MIMI KHALVATI
The Weather Wheel
Acknowledgements
Grateful thanks are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems, or earlier versions of them, have appeared:
Acumen, Ariadne’s Thread, Artemis, Cimarron Review (USA), Genius Floored: Alphabet of Days (Soaring Penguin Press, 2012), Genius Floored: Uncurtained Window (Soaring Penguin Press, 2013), Her Wings of Glass (Second Light Publications, 2014), London Magazine, Magma, New Humanist, Not Only the Dark (Categorical Books, 2011), PN Review, POEM, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art (www.taosjournalofpoetry.com), The Book of Love and Loss (Belgrave Press, Bath, 2014), The Critical Muslim, The Editor: An Anthology for Patricia Oxley (Rockingham Press, 2011), The Forward Book of Poetry 2013, The Long Poem Magazine, The North, The Rialto, Tokens for the Foundlings (Seren, 2012), Urthona.
‘Model for a Timeless Garden’ was commissioned by the Southbank Centre and written in response to Olafur Eliasson’s eponymous light installation exhibited at the Light Show, Hayward Gallery, 2013.
‘Ghazal: In Silence’ appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ website, Poem-a-Day.
Warm thanks to Peter and Ann Sansom for publishing Earthshine (Smith/Doorstop Books, 2013), a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. All the pamphlet poems are reproduced here.
I would also like to thank Martin Parker at Silbercow for designing the cover image, Alfred Corn, Jane Duran, Marilyn Hacker and Aamer Hussein for their generosity in reading and responding to the manuscript, and, in particular, Michael Schmidt and Helen Tookey for their invaluable editing.
Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgements
I Earthshine
House Mouse
Madame Berthe’s Mouse Lemur
Sun Sparrow
Knifefish
Snail
Sciurus Carolinensis
The Conservatory
The Little Gloster
Microchiroptera
The Landing Stage
Earthshine
Prunus Avium
II Under the Vine
Under the Vine
Starlight
Angels
Orchard
What it Was
Marrakesh I
Marrakesh II
Marrakesh III
Marrakesh IV
Marrakesh V
Marrakesh VI
Le Café Marocain
III The Soul Travels on Horseback
New Year’s Eve
The Pear Tree
Rain Stories
Aunt Moon
Statham Grove Surgery
The Wardrobe
Fog
Snow is
The Blanket
The Swarm
Model for a Timeless Garden
The Soul Travels on Horseback
IV Tears
The Overmind
Reading the Saturday Guardian
Midsummer Solstice
Picking Raspberries with Mowgli
Sniff
Drawing Bea
Nocturne
The Waves
Similes
Cherries and Grapes
Kusa-Hibari
Tears
V Her Anniversary
The Goat
On the Occasion of his 150th Anniversary
In Search of the Animals
Martina’s Radiance
Mehregan
Sun in the Window
Bringing Down the Stars
The Doe
Abney Park Cemetery
Migration
Her Anniversary
VI The Avenue
Granadilla de Abona I
Granadilla de Abona II
Granadilla de Abona III
Granadilla de Abona IV
Granadilla de Abona V
Granadilla de Abona VI
Granadilla de Abona VII
Plaza de los Remedios
The Wheelhouse
Finca El Tejado
The Avenue
Ghazal: In Silence
Notes
About the Author
Also by Mimi Khalvati from Carcanet Press
Copyright
I Earthshine
House Mouse
Even the mist was daffodil yellow in the morning sun,
a slant of April sun that glowed on my banana skin.
And in the shadow of my arm a mouse lay, white belly up
like a lemur sunbathing. Begging she was, paws curled,
miniature paws like nail clippings, hind legs crossed
in a rather elegant fashion, tail a lollipop stick.
Pricked on her shadow, her ear and fur stood sharp as grass
but her real ear was soft, thin, pliable, faint as a sweetpea petal
and her shut eye a tiny arc like the hilum of a broad bean.
Yesterday she was plump. Today she’s thin. Sit her up, she’ll sit.
You can see how Lennie would have ‘broke’ his, petting it –
mine weighs no more than a hairball, nestling in my palm
as though it were wood pulp, crawlspace, a ‘wee-bit housie’
and she, the pup, the living thing. The baby look’s still on her.
And the depth of her sleep. I tuck her into the finger
of my banana skin – a ferryboat to carry her over the Styx.
