Either this deep desire of mine
will be found on this journey,
or when I get back home!
It may be that the satisfaction I need
depends on my going away, so that when I’ve gone
and come back, I’ll find it at home.
In homecoming, my body, too, was happy. After the fire, how healing is water. The soles of my feet had hurt for hundreds of hours; they had become swollen with heat, and now they rested cool on fresh grass in my garden. After the thirst and heat of the Camino, I could lean my face against damp, dark moss, and I drank glass after glass of clear, cold water. After weeks of shared showers, insufficient hot water and skimpy little cardboard squares of travel towels, now I had deep baths, with proper-sized towels and, afterwards, my favourite dressing gown. I had the luxury of shady solitude, feeling how priceless is privacy after knowing that your body, awake or asleep, night and day without let-up, can be under the gaze of strangers.
The chancey nature of life on the road was over and I cherished the certainties of home. On the Camino, you don’t know where you will sleep each night, but back home is the simplest calm, the humble benediction of one’s own bed.
When I was ill before the Camino I had at times felt trapped at home, as if it were an echo-chamber for my psyche and would replay to me my own mind’s shriek, ape me the shape of my madness. Homecoming now, I knew it gentle and gentling, newly seen and known, newly and familiarly beloved. Moment by moment, I could feel the consolation of home, my own habitat surrounding me, the intimate miniature world, handmade and tender, the tended home which tends in turn.
Homecoming meant being with my friends, too. When I was ill, my friends understood that ‘I’ was not ‘myself’ and they held to their knowledge of the person they previously knew me to be. On the Camino, for the most part, I had hidden, a gaunt ghost in my own days. For everyone on the Camino, one’s ‘self’ is peculiarly un-anchored from its past. It can be hard to be a serial stranger to others and, walking ill, the dislocation was doubled: no one knew me, and I wasn’t myself anyway. I was unhomed even from my own selfhood, homeless in my mind, but coming home I could feel myself suddenly sturdy in the eyes of friends, my character leaping back like a dog wagging its tail when, after weeks of separation, it eventually hears its own name called.
If this whole year’s episode began with falling down a rabbit hole and continued through the dark underworld of suicidality, it ended with a sense of coming up into daylight, small but alive. It would prove to be some months before I was back to my full strength, but this was undeniably the start of wellness.
On the Camino, I had been spent utterly, emptied, dried, withered to nothing, but back home, at the end of it all, I felt a refreshment of sheer water. I felt daybright and eager, my prayers answered in a sweep of benevolence, a superlative generosity of pure largesse, pouring easy and abundant as endless liquid arpeggios. I felt like a small spring on a mountainside, the source of the Wye, water spilling up again and again within me, constantly innerly replenished, liquid life returning, life upwelling in unstoppable wellness.
– How are you? a friend asked me.
– I’m fine. Really fine.
I’ve never said it with such feeling. Fine. ‘Fine’ meaning ‘well’. Up from the good earth, a wellspring of fine water. Fine as a shining field of sunflowers at dawn. Fine as a field of stars in a midnight sky.
ARTIST-ASSASSIN
Poems
Getting My Bearings
When sight is condensed to starlight
Quick to eternity
When mind has thrown its anchor
Back to a raging sea
When the rudder has sheered away in my hands
The boat a stormwracked wreck
And my sails lie in tatters
Mast splintered across the deck
Then reeling round its compass points
Psyche’s reason undone
Before behind within and down
Shakespeare Hopkins Donne
I’m steering by the poets now
I’m steering by their song.
Out of Order
At two in the morning
I emailed my friends
Asking if I’d left my hat at theirs
With an urgency previously reserved
For an only-apparently greater loss
An appalled finding:
I find that I have lost
My reason, logic, and – once –
My words.
There, I’ve said it, as I said it aloud
To myself, on my knees in my study.
Terrified of losing my notebooks
I mark them with my address
Check frantic in my bag every minute or less.
My friend’s cancer-scare
I was with her there
In the hallways of the hospital
‘This is where I left her.
Can you tell me where
She is?’
‘Are you the patient?’ an orderly asked
Three times and
Three times I denied it, then
I got the giggles disorderly
At the comedy of loss.
I have lost my mind
My words
My friend
My notebook
And my hat
In no particular order.
