two uneven stones, cobbles laid
on thin bedding, alignment worn too soon,
brings to mind not Venice but some old
Hapsburg town, modern, bickering across a stream – say
Gorizia, Nova Gorica – neighbourly, nearly understanding,
both haunted by the ghosts of plumed helmets
or rare and common tragedies – death in childbirth,
a father’s mind clear and still unreadable.
No two people look the same on a leaden sky.
Voices from a shop door are indifferent. Their lives
are a narrow room, a walk to work with strangers
for whom wine was never a luxury, exotic,
who never knew the smell of altar wine
as an explosion in the senses of a boy too small
to drink – it was past and future, already
Dionysian, an unconsecrated sacrament.
NO MAN’S LAND
Here
in the middle of the road signs
Italia, Slovenija
here
on the railway embankment
bushes grow
They were young, they were seeds
they had the roots and patience
to embrace this land
once called no one’s
Now it’s theirs
Francesco Tomada
THE ORANGE GROVE
An orange grove – seemingly miraculous
the way they thrive in a dry plain -
lights the switched-on screen on a foggy morning.
Every year there is a first picture
to remind that summer is gone for good,
that it has passed beyond remnants.
Is that why the attic box
of photographs remains untouched?
The multitude of tiny fruits are tongues of fire,
the greens seem to give off the only heat
in the room. Click on. A meadow. Normandy,
maybe, the sea just past a dark uneven ridge.
Why are we, so afraid of death, so enamoured
of dead things – a season, a scene
dried onto a board a hundred years ago?
As if the apple, bitten twice, had withered
in front of their fascinated eyes.
Elvis. Diana. Bowie. They make us feel like God,
blessing them in retrospect. We step for a moment
out of the stream that carries us all.
We shiver, briefly. We dry in the sun.
1976
Engrossed in the story, I looked out
to see night had fallen as I read.
The dark of the Atlantic was mine now,
the written fields of a broken girl’s tears and those
of Monaghan were the same ink. A power cut:
the bus moved through an absence of light
as complete as any. Hills might have been sea.
Every welcome and shunning waited,
those years that would unroll
and gather up behind each of us,
strangers who gazed out, unspeaking,
waiting the first bright dot. No journey since
has passed with night as ambush –
how complete, how comforting it was,
Ireland blanketed in dark, Ireland itself a blanket.
OPPOSITE
Ice on the cars has thawed and frozen
again, it has a strange, furred tinge
under the street lights. Opposite,
behind stiff curtains, comes a soft
glow, a lamp on a timer set
to deter burglars. I can name,
with my eyes closed, half a dozen such
along this road that was once
familiar as cloth against the skin.
They say somewhere, that you can never
enter the sea without the world
around you changing. For me, here
at my front door, it is, however
briefly, the opposite; everything is
as it once was, they are all suddenly
moving in and through, those families,
their homes are a message I can’t decipher
yet, but it doesn’t matter,
the moment is whole, each blurred interior
patient as the night, and waiting.
SNAKESKIN
March, I think, a touch of indigo
in the sky, toes and fingers just
this side of numbness, and, job done,
rose slips regular as stakes
In a square of clay between gable
and garage – most sun, least wind.
But no amount of care
could shelter them from the restless
hand that planted. So it went on,
always some corner more churned
than dug, the rough and ready praised
– in truth it was beautiful in its own way –
and always like a sore, that dull
impatience which has its root in fear
of failure, which it always brings about.
Failure and uprooting.
Which is why
I need as counterweight
this recollection – it came from nowhere,
a gift – a day in the foothills
of the Jura, in search of a Roman well
(we finally found it, capped and padlocked)
the town a picture postcard, all streets
visible, church a white barn
in a siding. The air hot and thinning.
Corn stubble at wood’s edge buoyed
our feet, it felt like walking on water.
And almost stepped on, a snakeskin,
long shed, too stiff and dry to fit around
the wrist; but held to the sun,
worn almost translucent, shades
and patterns as if it were a atrip
of cellulose. And through a tear
wide as pin, light was the gold
of a chalice. The moment had that stillness
you know after it’s passed.
