snagged in boiled-sweet amber
I roll in my palm. A glimpse
of coincident eternity, chance
rendering a flicker immortal, less
likely even than some still-room full
of these whiffs of olives and wine,
our prattling voices over the church bell,
the tremble of the melon man’s
hands weighing, the weight of potatoes
in the basket, the sheepfold
shiftings of the crowd, or the sourness
of the mayor (with his clutch of gourds
and honey-pots) who hates me;
all these frailer than a whale’s ear-bone
or this spiral galaxy of ammonite
in its jet-black slate . . . Far frailer,
in fact: for these are written for good
in stone, these trails of tails and burrowings
or the pricier ancient fish
dimly X-rayed on plates of sand
where they sank to, drowned, flat as plaice
and boned from oblivion to be a souvenir
sheer chance rescued from time as we
will not be, now, crowding here
between the summery stalls and smiles
and the sour hatred of the mayor.
MIGRAINE
1
Inadequacy: caries of the brain,
sugared by loneliness. Roots so deep
it conjures an iron crown
bolted to the bone, but growing,
growing. Migraine’s grey house.
The brilliance of snow on fake trees
and the flash of jingles.
And what if this was said to be enough
for a whole lifetime?
The skull a sarsen of its own pain
like the girl’s skidded into by the car
who said, on France Inter,
that every second now
was une vraie galère for good,
and that she couldn’t forgive.
And what if she could?
Would the stone be lifted by a flight of angels?
Would the undulations flatten to a calm?
2
The pain’s organised, like crime:
the feel it has of cool forests
falling and falling inside me –
my head a cartoon Earth, perhaps,
with vinegar and brown-paper
poultice, the sun beating down
on the clear-cut forests, my eyes’
two washed-up fish that are the bad sign.
SNOWED UP
for Kim
Roads erased, but the milk warm
from the one farm a way was dug to,
the ladle tinkling on the churn we queued for
like Alpine herds. ‘The Lapps
lined their boots with sennegrass,’
someone chuckled, stamping his.
Stranded, becalmed in a glacier’s air,
news from nowhere, all tidings gone,
the TVs flickering to candlelight alone.
Tsunamis of drifts, with shrieks going down;
the pond and green become the same swell.
Seraphs of flint-glass, three days old,
their carrot noses pockmarked by the birds
and starlight glittering on the dared-on downs.
The fresh grew stained, and crunched
like apples. Shovels ringing instead of phones.
And the butcher was down to brains,
trotters, eyeballs (‘which I recommend’),
when, in the drift-bound bus stop, you brushed
its times into view like a buried capsule
and sat there waiting for the Swindon one,
determined to leave, late already.
And patient for the purr of an engine
as you were, gratefully mistaken,
you might have sat it out till nightfall
clutching your backpack, ready with the change,
but for the unnerving fathoms of the cold
and the looks, amazed, from those who saw.
PRODUCTIVITY
after George Ewart Evans
To bring the bloom onto the horses’ coats
at dawn, each day, before the ploughing . . .
tansy leaves rubbed between the hands
and sprinkled in the bait; or sweet
saffron, baked to dry
and fed in the same way – though not too much
or the sweat would bring the powder out
and the horse would smell of saffron.
Or cut-up bryony root, fed
into the chaff; you’d come across it
ditching, and grate it on the wife’s
nutmeg grater: it cleaned the skin wonderfully, men
and beasts. Or a wet of piss on the chaff
would make the coat shine.
Or black antimony to get that bloom,
or rubbing him down lightly with a rag
dipped in paraffin – that also
kept the flies off and held him steadiest in the show-ring.
Or a few leaves off the box hedge
dried and fed in a powder in the chaff
kept the sweat down that spoiled the shine.
And gentian or felwort to keep his appetite,
bring him back to the rack
and manger. Mangels from the bullocks’ barn
ground up, that toned them up, too,
April time, just after coming out of the clamp.
And into the open field
after two hours’ grooming, turning out to plough
at 6.30 a.m. with a shining team
for the strong loam and leaving the furrows
without a wrinkle to mar the whole length of it . . .
that kept you on your toes, that did,
they did, did the horses.
PLAY IT AT FORTY-FIVE
Too like a Dutch town, my mind:
well-behaved, no sudden ululations
of grief or despair, no wild
shaman dances of admiration
for the attendant gods; more
the discreet frown that hinges on propriety,
my bill of care the slight pucker
of indigestion, of life going down
too easily, too fast. I am rarely
startled, these days, and my dreams
are an iconography of trains
I’m always running for but seldom miss
though they never arrive where I think
they might, amid the dated hiss
of everything I ought to have done
beyond the sign of caution, slowing down.
