from reading lists
piled against our chests; shield the past
as under a hood of Victorian stone
your own shrine rests,
all but turned to a palimpsest,
in Edgar’s Field, in Handbridge, in Chester.
III
The Taiga
Cold crown of the world. Boreas exhales
the breath that’s preserved him all these years,
kept the wolverine alive, and the spruce-blue stars
keen as crystals of virgin ice
clipping the pines on their northern slopes.
Most coverage here is evergreen.
It grows in the short day painfully slow,
putting down rings, and whatever waxed needles do
pitter to the ground
lie there still as pick-up-sticks in the reckoning
between two goes, as if the soft lynx
left these miles on long exposure. Bison graze,
moss-obsessed. Fresh snow settling confuses them
with abandoned dens and boulders.
A she-bear, snug in the bed of her own fur,
lies under stone, four pink cubs
assuming their forms faster in her womb
than the carcasses that nourished them can decompose.
She dreams at double speed
of balsam wood, hot piss and foreign males,
the planet turning imperceptibly
underneath her shoulder. Honey congeals
in hives suspended from conifer boughs. The yellow
eyes of a Tengmalm’s owl
click in the dark like camera shutters.
Kassandra
We touch down in Siviri, on Kassandra,
the first spiral arm. A mantis dries in the myrtle.
Moths drag their abdomens through the fluid sand
in eternity symbols. The sea, antagonized
a cloudy blue, banks long drifts
of ticker-tape seaweed up against the pilings.
The air smells of salt, and the sweetness of pines
that weep thin syrup to the compound earth,
their long, pliable, pale green needles
managing to droop and spike at the same time.
White skies overcast, and calm, and close.
The beach loses contrast like a film too long exposed:
nacre-coloured, ivory, silver, shell.
The lukewarm water doesn’t wave, it breathes.
I lie flat on a flat cool dune,
my cardigan for a pillow, ear-down. The raised
spine of my book makes a rampart
where a tiny brown spider sits, proprietorially
taking the view. Sometimes he puts
his four front legs in the air and feels around,
checking the humidity, or hailing a friend.
When the sun touches him he shines like resin,
half-transparent. His face is a shield,
almost the size of the hooded crows’ hoods
of beaten mail, where they mooch beyond him,
then jump into the air like they’re jumping on to the ground.
Further down the beach, teenage boys
are dismantling a tiki bar’s wooden umbrellas.
They dig long palings out of the sand,
kept damp all season where they sharpen
to pencil-points at the ends, and rest them on their sides.
The shades, made of matted old tinder,
tile in overlapping panels towards us –
a solar field or a shield-wall at distance, the scales
of a lizard seen up close. Then the boys
carry them into the gloomy bar-room, in columns,
lightly as leafcutter ants delivering
doilies of privet to their underground posts.
Eagerly the restaurateur by the taxi rank
welcomes us, his only patrons, to a blue-painted table
and disposable white paper table-cloth.
Stray cats leap and drop into the garbage dumpers.
Across the gulf we can see Mount Olympus
melt the red sun like a bath-pearl on its peak.
The Russian girl who serves us is blonde and sad,
her eyes, born too far apart,
watery and pale as peeled cucumber. She wants to talk.
The chickpea soup and the octopus are good.
Her best friend married an Englishman
and moved away last year. There was a terrible fire here
that burnt the whole village down to the stone.
Everybody saw it happen on the news.
Things haven’t been the same. She sounds like someone
from another time, someone with an open wound.
Ouzo turns white when it touches ice,
like people’s eyes in the presence of angels.
The cubes revolve in its milky emulsion.
Tomorrow the sea will be plaster and the sky plaster-cast.
Already three cafés and the patîsserie are closed.
An old man sits at the end of the quay,
watching the caïques darken through his cataracts.
He catches fish too small to eat.
The rollers turn white when they hit the rocks.
Trimmings
1. Frangelico
It slops from coppery
glass Dominican cassocks
thicker than water,
thinned syrup crackling
and smoking over ice,
pale as hearts of hazelnuts
half-caramelized
or relics lit in cabinets.
Angelic alcoholic for kids,
all quickening sweetness
without the burnt palate,
it’s praline, gilt, milk chocolate.
Don’t knock it. Also,
don’t drink a lot of it.
