the wind that blew drifts of ash like bonemeal across clay.
In three years they’ll be grown; in twenty, diamond woodland.
But we’ll recognise our trees, set back where the path ends.
Surrounding them will be native oak, beech, alder, hazel.
One cherry tree from each of us: Tara, Bea, Kai and myself.
And on Tom’s behalf, we invoked the name of Yax Tum Bak,
Mayan God of Planting, there in a desolate, bitterly windy field
in Buckinghamshire. Clay stuck to our boots in grassy clumps
and as Tara heaved her spade, worms, lustrous as white mulberries,
fled, upturned. Later, in the Garden Centre – ‘Oh, how beautiful!’
my mother would have gasped on entering – I bought Tara
a peach tree for Valentine’s Day, Prunus persica, from Persia.
II Under the Vine
Under the Vine
Yes, I should be living under the vine,
dapple at my feet and the bare dry dust
singing of drought, of heat. Look at the pile
of rubble round the roots, curled dried leaves,
mound of ant homes I can’t see. Look at
the flower fallen in the dirt, flake yellow,
listen to the wasps, the bees. And the vine
above me, the vine that smells of nothing,
yields nothing but the music of its name,
the memory of some long-forgotten terrace.
Yes, under a flock of swallows that repeat
– because we have to believe it – the end,
the end, nearly the end of a summer
so long it knows neither month nor week.
Yes, I should keep my happiness hidden,
under the vine, from those who envy it.
Starlight
Only the brightest stars were out with a half moon
centred in the sky: a ceiling to learn the names of stars by.
And in the gaps between the stars, milkcarts went to market,
pony traps crossed viaducts, oxen drove sad water-wheels,
history trundled by as birds awoke and the distant sound
of a plane winked lights. Her owl flew back to Minerva
as she flashed her shield while, on Apadana’s stairways,
processions of bearded guards, Persians, Medes, marched past.
Cedar palaces were torched; frigates, night-fishing boats set out.
Passengers flew like vesper bats straight across the moon,
roofscapes listened for child lovers leaning over balconies,
geraniums grew in the dark. I had never been so happy
and historical. Happy enough to see, holding them up,
stars on the tip of each finger, countable, spread far apart,
one by one go out as day rose to pluck the first strains
of a Spanish guitar. Then the silver moon went white.
Angels
Updraughts lift sounds of language imperceptibly, even
the silent language of Lula as she hobbles up the steps.
Dogs Lula doesn’t know bark along the terraces, cockerels,
though it isn’t dawn, crow anyway. It could be any village
anywhere in the world, everything in decay. But things
retain their scent – the rubbed tomato leaf – and sound
– the bamboo river – and as if heard behind closed doors,
the angels: angel of September, of the fallen fig and dapple;
angel of perspective that staggers the terraces upward,
white steps downward; angels of the sister mountains –
the first, the second, the third. And the angels, cowled,
circle us like lepers on the hills, they unveil themselves.
And I love my angels not as they were in childhood,
angel of the crab-apple and chine, of calico and sandal,
but as they are: leprous and discharged, violent and betrayed.
Angel of the soft wind that blows across my breasts.
Orchard
However small, it’s still an orchard –
three limes, a pomegranate and a kumquat.
Each stands in a circle of shade
and bedding plants. Sweetpeas brought
from England have died at the foot
of their canes. Above, the pepper tree
that went wild in a sudden storm,
throwing its branches all over the place,
hangs droops of coral berries against
a calendar sky. Cones, black droppings
in the dust, a fragment of rope
knotted at both ends, a fleeting shadow –
a swallow if you look up. But no,
I keep my gaze on the ground.
If the trees were horses, they’d be foals
and the pepper tree their barn.
What it Was
It was the pool and the blue umbrellas,
blue awning. It was the blue and white
lifesize chess set on the terrace, wall of jasmine.
It was the persimmon and palm side by side
like two wise prophets and the view that dipped
then rose, the swallows that turned the valley.
It was the machinery of the old olive press,
the silences and the voices in them calling.
It was the water talking. It was the woman
reading with her head propped, wearing glasses,
the logpile under the overhanging staircase,
mist and the mountains we took for granted.
