deep in the woods where no one walked
but a man and a boy, given sudden wings.
RECENT SUMMERS
This imminence . . . an English distillation
of lowering hedges, a hammer-weight of heat
on the accomplishing ferns: everything tending
to cataclysm, fiddling while even dawn burns.
We wait: things might get worse (the hearse
ticking by the cemetery gate). The silence of the birds
we don’t look up to, now we’re up to things.
The calm freight of clouds too late to count.
FRED’S TREASURE
‘Still gas,’ he chuckled, back in ’76,
strengthening the wall-lamps’ whiteness. ‘I’m the last
darn house in Chesham, now.’ The rooms were a wade
of cardboard boxes – from which he’d pick, wrapped
in sheaths of the Bucks Examiner, his collection’s gems.
Mainly flints. The coulter’s clang had betrayed them
to him, trawling the plough-lines in its wake;
tell-tale swells and trims, purposeful, flaked –
nothing chance did: all enacted, shaped.
God knows why he’d begun, as a kid, to the creak
and cluck of a horse-team, in a blizzard of gulls,
but his passion’d found itself in furrows
up Buckland Common, or down near Chartridge,
over Botley way or in the thick
chalk of Cholesbury where the hill-fort is.
He let me palm a bulk of Clactonian axe,
smoothed by bone to a meat-red shine, that the BM
craved to have. ‘Oh no, it stays, I said.’
I’d brought him mine to check, in a Co-op bag:
a pyx of flints from walks and a curve of bone,
pick-like, he might have laughed at. Well, you could
have drystone-walled a field with what he’d found:
chopper, spear-tip, scraper, core; axe-heads,
chisels of bone, a jaw . . . the lofty drudge
of a lifetime, that – that only just fought shy
of sadness, for all his love had knapped
it into jewels. Dulled, I suppose, the moment
he was gone (as with all our things)
to a frass of boxes full of pointless rocks
in a gassy semi, near the water-cress beds.
FLESH AND BLOOD
Feel my hands, you’d say: like ice! –
hugging the radiator in the warm room;
certainly a little chill, the touch
of your elderly skin. Proof of age,
by which, of course, you were still amazed –
as I am now at how the speech from Hamlet
on the BBC (reissued) tape
revives that touch, as real
as the press of a piano’s key: the dead
don’t quite leave off for good. I could
a tale unfold whose lightest word
would harrow up thy soul, freeze
thy young blood – your voice
still under it, bewitching my childhood
between the easy chairs in Chesham,
Hamlet dawning as a domestic god . . .
Your own blood, old, slowed right down
until sherry went straight to your head
and our lunches would end in the ambulance,
your gashed leg oozing a syrup
that was almost cold, that scarcely ran
from the too-soft skin that time
it hung like a stocking. Hell
was living too long, you said –
surviving a husband you’d miss each day
by forty years, London a prison
of trip-wire pavements and dextrous shoves
and the eternal flight of stairs to your nutshell room.
THE CHANCES ARE
(Campo Santo, Pisa)
Swifts squeal where the firebomb fell –
bouncing off the cloisters’ roof
and sparing, from a wealth
of quattrocento frescoes
only one, like a kind of proof: The Triumph
of Hell. The rest worn down to brick
in an hour or two. As, quite suddenly,
at a certain age (say, forty-five),
what you could have done but did not try
(the career on the stage, the moving
to Amsterdam) arrives from the sky
and rubs its ebullient, painstaking flame
on your fixed tempera, scene after scene:
the wasted opportunities, the best of a life.
Though the chances are those charred walls
would’ve shuttled into place the same.
YOUR NAME IN FULL
The Old Norse still clinging there
like something a frog might do
or the sound I’d make
on that temple slughorn my father bought
in Katmandu in ’58
or what those huge coiling snakes of bronze
older than Vikings, thunder-booms
slumbering behind glass in Copenhagen’s National Museum
might wake to
at the sour breath of Ragnaroth:
porp.
The other uniquely
mine, caudled in affection,
tag of love so familiar
it was cleanly, clearly me
until the Bible lesson
in ’63 –
Genesis, the Garden of Eden.
Myself surging from the words
and the class erupting in squeals
as I walked in the cool of day with Eve
between the trees,
Miss Scott smiling shyly as she read,
relentless, to the bell –
then, in the playground,
a scrimmage as the fingers
tickled, let rip,
clambering up the ladder of my ribs
and down again
searching for the missing rung
in all seriousness,
fervent as punishment
or a girl’s kiss.