And the uncut fields were a sea,
the snake somewhere, its perfect self, moving,
air like electricity hissing on the tongue.
III
ON GROSSE HAMBURGER STRASSE
Hatless, I passed by last time.
Today, emptiness and overgrowth
erases the eloquence of the city.
Ahead, a lone figure, tall, in a white
yarmulke, makes his way along the wall.
He has the silent purpose of a pilgrim,
one who belongs, for whom
no gesture is necessary.
He has walked through an outcast
world to be here; the gap
between each step is a distance
that overshadows the likes of us
as the word infinity crushes
the imagination. At the gate of such
a tabernacle of suffering, what can we do
but don a cap – a lungful of air
in the face of a crashing sky.
MARIN MARAIS
On such a morning everything is on delay.
The laptop coughs into life
as if from a long sleep: a chaconne
by Marin Marais. From the marsh.
Nothing could be more appropriate:
the windows are fogged by the tail-end
of a New England blast which shuddered
and split. Now it spends itself.
You can imagine it: dizzy, old,
at some great altitude.
And the earth waiting
to be soaked and pounded.
Sometimes it seems to call
punishment on itself – the landscape,
that is: we two-legged ants,
carry on regardless. Plough
and shrapnel are one, we churn
where river-courses have been turned away.
And in the end what is there
but the dizziness that comes
from watching the sky too long?
VISITATION
Yes, there are at least
a thousand natural shocks:
some travel on the air,
others from the worm of memory
and this, a goad
in the depth of night –
the weight of my children
when I gave them a piggyback
home from the park.
ROLL CALL
The front bar of the Tower, raucous
even on a Sunday morning.
A band playing what passed for jazz,
footballers gathering. One knocked
his studs against a table leg;
no drink was spilled. Cars parked
both sides; a lorry-width, no more.
The counter rapped. A row about the noise.
Set list, roll call. Who would have guessed
at desolation – cell-ravaged bodies,
the street outwardly intact but gutted,
stories wrenched from a generation,
one by one, like teeth?
ARGOS
Glassed-over ruins, sea-green in the afternoon,
the quay a thin strip between ribbons of sun.
Figures move across offices. A perfect hour:
every sore, it seems to say,
can be bandaged by wealth.
When I got off the bus, everything
was huge as sunflowers to a child
in his first garden,
crowds were a river in flood
pushing at windows, lapping
in and out of doors.
I had been away too long,
had forgotten that people, like water,
erode obstacles by almost avoiding them.
Slowly it came back, the old familiarity
where nothing is quite the same
and you begin to assume
from the inside out
the guise of a stranger,
a face in a painting looking down
from a gallery wall.
A city is a great skin
stretched like canvas, its surface
a patina, fresh and dry by turns,
changing light is simply the past
forever returning. I thought, as I stepped
into the street, of a clot suddenly
blasted into radiance, the way
the tail of a comet is always there,
even in the darkest of reaches.
This is a moment. A step
among millions, forever old and new,
miraculous, like blood.
And here, five minutes’ walk away,
the hulk of an old ship
in a green dock, its wood
the colour of a bruise, birds
scouring for insects between planks.
Silence so close to the heart
as Jason found
lying in the shelter of a past
that would topple and devour him.
FEW HOUSES
There are few houses which are not unlucky,
into which misfortune doesn't fall,
the pinch of disappointment or the lash of madness.
Do they know, in their compact rooms,
that they're under siege, that a great,
inarticulate envy surrounds them? A child's
shell in a flowerbed, whitened to ivory,
has the pricked light of a distant beacon
reminding of every recent shipwreck. Pass on,
bury the notion of smiling gods and rocks,
you who have learned that each inhabits the other.
THE PARTING GIFT
(i.m. Paddy Gifford)
Suddenly the city was elsewhere,
a river running both sides.
Even the air was different, as if
I were inhaling silence; the apartments
too, empty but not abandoned,
waiting an evening return.
It was one of those moments
when you think of something
completely unconnected: this time
you, Paddy – how perfect you seemed
growing up, how your outpacing us
was measured in those snippets sent
from Devon – school photos, clippings,
you in blazer and crest, or holding
a trophy above a paragraph of newsprint.