Handy mnemonic for nuts
and Alps, the Piedmont
and Languedoc, Our Father,
fluent Occitan, Orthodox
baroque brass fixtures,
all the schmaltzy
terror of Christmas . . .
Bright liqueur, maple sap,
throat’s lacquer, misnomer,
namesake – couldn’t quench
a thirst, of course,
but gives occasion for it.
2. Lametta
Fuck me, I love that stuff –
tinsel stripped
like a tarragon stalk
of its million radial tines,
nervy with static
in shredded cascades,
angle-confounding
and biddable as a fistful
of grasshoppers.
It implicates itself perpetually
in socks, hell-bent
as Japanese knotweed
on travel, and infiltrates
the kitchenette, which seems,
beside its disco stooks,
too much of a muchness,
too matter-of-fact.
Could we dress all utilities
in spangles of lametta,
revel in the vulgar
Italian TV
indestructible attention-splatter,
the cat-bewitching
twitch and dangle, the dross?
Would things be worse
or better?
3. Periptero
Apparently
peripatetic, it pops up
wherever I go, glistening
on my shoulder: gold epaulette,
albatross, piñata stuffed
with bubble-gum, filter tips,
lottery tickets, mute
cascades of laminated sleaze
difficult to care about,
much harder to reject.
Less explicably there are
sewing patterns, puzzle books
and tiny plastic helicopters
bearing stigmata
from the moulds where they were cast.
The propriet
or slams
the shutters up
and locks himself inside
like a djinn in a lamp,
a night-busy, helping-hand
kobold in a kitchen,
utterly invested in the enterprise,
inseparable from it. What
is the epicentre everyone reports
but the staple through
the nipple of a centrefold?
Caribou
With muzzles made blue
by the blue saxifrage they cultivate a weakness for,
their heart-shaped chests, their little bibs
and dewlaps fringed with long white hairs like radish roots,
they show how thin our myths for them are.
Photographed with people they look like props,
apologetically small and feminine;
but homogeneous in their landscape they make boulders shrink
and nature fits them to her fabric
of snow-melt and sedge most ingeniously. There is
something rabbity about them –
their soft splayed hooves and sensitive ears,
that give-away impractical tussock of a tail, spotless or mucky,
signalling over plains
or flashing downwards when they climb
rocky outcrops in waves with a sound like knuckles cracking.
Overburdened by antlers that spread like reasonable hands,
all palm, all paddle, they spoon the cold air
or with one jerk rip holes in clouds
the snow crowds through, corridors wolves can follow.
Sometimes in spring they swim five miles
and make the river crossing. Sometimes they drown
and their bodies bump downstream with the antlers interlocking:
young ones rub like fuzzy-felts,
old ones knock together with a warm woody thunk
like a wind-chime thinking.
They pass their grazing grounds, they pass the wood-chipping plants
and the hydroelectric, and a sleepy logger in a quilted shirt
feeding denuded logs down a flume.
Wherever they are going, those resinous eyes, resolutely unsoulful,
don’t blink or flinch. They never change at all.
Octagonal Rug
Had the lion and the lamb lain down together, tannin lain down
with milk of lime, or Tannin lain with Metatron, the bronze and the grise,
the brown and the white, this flea-bag octagonal rug was the site.
Had the lion and the lamb thrown down their crests, the argent and the or,
the rampant charge and the muted shield, this was the field
of the cloth of gold, this was the league of corn. Here is a Tannenbaum
wreath in the snow. Here is a crown on a bandaged head.
This is at once the game and the ground. The lion and the lamb lie down.
The Eclipse
When it was time, we trooped outside – my brother, me,
my parents – through the open gates, and got clear of the trees
among crocuses and solemn strangers who gave sidelong
looks at the sky, as if it were the end of days and they expected
black riders or a plague of bees approaching.
Patchy cows languished in the next-but-one field.
Whatever you do, don’t look directly at it, my mother said,
in a tone that never changed, whatever age the child.
You’ll go blind, said my brother. Nobody corrected him.
Other people had made pinhole cameras out of cereal boxes.
You turned your back, and held the folded cardboard up
so the sun shone over your shoulder, like a teacher checking sums,
projecting itself in a golden cone on to the screen
where watching it change size posed no danger to your senses.