Giddy
(for Marg)
Happiness also fathoms things.
My giddy friend plays
Jove, the bringer of jollity,
A one-goddess ode to joy,
She is all the world giggling,
Gravity in reverse,
Serious about frivolity,
A superfluity of light.
Nocturnal in C Sharp Minor
(for George)
I
There is a fathom of a different kind
Which knows the call of the high seas
Where the siren voices steer
And waves have a resonant frequency with mind
The cadences are sheer
Beguiling.
What sounds like song to the mad
Is a deadly wassail
Composed by suicides past
A ship of drunk poets singing up
The tsunami which shatters them
Alluring.
What looks like madness to the sane
Is a self-bewitching:
Spells of the psyche hurled
On its own waters, crying
For the pitch that will rhyme them
Enchanting.
The howling causes
Fractured chords
The devil’s interval
Augmented fourth
From crest to gulf
From eros to thanatos
From music to madness
From poetry to anguish.
II
I am a nocturnal in C sharp minor
At three midnights in one: the day’s, the year’s and mine.
Midnight’s alcohol-saddened third
The winter solstice a frost-sharpened seventh
And the minor key’s treachery dominant
Seeking the resolution of a chord
Which has been playing me for years –
When the very word suicide has the sweetest ring
In the inaudible octaves far above and below.
I want to die: the phrase is music
I am not the pianist but the keyboard now
Resounded by every hand which has ever touched me.
Tonight transposes all the sounds across the highest Cs
A pitch too much for me –
I have become part of the siren frequencies
Captivated by the acoustics of the deepest seas.
I am being sounded by the sustained notes
At the furthest fathoms of hearing
The high wires which thrilled Odysseus cry for my reply
Knife in one hand, telephone in the other.
III
If I could call into the night
If someone could outshout the siren voices for me
If they would please pick up the phone.
Please pick up the phone:
The prayer which all of those who’ve been there know.
I know it’s late, I know I’ll wake your child
I know you know I wouldn’t be ringing
Unless what is ringing in me is a terrifying bell –
I am wrung out – I can find no reason not to –
– I have no reason now.
The phone wires ring.
I don’t exist
Between notes
Lost for words
Between books
Unharmonized with life
Between no one and no one,
Unless someone could please
Please pick up the phone
My prayer is answered
I ask: Please
Tie me to the mast
Put wax in my ears
So I cannot hear
These terrible siren voices.
One in Five
One in five in this madness
Go and bloody do it: OD, knives or hanging.
But maybe the statistics count it wrong:
It’s not one in five people
But one in five moments
One in five devastations
Will wipe you out.
One in five memories
Will explode you.
One in five stalkers
Will catch you.
Maybe everyone can stay with the living four
If they counted different:
Four hours bearable
Four friends reliable
Four hillsides runnable
Four pianos playable
Four poems writable
Not one life unwritten.
Betrayal
Our dreams betray us
To ourselves,
A fraternity of the unconscious
In the corridors of waking.
Spirals
The quixotic spirals of galaxies call me
Towards everything that shines,
Lightning electrifying the mosaic of the stars.
Night sky the first chiaroscuro,
Dazzling distance:
How light defies the dark
Even if the dark was dictated
Long ago,
Light strikes back,
Thousands of years later.
All my moons are spinning out of true
In galaxies of the human mind
With the moons of Jupiter, by Jove,
I can only see in silver and gold,
The spinning light
Where moons both wax and wane.
Wax itself can wane, Icarus,
You and I know, but not yet,
Let me stay here while
The waning earth
Waiting through winter
Wants candlewax, matches, flame,
Until it gets a spring in its step.
But the wax in my psyche is melting,
My mind can’t hold itself,
Turning frantic in its circling
The dial of twelve mad hours without words
Until even Mercury knows his day will pass,
Mercredi, even this Wednesday,
And tomorrow he must play his other part, and guide
Me to a hammock of silver silk,
Psyche spun out and back to the cocoon
Of earth.
Essay
I try it once or twice.
Try it with all the scissors I’ve used
For the literal cut and paste
Editing thousands of paper strips,
Sharpened text on my bedroom floors
For the last twenty years,
Scissors turned happily book-blunt,
Content on the shelves,
The right kind of essays,
The forays of the human mind
Exploring mountains, Montaigne onwards.