Your smile, although we couldn't put
our finger on it, had the ease
of a child of Empire, who saw
red on an atlas with no sense
of envy or disturbance, for whom
countryside was to be raced, not worked.
Where did they go, those countries of ours?
I know you walked the foreign landscape
if illness particular to oneself,
how dark and bare I only guessed
from photographs before and since.
Nor did I understand what Ireland
meant to you; it was the country
I thought I'd outgrown: you kept it
whole. It never crossed my mind
that you'd had letters too, from here,
that we'd seen each other not across a sea
but through the same glass, not quite clear,
not smooth, but true in its own fashion.
I always thought you'd be back once more,
one of those ideas we hold as a given
in spite of age and logic. Instead,
this summer I'll head south
and stand above your ashes sheltered
by our great-grandfather's name.
There may be life beyond; there is,
it seems, no word beyond thanks.
Your children's visit was your parting gift.
ETA-Hoffmann-Promenade, Berlin, November 2022
FISH
He turned as far as his waist allowed,
his arm sweeping. And you knew
he could see every church
within a five mile radius, the modest stone
of the barn-like, the two Gothic rivals.
His hand dropped, not from tiredness
but an empty weight; the indifference
of children, baptized but unbaptizing.
This was an exile no prayer
had foreseen: a kingdom moving
from under his feet while he took his rest
or worked to and from
each Sunday. You could hear
in his silence the sounds of infants
moving towards a maturity his mind couldn't shape.
He straightened and told of rowing across the lough,
the boat filling, oars moving as through treacle,
the moment at which floating and sinking
were one. He settled back: in that sigh
was the long last pull to beaching,
sodden clothes that still vex the odd dream,
and the chill of certainty having failed to buoy,
the crack unseen until it bubbles.
Souls, he said, were no longer fish,
at home where we didn't belong,
but old hymnals piled up who knew where.
That they were opened and flew
through the eyes to the throat and out into melody
was enough. They were safe from damp,
they honoured their own dust.
THE CHAIR
It has taken you all your life
to picture this chair
in the middle of a field - unchanged,
its surroundings dissolved
as if they had never been.
Isn't this what you wanted -
purity? Every deed a tightly-stitched
thread, fabric flawless from end to end.
You can never be the eyes that saw this space
empty, and measured in his head
the lineaments of what would confine you:
plumb line and string, the terrace stepped
as animals looked on, and rivets
hammered the air across an untarred fence.
You were born with a mania to collect -
or so you thought. It was nothing
more than a desire to dismantle:
you gathered so much it toppled
and demolished all around it
and left you here, no walls
to walk through, no roof to be repaired.
How does it feel, now there is at last
no keeping in or out?
Look at the chair. Guard it in your mind
before the rain comes, and the crows.
HOUSE
Rest
It is the year's first morning
of a six o' clock sunrise.
You move through silence
as though picking your way across snow,
other presences are ice underfoot,
to be acknowledged and respected
and the air's very stillness
makes you aware
that it's never still,
it merely seems to settle, has cushioned
the ticking of the clock. You too, are part
of the moment's illusion - house or home,
here at a small square table,
in the turmoil of a head
that is a house – your only house -
is the remoteness of rest.
House
Once you understand that the house
is a being; that you inhabit it
as an organism inhabits a body,
you can begin to move freely.
Not just that:
it comes to you that the house
is male and female, at times
interchangeable, at times one.
And that your memories
have as much solidity in this place as you,
that you are indeed little more
than the seed of a future memory,
here and without.
The Stairwell
There is a point on the stairwell,
the tenth or eleventh step,
where warm and cold air meet
and hold each other fast,
the change in temperature so slight
as to be unnoticed.
Here scents linger or emerge
like characters in once-treasured books.
Don't name them, pass on,
for every sewing-up there must
be a tear. Here an energy manifests,
wells like a wave of embarrassment,
here some day you'll come across
your other self. Both bewildered,
wondering which is which.
Presence
Something stirs. Something below
the level of the body senses it -
a warding off, as with flies or persistence.