Madame Berthe’s Mouse Lemur
We should have been lemurs, lowering our metabolism
to suit, going into torpor in the cool dry winter months
to save on water and energy. We too should have sailed
on a raft of matted leaves out of poor Africa, out to Madagascar
into a forest of mangrove and thorn scrub, feeding off gum,
honeydew larvae, bedding down in tree holes en famille.
The very smallest of us, the veriest Tom Thumb, the most
minute pygmy, tsitsidy, mausmaki, itsy bitsy portmanteau,
little living furry torch, eyes two headlamp luminaries, front
a bib of chamois, tip to tail – and mostly tail – barely as long
as the line I write in, despite illegal logging, slash and burn,
would survive longer than many folk, especially in captivity.
Only the barn owl, goshawk, to watch for in the dark – raptors
with their own big beauty. But Madame Berthe’s Mouse Lemur
is caught in the act – a chameleon clasped in her hands,
a geisha lowering her fan: the smallest primate on our planet.
Sun Sparrow
Sun, like a sparrow in the house, seeks dustgrounds
small as a handkerchief to play in. Sun sparrow, house sparrow,
I give you landing strips of dust on wood, runways
between photo frames, wood grain and wood knot roses,
nests of cane and cloth for you to steal, netherlands I never clean
for you to bathe in. Here’s a dust bath, look, under the bed,
large enough for you and all your family. Why, even
the numbered hairs of my head, fallen, have lined a nest,
innumerable nests and silver they are, the better for you
to shine in. Come, sun, roost. And here is my skin. Warm it.
Sun sparrow, didn’t Sappho herself have sparrows,
fair fleet sparrows, draw Aphrodite’s chariot to wing her plea?
I ask no such thing. But I see you land, on wood, on wall,
take flight again and you who have your own warmth,
who need no streetlight, neon sign to roost in – why flee?
Be sociable, sta
y awhile on my flaking sill, hop right in.
Knifefish
Lit, lit, lit, lit are the estates at dawn:
honeycomb stairwells, corridors, landing lights,
flare paths for passengers flying home.
Three jets like electric fish streak the sky with rose.
Black ghost, ghost knifefish, how many days
since you went abroad, lurking in your murky pools,
locating dawn by sonar, by electric fields alone?
To image your world in darkness – driftwood
casting distortion shadows – no matter how weak
your receptor organ, faint its discharge, barely a volt,
through tail-bend, waveform, you fire, you feel,
sensing lightning, earthquake, your own kind
turning their dimmer switch up and down,
for this is how you talk. Old Aba Aba, grandpa,
with your one room lit at a time, feeling for walls,
navigating as surely as in the brightest, highest dawn!
Snail
Close the trapdoor. Let no light in. No,
not the luminous apricot cloud or whale cloud,
fat peach cloud or the isthmus of blue,
the sky lanes in between. Close the chink.
Sea slug, land snail, one head and one foot,
draw the one foot in. You are all head now,
helmet, foetus and dome, oceans under,
trapdoor sealed. Safe, safe, safe.
Snail-deep, slug-dark, shu-shu-shush.
Waves roll in. But here you are landed,
relic on the sand. The moon has carried you
on his back but what do you know of love?
Its arrow, smear of silk. And of hatred?
Salt, drawing your love juice into its grains,
giving you age, old age and its snail-slow shrivelling.
Be lazy, snail, be slow. Savour every inch.
Sciurus Carolinensis
Sun rivers on glass, threatens to mount, blaze
into my eyeline so that, heat-struck, I headlong
down to hump squirrelled in the shade below, leaves
moving as I move, as grass moves with the snake.
I am the grey. Born helpless, blind and deaf.
My mother lays me across her forepaws, fetches me
out of a cave, weans me once my teeth appear.
Sciurus names only my skia, shadow, oura, tail.
I displace the red. Acorn-bred, carrier of the pox,
I infect it with lesions, ulcers, scabs, weeping crusts,
it shivers, shivers, skia, oura, and then it’s dead.
I mean no harm. I’m no image seared on your brain
only seen side on, tail up, ears tufted like conifer spurs;
no nutkin on a branch, jug on a wall, graphic loop,
no ampersand between presentiment and trace.
Skia, oura, I flicker on the walls of the cave.