This is a trial of a different kind.
I’m trying it out with a Stanley knife,
The wrong kind of sharp,
Implorer not explorer,
A literal essay
Best edited round
Into metaphor.
Because It Snowed on January 18th
A little bird died in the night
Instead of me.
The snowfall which cancelled my voice of reason
And put the cat’s-paw in my head
Froze the treecreeper’s mind
To reckless and suicidal behaviour
Dropping like a plumb line to the snow
Inviting the cat
Only too happy to accept.
I’ve shut the cat into the kitchen
With the still bird and the still
Fluttering knife.
Nature’s easy, psyche not,
Being both its own
Predator and prey.
Blackbirds
(for Vic)
Blackbirds in London’s January pouring their real songs
Into the artificial dawn,
Looking for the trees of Arden
With all their ardent hearts,
Burning from within,
Thinking if they could sing
With more heart, more song,
Then the sun will rise.
Though it is night for hours yet
They sing and burn
And burn and sing
In the false-fire neon
Until the real sun rises
And they burn out into day:
The price of streetlights
Paid in song.
Their hope is a heartbreaking faith
In fake stumps parked
Along pavements which never lead
To the forests, which know no roots
In Arden’s earthed, enduring language
Where the birds trust the root-truths of trees
Where, when the real dawn breaks,
It trysts with their unbroken song.
In Reverse
It’s the daylight I can’t stand.
I can see the dark circles under my eyes,
Reverse moons stitched black
On to the sky of my white face.
By day my hands are purposeless,
Ambling between keyboards, piano and type,
With nothing to play for on either:
By night my fingers feel quick and light.
Hours of daytime stall cold on the floor,
Useless as broken pressure-cookers,
As suns of midsummer.
Night thoughts are lit from the inside,
Candling the living work
Of the kindest poets who revealed most truly
World-mind turned inside out.
Their work is awake, long after they’ve gone,
Awake and speaking in my night
When – with relief – no one else is here
To mirror to me all that I am not.
One Second
In the distant past
Ten tidy minutes ago,
Checking their watches
They started the car
Not knowing how
In prehistory
Two sad hours ago,
Had I hugged my nephews
One second longer,
I would have come punctual
To the double collision
Of geological time and now
The road punctuated by significance
The failure to read the stop sign
My mind wrecked and reckless
So when I drove across the path
Of their oncoming car
At the fatal crossroad
We were all one bare second away
From something that had already happened.
‘The Eye Begins to See’
(see Rilke, ‘In a Dark Time’)
Poems depend on sight in the dark,
I can only see to write
In the literal night
When this madstruck time began
– Hallucinations enchanting my eyes –
I could see things which were not there
While, driving without looking to see,
I had no regard for what was there
Real as hard metal.
And then my real vision fogged
My left eye could not see the irreal presence
Of some protecting angel
Who measured the distance by which I missed
And made a better judgement than mine
Cast a mist
On half my sight
A spelled-out cast so I cannot judge distance
Out of the question to drive
Staying me to meanings of the righter mind
Found in soft pencil only
And only in the kindness of dark.
The Lonely Letter
I
Lonely as one letter of the alphabet
I walk beyond the snowline of Kili,
A canary for altitude sickness,
I get it violently: quicker than anyone.
My head is an ice palace of crystal pain:
In sick vision, snow is pillows and pianos.
I the inexorable solitude,
A tiny iota divided from other minds.
My idiocy is my implacable will
To go on, against wisdom, against advice.
Because the views from the summit impel me –
Everything here is ice, fire and spirit –
Because the mountains become me
And I can lose myself
Because I can see worlds
And I am unlonely
Because on the top I cannot feel
The peopled isolation of the valleys.
II
If the unlinked climber sleeps
One night on Cader Idris
They wake either mad or a poet
(Or both, poets always reply.)
But the obliterated letter losing sight
Of other eyes knows the third choice
Where the path is a hairpin turn –
Annihilation –
Striking a cliff of fall
Filed away by suicides-future
Like a grid reference:
That’s a likely site.
Now is no time to risk it:
Cader is come to me: Kili in my mind.
The snowline has slipped, it
Pillows my voice to a monotone,
Freezes the fingers of friendships,