It is the house, fighting off
the sense of its own failure,
it mimics you, or perhaps has drawn
you into itself more completely
than you'd imagined.
And that it's your presence
bringing it to life, igniting
a passion older than the railway,
longer lasting.
Athenian
A glimpse in the night
of an old father, an Athenian
or rather the rustle of his name
smooth like a drawer opened
on chalked rollers
in a corner of time where night
and sound move through each other
like sleep and wakefulness,
an instant where importance
is of no matter.
Tiredness is at bay, dammed
for the duration of a stanza.
The first bird has begun; something
in his blind eye recognises
the dark lifting.
Names
And sometimes it's as if
lying out in a desert,
counting invisible stars,
remembering them with names
you were afraid to use back then
but which were always true.
It is the pain of conviction
which enables you to utter them.
The furthest were a fine sugar -
how many years since you held that taste?
It ran across your tongue tonight,
a fugitive, a fox.
Where had it been hiding?
Under the Roof
Rot beneath the floorboards, fire under the roof.
An interruption short of terror.
Every sound has given way
to the heart's pounding. An instant
lost to logic - yes, this is how we pay
for calm, yesterday's or tomorrow's -
or a purging of some childish misdemeanour,
hidden wormlike all these years
or the price of original sin -
not death, but knowing the inevitable;
morning will sweep clean, the air
taste of cold, of renewal,
all will begin, as though
the night had never been.
But first there is the sinking back
Trucks
Trucks rumble. The earliest
are unseen, imagined, like subsidence
you know they cause; the house shifts
a grain a year. But all remains intact
as far as can be measured.
And what does it matter to be noted,
as if the calendar mattered to the earth
or a cog wheel to the sun?
What counts is the silence between rumbles,
the way it stretches like a restless nerve.
An itch that can't be scratched.
.The Ear Fixes on a Sound
Puzzled by darkness
the ear fixes on a sound
of its own making,
the bark of a seal
miles inland,
reminding that we're all stranded.
And when dawn washes like a tide
there will be no obliteration
but a mere sweeping away,
a return to be waited upon.
A Lock of Hair
What is a house? Look at what
will be taken out when the time comes -
books, albums, photographs; a stamp collection
blank beyond the second page.
Bed linen, old furnishings.
What are the walls but skin?
The house is what will be carried off.
Remember that morning, clear and chill,
a lock of hair, golden
in the clay of a flower pot;
a child's curl, perfectly cut,
not wind blown, too tight for that,
dropped by a bird on its way
to this year's nest.
And a breeze shook the roses,
they shivered, temporary, resolute.
Almost a Sound
It could almost be a sound -
the souls of your parents
breaking through, like an answer
to a question you dared not ask
or the warmth of childhood,
universal but always elsewhere
now - does the wolf feel it,
stretched on his last snow?
Carpet
Stairs, that distant night. Ascending,
descending like a child, for fear
of a split brow or broken neck
and of being discovered so -
there's something about indignity,
the shame of it, that keeps us alive
without our realising.
The close smell too, of carpet -
once, in an infant fever, I lay my cheek
against it, by the fire -
it came back to me, a comfort,
something older, something beyond,
it carried more stories, more lives
than I could hold in my befuddled head
so that mine wasn't diminished,
but dwindled somehow; it became
a kind of air that suddenly held
the possibility of drifting out
and settling, altered but almost whole.
Those to Come
Earth will take its due
but in the end it is air
that will carry your last remnant,
borrowed and kept beyond its time,
held in suspension, flaring
as an unaccounted shock
or sudden flood of warmth
in someone years hence
turning onto the landing,
a flash, a memory of tingling skin
from a time when photographs
were sunburn red.
Go through each room. Everything
you touch will be uprooted.
Think kindly while you can
of those to come: their hopes,
their strained joints,
the void they're to inhabit briefly.
Think back. Never did you waken
in utter darkness,
there was always a patch,
pale, benign,
moonlight with no moon
and a familiar breath
from an empty room.
IV
THE GOD OF UNIMPORTANT LIVES
The secret, he said, is passivity,
not to pray for good weather
when rain refuses to clear for days on end,
to accept the stubbornness of clouds
as a reminder of our insignificance.