GHOSTS IN THE BATHS OF CARACALLA
The gloom beyond the roadside planes expands
to a Chicago skyline of shattered brick,
a labyrinth of half-domed halls that sounds
with the squeals of swifts, like children, like a trick
of light on polished, fish-drawn tiles; we’re almost
persuaded. We wade through clumps of grass instead,
stand on the marble lips of a dried-up past
and try to find what the guidebook said
about tepidarium, noting the pipes and drains.
Steam-bath vapours, hazed windowlights,
the fear of verrucas and showing the stains
on your underpants, changing; the boards’ heights
higher than your vanity; the sting of bleach
gathering like crumbs under the eyelids. The girl
who drowned on Opening Day in Amersham, unable to reach
air through the ganglion legs and turning to pearl,
lying unseen all day at twelve foot six while
life thrashed above her in its usual style,
lies here, too: Roman, now, and dignified
by all these who’ve enjoyed themselves and died.
BLUEBERRY PICKING IN MICHIGAN
for Lucy and Hugo Wistreich
Along with the o
rchards’ Main Street-straight straight rows
and the Pick-Your-Own bunch of families’ cries
(‘Where are you, honey . . .?’ ‘I’m here, right here!’)
through the stripes and shots of sunlight between the leaves
the farm’s to be sold, we’re told. ‘Lucy, I’m beat.
It’s sixteen hours a day and I’m gettin’ old.’
The final harvest and it’s hard to believe
when all it takes is a twist and a squeeze
for each fat pap to be tumbled to fruit
that peppers neck-slung panniers or spills to be juiced
on the ground: how crazy to think this can all be razed
where abundance itself’s a kind of law, a right!
Our baskets are heavy, the day too warm. My son’s
showing me how the blue rubs off to a shine as black
as a mouse’s eyeball (though black is really blue, deep down) . . .
Sorcerer-lipped, indigo-woaded, we grin like clowns
as the farmer ribs us on our return: the original
sin in the garden, and how we’d ‘better git up
on the scales, too, you guys, judgin’ by your faces!’
The Last Day beckons in the sign erected there already
on the road: Prime Land for Real Estate with so
many acres. Orchards just don’t pay, you say, these days –
‘even in Michigan, Garden of the World’: the coming season’s
mashed-up soil ruled off to plots, zoned for the diggers.
It’ll ripen to something though, I suppose: lawns in the blueberry
light of dawn; glistening sidewalks under snow; seep
of fries and hysteria of TVs (‘While they’re
too nice with curd,’ the farmer’s saying), or a dim phone
continuing on through the middle of an afternoon.
CORDIAL
(Corrèze)
The stuffed fox’s cobweb runs from its nose
to the rusted tins of sugar on the chimneypiece;
the black pot’s slung above the smouldering log
and pulses steam. The walls have been smoked out of whiteness
to the rusty brown of a windfall, almost golden;
hold dated calendars and beehived nudes
pinned and curling like bills in Dutch still-lives.
He was feeding the pigs outside, the bent old man;
now we are with him among the dark benches,
the one big table hidden under a welter of papers.
The sign may be broken but he’s hung on here for fifty years,
‘toujours ouvert’. We order some sirop for the kids.
Glugged out of a dusty, retro-labelled bottle
swirling with sediment, it leaves a corona
where the level’s stayed put too long, it seems;
smells vaguely methyl, though it’s grenadine.
He thins it down tumbler by tumbler under
the doddery tap. ‘There’s something wrong,’ Josh hisses,
‘taste it!’ Like a forest floor it’s fermented
into strength, mellow as island malt
from not being asked for for God knows
how many years. He’s telling us of his stretch,
‘during a man’s best time’, as a prisoner of war –
come back too old for ‘les filles’, he stayed
celibate, uncourted; the unstirred spirit steeped
only in its own hour, here between the trees.
We walk back home in awe, unsteadied by a
child’s drink: that someone can just live
there where it is good, accreting the years like leaf
fall, altering nothing, strikes me as rare and fine –
if only that strength could be foreseen, like wine.
EXILE
England, royal-revelation-awash,
(muck’s sluice-tide) barely holds her head
above the waters of her own front page,
the rustling, thrown-away woods of her mind.
Murrain. War. Fame. What was it Eliot
said? Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog . . .
