Ices the keys of the piano
To the unletterable I.
The Price of Argon
(for Iain)
I can feel words with my fingers,
Consonantal cutting rhymes of rock
Chime clean with carabiners
Connecting ropes of thought,
The cadences of vowel slides
Smooth or taut: snow elides
To hollow
While my temples – of Apollo –
Are hammered through with nails
No rhythm except pain.
Why would you climb the human mind?
Not just because it is there
But because all climbers dare the air
Where it is thinnest,
Aware its gases still include dreams.
Too little oxygen to survive,
The body stints its appetite and eats itself,
Anorexia of the heights,
Obsessing every ounce of carried weight,
I can barely drag the whiteness
Of a page to write
Of either the ethereal mind
Or the freighted body.
Climbers call it the death zone,
When they raid it for the summits
For the views – my god –
The vision.
Out on the earthstruck mountain
The head must not mind hurting itself
Skystruck how the price of argon
Has risen to what cost?
All that you possess including – possibly –
Your life.
Argon, the inert gas, is associated not only with inertia but with reverie.
The Traverse
‘Make it a short pitch,’ I said:
‘More accidents happen on the way down.’
So the lead climber was just below me, holding the rope safe,
But in a sudden avalanche he had to swerve away:
The line dangled uselessly,
My mind swinging,
My descent unsecured,
His voice too far to reach me.
I had a choice on the bare rock:
The dutiful
Waiting
Or the beautiful
Traverse –
Truer –
To me –
In a night now voiced with stars.
The utterly speaking part is uttered alone,
The traverse between writer and reader,
Between pencil and page,
Between word and root,
Between language and speech,
Between silence and song,
Between voices.
Parallel Loneliness
(for Ann)
Loneliness is not a word you find in the plural
Lonelinesses would give the lie
To its bound solitude.
Loneliness is the marches,
The no-man’s-land between countries:
Loneliness is the marked mind,
The invisible geography,
Territory known by others,
Who have been inwritten
By that same cartography,
Leaving us alike
In worlds alone,
Mapping edge to edge
Our parallel loneliness.
But we have a trick up our sleeve
To defy those maps of the mind:
Faster than prayer,
More certain than pills,
A side-splitting, map-tearing joke
Told together:
Hold together, my friend,
I’m right by you.
The Fire of Love
It really would be madness now
To love you
Or you, or you, or you,
Though my heart is on fire.
Someone asked me what is it like, this madness?
Like a wildfire fanned by a hurricane,
A quickened quality of flame
Which knows no borders,
No respecter of persons or properness,
Easy to love anyone but insufficient,
For this is an ordinary fire burning extraordinary
In a world too beautiful to leave,
Where each fir needle is fire
Pure water is fire
Ire is fire
Eyes are fire
Enflamed to seeing
In a fine circle of light
These black suns of knowledge
How the pupil blazes through
To the pure circle of the sun.
It would be madness to love you or anyone
Because this love is a need-fire beyond
Burning for the universal
As transcendental as each of us,
Outsunning the sun
With fire and love and hope:
And the pupils of my eyes are learning
A language of purer flame.
Wavelengths
(for Jan)
Everyone is an exquisite device
For reception and transmission
Wired for empathy
To the acoustics of each other
But the extra sensitivity of certain states of mind
Calibrates at a factor of ten
Each gauge read to a further order of magnitude
Picking up the tiniest signals
Or deafened by the shouts of the over-loud
So the self-obsession of a neurotic
Is an unbearable broadcast of blather
The tedium of a self-repeater
Jangles like an advert for advertising
Avoidance or ear plugs the only strategies
I’m trying to tune in to the wisest wavelengths
The voices which speak their kindness in kind
Which find their way into my mind
Because they know fine-tuning
Is an art where to speak is to listen
Even to the unspoken transmission
The catch in the throat, a way of breathing
The eloquence of silence
The voiced pause
Of the unanswered question
Because they are willing to go an extra order
In the magnitude of the heart.