To step out, fastening our small buttons.
But I pray as I must to the contrary,
assuming always that a storm pushes
against your morning door; that in you
is contained all stretched on the altar of betrayal
or the inadequacy of the few they trusted.
Come snow, come sun, you face down
the god of unimportant lives
every time you wrap the day around you.
You for whom constancy has been misfortune,
a planet in a clumsy universe.
We hear the same bell from different distances.
It doesn't reckon time, it's the centre
of the surrounding sky, tolling that truth
is absence, that gravity means above all
immense emptiness, the loneliness of satellites.
Silence returns, that wave of air flatlines.
If only the heart's restlessness could subside
with such grace, if we could be stilled
by something short of illness. Instead, calm
brings anxiety, an imagined sound of thunder.
Only at night - I remember one, in March,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter a pendant
hung above the lime trees - does sky, body,
earth, align, the breath steady,
a fine mist disappearing.
The voice comes back. Prayer he saw
as a flock of birds, twisting, spiralling,
dispersed before ever finding roost,
its beauty in whatever patterns
coincidence made. I think of it
as rooted, like those surrounding fields
you made your own. The grass springs back,
perfectly in place, each blade
never quite the same for your having
brushed against them; the bruised sweetness
they release, we never sense. Evening settles,
a fox sniffs the dew from an opposite hill.
BURNT WALLS
Who will come after those who come
after us? We can never be so certain
as the first who listened to Homer,
the smell of burning timber
sharp in their nostrils,
or our own, who pinned rags above a well
that had seeped for a thousand years,
their tossed coin rusting, its iron
feeding the roots of a quicken bush.
This morning birds fell silent
after the first hour.
What were they waiting for? All you could tell
through the hairline-open window
was rain under the tyres of early trucks:
it too had stopped. Already the day
was falling through itself, inside-out,
afternoon unfastened and fleeing.
Was there ever before a time
when children's chldren were as unreachable?
No imagination can wrap itself round
the possibility of their lives,
the very act of trying makes us ghosts,
we feel ourselves melt or shatter like ice.
And when all this has passed
there will ever be the fright of failure.
What will they become,
faced with their own burnt walls?
KAPPELHOFF
The void is a series of pinpricks
not yet joined, their darkness
spells no word. Such density,
spreading like blotted ink,
a perfect O, unthinned.
Among it all, a flash
of how it once was: opposite,
random sounds gradually patterned
in a constellation of sentences,
and out, ad infinitum.
Until the merest tilt, a novelty,
a millisecond's pleasant dizziness,
an inner pins and needles.
Then - how it refused
to go away - olive and olvidar.
So easily it scatters, knowledge,
vanishes and bobs like numb
fingers clutching at a spar.
The first bars of the Stabat Mater,
Doris Day's real name.
DOCKSIDE SHIPS
Now, towards the end,
after a long half-chaos,
things are arranged for others,
sorted, ready for dispersal:
the long rows of books,
dockside ships waiting on a high tide.
Eyeing them, corner to corner
from the centre of the room,
they become hours, days, years,
time and how it could have
otherwise been spent.
Why have I read?
How much of it has been
to gain the knowledge of others?
And how much of it was knowledge?
No - it was to be led by the hand
by different fathers, mothers,
to feel their palm immense and warm
around my infant fist; their pace,
it seemed, slowed to mine;
the stillness, when they were done,
of standing alone and sturdy.
And those from whom I learned little if anything,
they threw me in the air and caught me.
And I'm forever grateful for that giddiness.
STRINGS
First there is the surprise of age and rust.
It always catches you; a chapter falls away
like a rope bridge in front of your eyes,
and you think of the inner workings
of your body - is it as badly maintained?
Discard the old strings. They lie dead
across each other, necks wrung, but one
having left its mark across the back of a hand.
Now the new, pliable at first, soft
as a fontanelle. Once and once only
light catches them unwound, their looseness
a kind of innocence. Still no more
than the thinnest of wires, they know nothing
of music, no more than a chrysalis
can conceive the colour of its unformed wings.