With a shudder, I thought, What’s there to stop
me looking at the sun? Nothing – only my resolve in between –
then someone said, Here we go! As if my shudder had escaped
a shadow began to slide across the county. It looked like a wind
blowing candles out – the candles of white houses,
the candles of green trees, all bright points in uniformity dimmed
and left behind as the leading edge pressed on,
offering no resistance. That stone sliding shut across the face
of the sun shut the landscape too. It was all a projection.
My mother used to show us the blood dammed in her vein
by smoothing a fingertip across the back of her hand.
Into that same still fascinated time I passed when the skirt
of the shadow caught me up, leaching the warmth
from my scalp and face, as if I had been buried in morning sand.
What was dim already disappeared.
I stood at the lightless centre of the worst I’d always feared
before the finger lifted and the force of the heart,
reasserting itself, shot burnt umber back into the earth.
The sun’s defeat made it seem less matriarchal
so I looked. Brightness caught me in the face so hard
my eyes flinched shut – but the sun in my head
remained: not yellow, not small,
not even exactly there, but definitely present, round but not a circle
and not so much bright or shiny as intense, meltingly intense,
a softness in the sky, an inwardness, where common sense failed,
like loose water seen through a weakness in the ice.
Memory Foam
A reek of paint
escaping from the vacuum-sealed
mattress puts me back
on a picnic table, overseeing
handymen creosote the fence,
with childish insistence
on being seen, on soppy adults
taking my impression
as the fat of my calves
took a rubbing of the table’s grain
like a gravestone
copied with paper and crayon.
My colouring-in required
the same enormous concentration
each one of them devoted
to dipping wet stripes
from his prised-open tin
panel after panel;
trellises criss-crossed
like the undersoles of Converse
consolidated
my thumb when they’d gone,
registering something.
Habit comes
and takes my hand,
desire lines dear as the paths
across a palm,
each time I enter woodland
where the poachers advanced
and battle re-enactments
in civilian dress
laid the bracken
flat in the form of a beast
unrecognised yet:
here she sleeps.
Be it pines
rasping at cross-purposes
in the Trossachs
or sessile oaks in Ecclesall,
where the cross-pieces intersect
they chafe a bit
for want of humectant,
milling a fine
dust that all but disappears
under the ratcheting
shadow of the rendezvous
where it was born
or flares up bronze
if a footstep’s pressure coincides
with the sun
as childhood can, caught
in a crossfire of sunbeams
as I am, embedded
here in the summer afternoon’s
pallet of visco-
elastic polyurethane foam,
both firm and forgiving
of the body’s form
and all its former trespasses.
The Historical Voice
The h
istorical voice speaks when the fire’s done burning
at a distance that is far but not inconceivably far from here.
In its vowels the Atlas bear and the tiger go on living.
The handful of things it tells us have been said before
and will be again, but it knows you’re not the only person
left who failed to listen. Difficult words like shame,
fatigue and dishonour take shelter in its lexicon.
Nothing is dull but shines in its notice. It can fold time,
bringing two apparently unconnected matters together
in combinations meant to reconfigure your sense of scale:
a pin and the Pinwheel galaxy, a black hole and a feather.
It has no discoverable loyalties. Neither male nor female,
foreign or known, its accents come from anywhere
but here. The syntax it likes is clean, perhaps translated.
Rats and horses often appear, but metaphor is rarer
than the similes it finds to be more true, and underrated.
Knowing the worst, it speaks from that shadow. We,
it says, including itself, we are like this. What has occurred
cannot be hidden, perhaps not understood. It tends to be
more kindly than severe, less grave than good-humoured,
as if in exhausted agreement that we all now comprehend
the long half-life of cruelty – that love alone, however
prone it seems, can like a tiger worm live on sand.
It talks like this of love without incurring your disfavour.
A Shrunken Head
In the cargo hold,
cruising at thirty thousand feet
above blue islands,
galactically cold,
I float between Oxford and the site
where I was found
then traded on.
I cannot see for bubble-wrap.
At this stage
in my repatriation
I belong to no one, a blip,
a birdy ounce in the undercarriage.
Only the curator knows I’ve gone
and who is left.
She redesigns the tour:
lizard bones
replace me, indigenous crafts
distract with dyed feathers
from an absence. So
in me no memory withstood
the leather-thonged, moth-kissed
costume of an Eskimo,
its upright hood
ringed with reindeer fur like frost
regarding me for years
without a face
across the Victorian cabinets;
or a cruel long spear