Hospitality
(for Buz and Thoby)
Just how far has a hospital taken leave
Of its original senses
Of providing sacred hospitality
On an uncertain stretch of road, the inn,
In those acres of fields, the garden.
The language of care, cariad,
The caritas for those who are strangers to themselves.
Mercury is guardian of hospitality,
On the horizon for lost eyes, a focal point,
A fuego, the warmth of ‘hearth’,
Folding in one warm word heart,
Heat, earth, hear, eat – and the tea
As a child in my grandmother’s house
By the stove, bread rising,
The yeast, the wine
Of consecrated trust
That there will always be a welcome
For those suffering hiraeth away
From their own mind’s square mile
So everywhere is home, as ungated
As gratitude, as grace.
Cariad (Welsh): ‘dear’. Hiraeth (Welsh): ‘homesickness’.
Patient Doctoring
Sometimes a doctor must be patient with himself
Holding back the frustration of the desire
To act, intervene, inject, prescribe
Because a patient’s description may be more curative
Than a doctor’s prescription:
The telling of telling details of a life.
A doctor wants someone up, out of bed, on their feet – of course –
To speed the course of illness.
It is harder to be willing to wait awhile
As the mind takes its own courses
In the paths of its own cures:
The guiding word is docere,
Leading someone by the hand through madness
And fine doctoring is a subtle profession
Willing to watch, wait, attend,
Attentive to the quiet admissions
When a doctor’s first and greatest skill is to listen.
I shrink from unkindness.
I wane at insensitive remarks.
But a crescent kindness
Kindles me like the moon
Waxing back to its full brightness.
It finds me, moves me:
Injections of reassurance twice a week
Interventions of thoughtfulness
Kindness a force against which even my nightmares weaken.
Fiercer, tougher, willing and wise to the medicine of time.
For the off-kilter mind
Listening is another form of intensive care.
I daresay it would be easier
To commit a patient talking suicide.
Far harder to take the other route
To the roots of this kind of pain
Not sedating suffering
But slowly – patiently – actually
Undoing its terrible hold.
The Question I Would Like to Ask a Shaman Now
Not how to fly.
Not how to hear the messages on the highest hills.
Not how to discern good angels from destroying ones.
Not even how to find the poetry.
But how to get back safe from the night-shade,
Night-vision intact, tucked poems in my rucksack.
If I answered my own question
It is to attend each occluded step
Beware the accidents of descent
Keep a constant vigil
A stern metallic grip
Holding fast to bread and water.
It is not to flinch at the knowledge
I have to climb down lonely as I climbed up
Fabulously alone.
To use each herb-word, each verb-root
Because the only thing which unclouds my solitude
Is language.
It is to find the courage to leave the allure
To return to the softer shore
Of the lovely dayside
The tidy fireside
Clean cups, stocked woodpile,
The written book, completed work.
In Thanks
For the sensitivity and tenderness of many people along the way, too numerous to mention, I offer my poignant appreciation. I drink to all tendernesses.
For those cherished friends who took care of me with enduring loyalty and lit candles in the dark: Ann Clare, Niall Griffiths, Anna Jenkins, Deborah Jones, Nicoletta Laude, George Marshall, Thoby Miller, George Monbiot, Marg Munyard, Eddie Parker, Jan Parker, Andy Scrase, Hannah Scrase, Thea Stein, Buz Thomas, Andy Warren and Vic Worsley.
For being the apple of my eye: David Griffiths and Timothy Griffiths.
For such wise and comradely encouragement, a deep bow to Barry Lopez, Iain McGilchrist and Philip Pullman.
For kindness, intelligence and support far beyond the call of duty, I salute my agent Jessica Woollard and my editor Jack Shoemaker, together with Anna Ridley and Anna Kelly. Thank you with all my heart.
And for the profound skill and care of Dr Leslie: I hope that this book itself stands as my testament of gratitude. It dedicates itself to you.