One day you will show me a perfect creature
of small cornfields and vales, sunlight
on spires, towns cosy behind their walls
and love at the sharp end of age.
TRACKS
Up in the Alps
on a fair day of snow-sheets
we tracked a rabbit
to a sudden hiatus
of blood and fur.
Fox, I said – not knowing
any better, but excited
by something vinous and heady
to show the kids:
as if life doesn’t
always come
spotting the bland snow
with its bright
abruptness – or doesn’t
so clearly now,
pound-foolish
with beast, bird and forest,
drawing the curtain
like a white drift
over the way (mistaken
for the hard path underfoot)
to the blizzard’s cliff.
SCRATCHINGS
Jour enselevi que la poésie dégage comme la bêche la source
Yves Bonnefoy
If America, her spirit of anywhere lives
it is here, on Rockford’s frayed edge
of diners, malls, neon, cross-stitch freeways.
Rained on in storm and exhaling the burnt offering
of summering cement, tarmac, the lawn surround
of a Burger King on its midnight strand of parking.
The woman, skin-ruffed, grimly at the counter
with headphones, lipmike, lonely in the fall
of frosty light, takes our orders and calls.
Lonely Hopperish all-night brightness,
lonely buzz of the kitchens’ electrics like anxiety.
Madness. Madness in the absence of prairie, here –
something deadly numbed not there that should be.
Is this precisely where (this spot) the Sioux,
for instance, spied their non-gods
in loneliness of fasting, creatures of earth and air,
the solemn hide-flap of the tipi opening
to a universe speeding from the eyes like horses
to no known end but the end of breathing?
2
Gods? Have done with them.
Gods obscure the woods, the stones, the moon,
on a hanging edge the beech golden that combs down to the coomb
or the fox fleeting narrowly beneath it that one morning.
The sparrow-hawk spotted by us tree-nursery workers
knelt to the inching oaks, their leaves frost-dotted,
dawn then like a polished stone, flint
to fire all along, goaded us to pray but we didn’t.
Or the Essex marshes by the Sainsbury depot
from the train like something consoling seen, waving
rushes and the blades of floods over acres.
Have done with them all in majesty of sea water, woods.
3
Shuttered laundrette in a morning haze,
damp’s vaseline and the smell of feet
in the shop where the news is baled
on the floor to trip me up, the shuffle
of the old black guy at the corner with his Asda bags:
all this unchanging, as if in Latin, a tower-block
merely the interruption of the laconic barbarian,
Bedlam still there where it stood, bottom of Eastcheap,
my suitcase careering on its wheels
behind me, running, late (bomb scare on the Tube),
stopping this guy – an Australian – to check,
who tells me with great concern
not to go further than Waitrose, mate.
Everyone whelmed by what’s under,
not above, old
places for burial whose skeletons resemble the insane
screaming through portholes, silenced, in pain going down.
In the train’s funnelling fury I find
a fresh language, as London once after fire did,
ransacked, gutted: What was doing it was that open
sea-chest. And the speaker serious in a grey suit.
4
The school’s gull-cries even from the stumbling path
down to where my daughter’s already alight with release,
coming home. My own home-comings in Chesham,
long levelled light of evening, the bus windows misting
so blankly one day I missed the stop and went right on
to where I didn’t know, no longer crack-hopping on familiar ways
but abandoned to my own whereabouts in a large road; and remained
but to walk, ask, vague directions right to my mother’s alarm that lateness
made dream of things no child should know, mist-bound and blissful.
5
So close to madness the scooter accelerated of its own accord,
braked at the roundabouts and junctions, took me to my place.
So mad the electric heater beamed itself to life, clicked off
while you were thinking of me. Aglow enough with longing.
So mad I might be, oblivion’s second chance, the hedgerow
becoming a maze, feeding off wood sorrel and lapping at where
the brambles touch me. So mad I might be, in the dim
twilight of woods, your deadleaf-coloured stroke of fortune
falling into sunlight or far-off clash of trolleys like wind-stroked wheat
where once wheat was – and before that the madness of pure trees.
6
Dante your uncle, kind, who looked into the snake eyes
of the SS guard in Warsaw, kin to oblivion, sudden; chance luck;
lost all his family who didn’t mind the omens deep in the spine,
who survived on berries in Polish woods, daring himself down for bread,
has died, is burned to ashes and his ashes spread in Kenwood under a particular tree
by the gravel walk he loved and will always remember,
his pots the colour of pools and trees and moments one remembers
as moments, his swift brush-strokes strokes of memory one waits for