Slowly. As the machine heads turn
something like mercury runs through them,
they come alive, resisting like children
the perfection of harmonics. And every movement
is minute, almost hushed, the moment tightened
to fractions of fractions, the breath held
in fear of a snap and lash - no, the last
adjustment is easy as a sigh. And now
with the first strum, balanced, plain, comes
an echo of all those songs
you'll never get to play, beyond the reach
of clumsy fingers, lodged in the ear
that misses nothing. Hold the guitar
to the skylight; the strings' shimmering
is impatience. In your grip it's a ship
waiting to be launched. Each chord
in someone else's hands will be
a sea with its necklace of islands.
THE GERMAN LETTER
No mornings stranger
than those familiar
in every respect but one.
Coffee in a renovated shop,
poring over a German letter
in a school primer.
How it all comes back,
the struggle, the expectation,
every language a river
guarding its fish.
New year, old traffic
hurrying to the zebra crossing
while it's clear. The drivers
are eyeing that empty space
as if it was an open goal.
How it all comes back
to them - mornings,
cold fields, the slap
of a ball on the face.
A loss that will not let go.
Was ist deine Meinung dazu?
OXEN
Once every dozen years or so,
springs here run dry. The ground
around the cattle trough
is baked, part powder, part brick.
I wonder about the nettles I pulled
a lifetime ago, my gloved knuckles
stiff for days. How far have those roots
travelled in search of water?
And I marvel at their acquaintance
with depth, how they could outlast us,
clumps in a corner older than monuments.
And the million spiders floating invisible,
their voyages more hazardous
than that of Odysseus beyond the Cyclades,
from what cold height
do they descend to find shelter
at the butt of dock leaves?
Hedgerows are holding their green
tenaciously as we our youth, they give
little of themselves to the dead air.
Even flowers have withdrawn their scent
but for some faint aroma lingering
among the dust. How quick I am
to find oppressive what I counted
down to all winter, many winters past;
the more we dream of excess,
the more we baulk at anything
beyond moderation. And the itch
of dissatisfaction is more corroding
that the harshest sun. Those fat oxen -
how I longed to hear the long grass
rustle as they made their way
placidly to the altar. Such gold,
blues, greens! I forgot the serpent
ready to strike at the passing ankle,
I was too young that first time
to know we die from inside out,
our extremities unblemished. Take back
this more than perfect heat, leave us
the vision of a copper sea.
CONSTELLATIONS
I could never figure out
what others saw at night.
The stars coalesced into patterns
older than the written word.
But they weren't my shapes - mine
were different, the dream of an oddity.
They're gone now. And I wonder
which is the greater loss, those outlines
or the boy who stitched them together?
It took me years to understand
that there are different ways of not knowing.
Night wheels uncaring above our infinite
roofs, our lives singular
and insignificant as plankton.
A lit city is less than a pinprick,
its heat no more than that of a red cell
in a thread of veins no one sees.
There are no constellations.
They're all lone stars,
strangers to each other.
Their names are a monument
to our hunger for speech,
how without stories, we're bereft,
particles of life like blobs of mercury
fated never to fasten on each other.
ISLANDS
I
The Moon, those nights, mattered
when there was a man in it -
was he benign, trying to peer through
those thin curtains?
And then at about
seven, he became Greek and she,
many-named, patient as a hunter.
The hours we spent watching each other!
With the odd star too dim
to steer by. Then Armstrong, and what
my mother called those big Yankee boots.
II
The moon sank beneath the horizon
the first morning after
she died, my mother.
I was Odysseus navigating
a starless sky. What did it matter
that the sun of adulthood attempted
to make good a deficit?
It was too low in the sky to blaze,
could only blind.
At night now, a far-off piston
breaks the plane of silence,
a boat engine traversing a sea
known only to strangers long disappeared.
May they break unexpectedly into a dawn
of mangroves and parakeets,
a sweeping of sound and colour
denied the asthmatic schoolboy reader,
his feet perpetually cold.
Suddenly the air has a hum of oil
and the wind picks up, slightly.
A full moon those winter evenings meant
we could stay out a little longer,
our fingers past the pain of numbness,
but I wanted more, the freedom of suspension,
to be as it was, just there, neither hung
nor floating, to possess its unnerving stillness.