It was the blue-humped hose and living wasps
swimming on the surface. It was the chimneys.
It was sleep. It was not having a mother,
neither father nor mother to comfort me.
Marrakesh I
On our last day on the roof terrace, our own ‘heavenly message
of the third floor’ that Matisse had in mind for Les Marocains,
the air’s so still not even the cellophane of my cigarette packet
blows out of the ashtray. Morning sun lies on me like a blanket,
le baromètre a remonté d’un quart de cadran while down in the storeroom,
where two caged budgerigars have never seen the light of day,
il fait clair comme dans une cave. Daisy, the indoor cat, grubs around
the soil of the young olive where a few wild grasses in the tub
are all she will ever know of lawns. Fatiha has watered the palm,
oleander, succulents and a dribble of water crossing a barrier
of sun and shade gleams like oil. The cat moves soundlessly,
the sun with stealth until the shade, the chill, swallows our feet.
There’s no accounting for joy, the way it bubbles in the most arid
of deserts or rains blue gold. The muezzin climbs the minaret
in leather mules not on foot but by donkey as if riding, hill by hill,
into Jerusalem. Proust’s voice obeys the laws of night and honey.
Marrakesh II
I have been looking for the famous gentleness of light
floating on the paper field in the pink city and have seen it
only in passing: as we crept into the old town, the taxi
nudging the cyclists, donkey carts, through mud-walled lanes
as if entering a bible story; in the smoky vaporous haze,
the smoky hooded figures enveloped by it, each man a Yeats
declaring ‘I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing’;
in the blind walled pink of the Tombeaux Saâdiens at sunset,
set off by small red rosebeds, a tall magenta bougainvillea,
the colours proceeding by pulsation, exhaled from within;
seen it in the mosaic of light falling through the reed roof
in the Berber souk or down thin alleys of keyhole arches.
Travelling on a paddleboat to Corazón, battling a channel
of reeds and branches, Paul Bowles wrote that it was like
being in the bloodstream of a giant and so it is, immersed
in a memory of sundown, at any hour, in all his arteries.
Marrakesh III
To see him at his easel, H. Matisse par lui-même, black hat,
tailcoat, beard, glasses, on a camp stool facing a marabout
in pen and ink is to feel a small breeze coming off the pages.
A horseman, acanthus, basket of oranges, a smoker at the window,
another, another, the medina, the portal of the Casbah mosque,
Seated Moroccan, Standing Moroccan, a calla lily and bindweed,
riffle like water through my palms while I sit surrounded,
three floors up, by the same raised, lowered, false perspectives.
But Arcadia is not something to project into deep space
but onto the surface of memory. Ah! que le monde est grand
à la clarté des lampes! Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!
In Jemaa El Fna, the lanterns are lit. They congregate like stars,
tin palaces of fire and flame, a sultanate of miniature cities.
But at cruising altitude, above streaks of indigo and purple clouds,
a blood continent broods on black estuaries, archipelagos, reefs,
for black is the simplifying force of memory. It is a form of elegy.
Marrakesh IV
‘These recumbent figures, all in the same gray nuance,
such a soothing gray, whose faces are represented by
a yellow-ocher oval, you know that they were not always
painted like that. Look! At the top, the man on the left,
he was red! The other, next to him, was blue; the other
was yellow. Their faces had lines, eyes, a mouth.
The one at the top smoked a pipe… The slippers, the pipe,
the lines of the face, the varied color of the burnooses,
why have they all melted away?’ C’est que je vais
vers mon sentiment; vers l’extase… et puis, j’y trouve le calme.
J’ai mon bol de poissons et ma fleur rose. C’est ce qui m’avait frappé!
ces grands diables qui restent des heures, contemplatifs, devant
une fleur et des poissons rouges. Eh bien! Si je les fais rouges,
ce vermillon va rendre ma fleur violette! Alors? je la veux rose,
ma fleur! autrement elle n’est plus! Au lieu que mes poissons,
ils pourraient être jaunes, cela ne me fait rien: ils seront jaunes!