And in the middle, yes,
the scrupulous secret,
shaming for no real reason;
an old family surname
rattling on through generations . . .
a piece of forgotten root, a filler
shared with my father
that makes a disastrous acronym of name –
A.N.T An
ugly shadow, a haunting
like the hand-me-down Roman nose
or the strain of something botched
or the old, forgotten loyalties
of clan, of kin: something
only vaguely my own,
product of duty or sheer whim,
uncalled for until
some real shame rings it
out at last in leaden strokes –
hammered to the open, collared, caught:
your name in full
like the spy within
who knows much more than he ought
and might just tell
but I’m not telling you.
(So just as well
the front-page court report
in the Marlborough Advertiser
back in ’82
had ‘Adam Naylor Thrope’,
and no one knew.)
THE CAUSEWAY
It was only a rowing-boat, back in those days;
one-man crew, potato-sacks and gossip,
too small for a car. So the tiny island bred
its own species: unlicensed, dented, mirrorless,
treads as if sea-smoothed, the milometer
seized from lack of use, like a swift’s legs –
there was nowhere to go but round,
quicker to walk it from here to there.
Yet their elders were everywhere, abandoned
where they’d died whining or kept
for the hens; dashboards losing their toggles
and wires, mudguards curved in the rust
of autumn ferns . . . while the whole place,
it seemed, champed to be further off
from the other isles, like abandoned
St Kilda with its birds. And now? The causeway
cuts the choppy water in a marriage-
knot: no longer the longing of sea miles
but a few hundred yards on sound tyres.
PRINTS
The dollardom shore of big Lake Michigan
finds him doing what he did as a boy
by real seas, running alongside them:
the land’s hem stitched, he’d look
back upon a long beach emptied
by twilight (his spoor blurred as if already
old), and turn it to Avalon, or Crusoe’s island.
Even on the edge of Central Africa
he had to change into somewhere else
what they would always be alone with
after the bush-drive; imagining this
not ever seen, not watched, kept
locked from eyes like a schoolgirl’s journal –
older than lungs, earlier even than gill slits
or the hair-like cilia of bivalves, the sea-edge
stroking backwards through deep time
and the blasts of geology, silvering his prints
from laval sand with the stands of palm-trees
cupped from sight by his hand . . . then find,
on the slow walk back, an impress or two
the sweeps of foam had missed: fossils
of some unknown future, or ears listening
through billions of years of hiss for the delicate cry.
LAGO NERO
Solitary, a steep two-hour walk
up the snow-limed, winding track
to the lone chapel with its locked
clutter of pews in the gloom,
its painted Mary emerging
far, one felt, from her home:
a rumour of someone known.
Old notices, as in some English porch.
A worn-out cross in the stone.
I spot a scintillant of jet
in the sheer sky above the soft
white outcrops of mountain, the black
lake disguised as a deer-tracked
flatness under a glare of snow,
the jet’s suggestion of a roar erupting
like an afterthought, the truth
arrived at! I have, instead, a sudden
hunch – the faintest scar of worry, really –
that even heights like these are the hour’s
stooge: the grandest mountains give
in time. And I see it like a diagram,
almost educational — moraine,
landslip, friction, wind: the solid
gleam of the perpetual as sheer idea
and thought its isopleth, that links
like point with like point
until we become what we meant
to be all along, but did not dare.
NERVE
in memory of Sébastien Houix
1
‘I’m immensely privileged,’ you say, paralysed
from the neck down and hardly able to speak.
Your hands rise to the mouse in mine, are left
there; their twitch shifts the arrow round
the on-screen keyboard. Your fingers feel like snow
crust, but the words you coax from them
are warmed with care, each laid down like leaves
of gold by time (a day to phrase a thought) –
and pain, no doubt. Your cup of tea with its straw
turns cold, resting on its book. The weeks
are up and down, but you’re aware in writing
(I quote from the poem) of your steady aim: ‘to stay
alive until the cows come home’. A dream, we know:
the doctors said you wouldn’t see the summer
I’m looking out for on the breeze like a sign:
the fragrance of thyme against the burning odds.
2
The heat’s full on, the cicadas brimming,
a slow slap of coldness in the stone bassin.
My brilliant student, ten years on from London you’re lying
in the shade of your Aleppo pine, being read to again.