This is what I've tried so often since
to put into words - the unsayable,
the riddle of being. Now that it's no more
than rock, the moon, a hardened blob
among countless, why cling to mystery?
I'm growing tired of the battle between story
and ststistic. There are too many billions.
I'm forever drawn to those stars hidden
behind hills, scattered like seeds across
the edge of the Mediterranean, or the unsung
music of conjecture.
III
Frail as a reed, a bird calls
to a waning crescent
in a sky almost blue.
The last song is the first
as though night had never been.
There is no new moon
and all that ever happened
is lodged in that unlit fact.
And still there is the word - new,
light, full - and the vision it affords,
the space to believe the sun
will always rise. And so it will,
sufficient for the animal, and the eye
which sees beyond noughts
to that figure, salt-skinned,
wind-lashed. Alone in that emptiness,
sea pitch, sky sulphur, he found
light to steer by. What else was there?
Even as a child
it was never enough to drift,
a course had to be plotted,
each thought a random, jagged island.
THE DEAD SIGH
It happens sometimes:
the lungs, half-full at death,
contract, expelling air
in a dead sigh,
air ripples a last time
over vocal cords
still and finally unique.
What did it mean, that sigh?
For I knew it was more
than mere air,
it was, above all, you.
You'd been almost away all day,
more than sleep, less than death.
There was one small device
keeping track of your fading
as we assembled,
each to ourselves,
a mosaic of your life -
it shifts like fog,
disperses and gathers
but always at its centre
the dying pulse, that stillness
and then the sigh
and its coming out of nowhere.
Others, I've read since,
have jumped on hearing it,
jolted by an eeriness
they can't shake off.
I knew it then, remember it
as a summing up -
a life, a final gift.
THE LAST NUN
Long-dressed, the last nun peers
as morning dribbles light along the horizon.
She wonders what coat God will wear today,
what face - those old familiars
or that boy she so soon forgot?
One of them visited in sleep
and spoke. All that remained
when dawn broke was the hum of an incantation.
She ponders the body.
Christ almost weightless on the cross,
his ribs two boats meeting at the prow,
hers, shrinking into sleeves and waistband
like an old nut in a shell
and she is struck by the notion of wisdom
as a force circulating in a sealed space,
a prowling animal, an unearthed charge.
And she in eternity, losing her grip on years.
There was joy, though, of a kind, in waiting
for enlightenment that would not come,
the toil of prayer in the end little different
from that of planting - the sense of hope,
the same ache in the back on straightening.
When did it begin to loosen,
her early grasp of the hereafter?
When did prayer become a meditation
on edges forever worn away?
She could wish for the world's one advantage,
its immediate reckoning - credit, debt,
a balance shifting but always visible,
there to be counted. The weightlessness
of faith stings now, like clean air in frost.
The town stirs, still drowsy.
Those prayers and the life
which prompted them: where have they gone?
Whether they rose as incense
or dissipated like days, there is,
as all draws to a close, the fact
that they were offered.
And what of being the last? It means
having lasted, endured, upheld by the pain
of durance - Christ buoyed by nails,
defying the drag of the earth.
AT THE END OF A WHITE LANE
(Au bout d’une allée blanche)
At the end of a white lane
as though lost
surrounded by forests,
humped like a shaved backbone
with some apple trees thrown into the wind,
a tiny fragment of the abbey,
its frail, tight arches
given over to silence,
to contemplation.
Only bird song populates empty walls.
No more prayers -
full-natured Dawn is henceforth goddess,
in the mud of the river
sparse deer prints tell of her cult.
Michel Cosem
IN THE LONG GRASS
I hang up, or whatever they call it now;
a red dot, not even a button.
And everything is silent, astonishingly so.
Such sunlight, flooding; the top of the stairs
casts a jail-cell shadow on the landing wall.
And imagining carries all the effort
of escape. I cast around the alien haze
and wish the day could end
with a gold halo. Instead, evening sinks
into the long tropes of absence -
a dog calling in the long grass,
the ground hard under your feet.