Marrakesh V
The floral motif is the initial cell from which the pattern
spreads to the edges of the cloth, canvas, the material world
which is drained of meaning and hierarchy. In its place
the underlying void, aerated, animated, expands like gas
until cloth, rug, garden, agave, succulents, yukka, cacti
and sky-high bamboo forest revert to dreamlike pentimenti.
Jemaa El Fna, once a bus station, has been recognised as
a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity
but Berber water-sellers, snake-charmers, storytellers, scribes,
shoeblacks, tooth-pullers, mendicants, fortune-tellers, masseurs,
are more than oral, intangible, in a plaza where no building
should rise higher than a palm tree. Near the Koutoubia,
the booksellers’ mosque, Lalla Zohra, the children’s saint,
entombed in a castellated, icing-white cube, makes her escape
and visits us regularly. A woman by day, a dove by night,
she sits against the skyline silently, as if transfixed by chanting.
Marrakesh VI
More megaphone than bird, his whole body pulsing,
the Sahari House Bunting, stringing himself along
the riad’s parapet, repeats himself ad infinitum
with a second’s pause to catch breath. In that pause,
his mate replies but with a different call, a yes, maybe,
or occasionally interrupts without disturbing his rhythm.
On his ledge, he rotates to the north, south, east, west,
calling out to the four corners of Marrakesh while she,
catching the sun in flight, fans this way and that before
flitting back to her perch. Now he’s on the corner outpost
of his sentry walk, faithfully plugging away and finally
stunned into silence as the braying starts – a most marvellous
cacophony of muezzins from Ben Youssef, Sidi Ishak,
Mouassine, Ben Salah, Koutoubia, Berrima, crowning noon
until, with a lone Allahu Akba-a-r, the last muezzin’s adhan,
Le Café Marocain
This is the soul. In aqua and gold.
It rhymes with the body as burquas do,
as birdsong with arches, nine to a wall.
The goldfish are spoonfuls of honey,
spoonfuls that dissolve in the bowl.
Glass is the ground of contemplation,
this and a flower, the three-pronged rose.
The gold of men’s calves, feet, hands
– lower limbs the body in broadcloth
set loose as it burned off in smoke –
was the first idea, as the soul is, before
the image, the afterthought was formed.
This is the last we shall see of the fathers
in grey burnooses, meadowsweet turbans,
faceless in ovals, forgetful in youth:
this ore, this residue in the alchemical bowl.
III The Soul Travels on Horseback
New Year’s Eve
Night is a rush of noise, an Indian hilltown train
steaming up gradients through Himalayan tunnels,
morning the destination, quiet as a mountain top
after the snow has melted, celebrants have left:
a Shimla of the mind, its local aspirations – work,
money, kinship, health; a time to think things over,
let them settle in the recesses of imagination.
They’ll raise their heads of their own accord, lean
out of carriages to wave. For now is the time
of watering the splendid platform displays, of
gathering at The Ridge, the Scandal Point in the mall,
fingering oak and rosewood souvenirs. In Shimla,
mashkis will be carrying goatskin bags of water,
sluicing down the tarmac while I, at the last
hill station of the year, will bring the silence in,
fold it like a three-flower Kullu shawl on my table.
The Pear Tree
And when there’s no poetry in it, the hour, the sky,
only cumulus and the first faint ossicles of rain
pattering on glass like a bone bundle thrown
for a shaman to divine, when no answer comes,
faith gives up, brain slackens, skin sloughs off
like a turtle shedding old scutes from its shell,
when the same dread incubus squats on the heart,
hiding a breathing hole on the top of his head
for all breath, desire, have long fled his mouth,
when friends disappear – and were they friends? –
and your head on its single stem weighed down
heavy as a baby pear tree not with pome or pear
but with time’s three globes, what then,
little pear tree, bletted by frost? A rootstock
has dwarfed you the better to bear but quince,
pear, whose bridal kiss will you perfume now?
Rain Stories
Huddling under an umbrella like two old lovers
arm in arm under the pouring rain, we took up
where we had left off, catching up on the years,
their stories common knowledge now – rain
audible and visible. (Affection returned though
before we share such rain it will be years again.)
But mine at home, and only mine, is secretive,
soundless and so fine, it’s only against darker leaves
it reveals itself. Winter, it tells me, means
‘the time of water’; raindrops, it shows me,