You’re always smiling. Now it’s the turn of the breath
to come with an effort. Next week they’ll bring
a machine with its mask’s relief. ‘It’s very tiring
to breathe,’ you tell me in gasps, ‘but I think
it’s the heat.’ Everything else – the nerve-logged
muscle, loss of weight, the way the head now lolls
too heavy for you – you have taken on board; but you
refuse this slack from the lungs. So the cool of autumn’s
looked forward to: Brittany, a trip to the sea.
‘To watch the storms,’ you explain. A simple
phrase that leaves you beached, choking. Just
turned thirty, scalloped to the bone, you’re fighting
for the right to return to your element: air,
love, movement. I see you there in the teeth
of some Atlantic gale, spindrift flying by your chair,
grinning on a cliff-top. Outfacing the bare
facts, the unjust laws that sink a survivor.
Your wit, for instance, still makes me laugh,
each word retrieved from some deep mine
of life. If wit alone was sufficient to stall
whatever’s pinned you here, choking in its creep,
you’d pick up your chair and walk, Seb,
running your voice through the resinous
sotto voce of the pines and the river, then diving there.
3
I’m reading you Shelley. A tiny fly
flickers on your face. I brush it off.
It returns through the verse, crawls over your forehead
undisturbed, as if you’re dead; even in sleep
your hand can’t lift to scratch, or brush away –
though you tell me you dream of it, and of moving
like the young man you are through bars and streets.
4
You’d shape the garden from your seat,
the bamboo sheared halfway, the flowers
scattered with precise care
along the paths your electric chair
bumped on, the old pond scoured
and put to fish, each order gasped
in Spanish. You called yourself
‘Lord’, with that mischievous grin,
reckoning you had ‘all the power
of a petty despot’ (unable to lift a finger
at whim – or anything). Most times you were
stilled, contemplating, so quiet
it was hard to make you out
under the chênes verts. ‘I’m the luckiest
man alive,’ you’d claim, when you could still
speak; ‘I can watch the light, actually
watch it move through an entire day.
You see? Watch how the sun creeps leaf to leaf,
the shadows, the birds, the sounds. I feel
at one with everything,’ you’d add, in hoarse
gasps, dappled there in the trees and become
your own sundial, stilled, slowing things
down until they might go back as they were.
5
Soon you spoke only through the letters
clustered in groups on the square of perspex
I’d nestle on my lap, peering over it
as you moved my finger with your eyes’ roll,
patient as dry-point: your four languages
stroked out of it, the mother-tongue French
reserved for your mother – commanding her
like an infant’s tell-tale cries, aga
in. There was
a magic, though, in that slowed-down spell:
PERT . . . IN . . . what? IN . . . what? IN . . . ENTL?
Ah! LY! PERTINENTLY SAID, you’d said,
and were saying it now with that ventriloquist’s grin
that brooked no short-cuts, not even TEA? – as if
the grammar’s knitting of a full-blown phrase
(HOW ABOUT A CUP OF TEA
or, WHOS TO SAY IT WOULD HAVE MADE
MUCH DIFFERENCE I AM HAPPY NOW)
was itself a shield, see-through but unshatterable . . .
along with the jokes, of course: as when those two distant
relatives from Aix, stooped over you, were shouting
questions for the deaf, the slow (‘Et comment vas-tu?
Tu as tous qu’il tefaut?), and my finger’s
acknowledgment built from your eyes
THEYRE GHASTLY, in English disguise.
6
The day you had to go to the hospital
for the stomach tube, you were asked
if you wanted to take anything
and you said, letter by letter on the perspex
page (I translate), MY TENNIS RACQUET. And then,
signalling something more to be added
through the laughter of those who could move
and speak and breathe without pain,
you had them pluck from the strings of letters
DO YOU RECKON THEY HAVE ANY BALLS
AT THE HOSPITAL. Two days later you were dead.
Your last words to the nurse? BON COURAGE.
MARKET DAY
I always stop before the fossil stall
when the market comes round to summer
like a fleet of sampans and billows
with striped awnings that shade
gewgaws, baubles, things only
the slow magpie tourists need –
curios for the bored who believe
it is like this here all the time.
And what do I know? Nothing.
I think this again, on pause
before the simple trestle
of the fossil stall. There must
somewhere be abundance of them
for they are the same each time,
authenticated in a string of zeroes,
a hand-written Cambrien or Carbonifère –
even the dinky, idling teeth
deleted from early sharks, or the gnat