The Conservatory
If you keep two blinds down and one blind up
and sit under the one that’s up under the skylight
and the Sunday morning rain, you create –
at absolutely no expense – the kind of conservatory
you’ve always wanted but without the wicker
and kelims, the view onto the dripping garden
and the cat, all soaking, hidden under a hedge.
You are elevated instead. You are a bird in a nest.
Rick as a small boy sold birds for pocket money.
He made his own trap out of a wire washing basket,
a stick, some fishing line, some bread, catching
sparrows, dunnocks and, if he was lucky, a finch,
before progressing to proper trap cages with a call bird
that would sing and attract more birds he’d extricate,
sell, then start over again. Now he’s a mouse-catcher
with no pension. ‘You’re not illegible’, he said they said.
The Little Gloster
With such icy winds, facing the rising sun in the garden
makes no difference so I take shelter on the terrace,
comforted by two black sheepskins, one under me,
one over, kindly provided by the establishment.
Seagulls, seen from below, their red feet neatly stowed,
beaks and eyes painted like wooden toys, hang
immobile long enough to be scrutinised in flight
before they swerve away. Propped against a fence,
a reindeer is spotted with fairy lights you expect to see
vanish like daylight stars and everything that loomed
last night on a smuggler’s night black with storm
– the distillation tower’s disembodied four red eyes –
retreats into its rightful place. Young waiters, chefs,
preparing for the fair, are lining up white deckchairs
close enough to the seafront to feel spray. Sandwiched
in these sheepskins, I am half man, half sheep, myself.
Microchiroptera
Only human noises populate the night. No owl, pheasant,
wailing fox, only stars that have buried their heads in cloud.
Listening becomes a momentous task. The eye as always
fights for supremacy and the ear, fazed as a bat in rain,
imagining it hears a rush of water, hears ‘all things hushed’.
O chauve-souris, flying mouse, leather mouse, flittermouse,
jealous naked microbat, winged seed of sycamore,
umbrella man, acrobat hanging in your own skin parachute,
flying patagium carpet, O bat-being in fairy wings,
string purse, anus face, where are your echoes now
– dry flutter of a mothwing, rustle of a centipede –
where is your pulsing cry, your lovesong in the dark?
In the vast homelessness of a country night – dear country,
left behind – we come back into our moral being, back
into the animal ground of our being under the absent stars.
Under their roofs and rafters, we navigate that ground.
The Landing Stage
How slippery the path just at the end where the indigo stutters
of dragonflies rain against glass water! Where everything is flower –
the air, its scent, cabbage whites, single, paired; pines, cedars,
carpet dew; where old age flowers in its slow walk to the water;
where the left brain flowers and the right, the lawnmower
sprays grass fountains; where sadness settles for the pine cones,
not knowing if they are really pine cones at this distance;
where Anne flowers in an orange shawl and our lungs
are grey wildflowers, minds a mindless garden; where,
in the event of fire, we are to collect at the bottom of the lawn.
We are to collect our belongings, blankets, iPads, medicines.
We are to collect sunlight silvering on our shoulders.
Our shoulders are thin. We collect our thinness, our boniness,
in a huddle of silver water down by the river. Be careful!
they warn me, those who are, going down to the landing stage
raised high enough to dangle younger legs over the water.
Earthshine
Under the giant planes beside the gate where we said goodbye,
the one bare trunk where squirrels flatten themselves on bark
side by side with a voluminous plane whose ivy outraces branch,
under the two great planes where we stood vaguely looking round
since it was a clear night, the street empty and we, small gaggle,
newly intimate but standing a yard apart, keeping our voices low
though they carried bright as bells as we counted the evening out,
gestured towards the cars, deciding who would go with whom
and gradually splitting off,
under the planes with the squirrel dreys
hidden in all that ivy, but hanging low directly above the station,
there, where we looked pointing, like an Oriental illustration
of Arabian Nights, lay the old moon in the new moon’s arms:
earthshine on the moon’s night side, on the moon’s dark limb,
earthlight, our light, our gift to the moon reflected back to us.
And the duty we owe our elders as the Romans owed their gods
– duties they called pietàs, we call pity – shone in the moon’s pietà.
Prunus Avium
We buried my mother’s ashes in the holes, the four
we dug to plant four cherry trees for her, Prunus avium:
wild cherry, sweet cherry, bird cherry, gean or mazzard,
each name carrying something of Prunus avium on the wind,