are spheres and only tear-shaped when they fall –
though in Oaxaca the Church of Santa Teresita
had a glorious rain of roses; more instances,
it gives me, from its own backstory as in –
a r. of kisses, 1893, of calm moonbeams, 1821,
melody, 1820, frogs, 1593, of sparks, tears, 1541.
Aunt Moon
Aunt Moon, Old Glamour Moon in a haze of smoke
puffing behind your folding screen, Old Barren Moon
with your round pig belly, what lies, what lies!
I love you for the lies you’ve told! Lies with a belly
of milk, lies to call the children in, gather them
round your mirror fogged, Old Moon, with death.
No lying now, is there? No creeping round the houses,
sly Jokester Moon with your pearly teeth, implants
that went wrong, aren’t they? One look at the truth
and you vanish. O what a clear clear sky, clear as day!
But I saw you, Moon, in the doorway. Spliced in two
as the glass revolved, in purdah with your back turned.
Who were you whispering to, Aunt Moon? No one,
was there? No one ever to lisp to, bribe, stab in the back,
no one to avenge. No, the best lies are told with a bevy
of innocent stars in your eyes, not in a revolution’s doorway.
Statham Grove Surgery
Seen in disbelief through fug in the workmen’s caff
with its canisters of snow, in the panoramic distance
of Clissold Park wearing its hood of grey wool, chef’s hat
in the snow, behind a fallen tree trunk languid as a nude,
a human hare, grey on grey, white gloves, white hind paws,
is shadowboxing while their trainer, red on grey, holds up
focus mitts for a second sparring jackrabbit, black on grey,
like the hare on the moon. Amber eyes glide down the road;
horse chestnuts waltz in whalebone, braceletted with crows;
my cappuccino breathes out smoke. Ruled on park railings,
black is a marriage of scissors and snow. But in Statham Grove,
among red pillar-box hills, gold corridor woods, we turn into
house plants, umbrella plants, gum trees, rubber leaf hands
still charged with snow, deaf to a story a young dragon tree
hears, enthralled. Dr West wears a bright red stethoscope.
Homeward bound, we leave footprints in a black leaf fall.
The Wardrobe
How secluded we are under a sun we should be out in.
Cupboarded in shadow, one foot in twilight, we tilt.
Childhood snuffs its master light, light we need to love
and be loved by, to write, to read. Else all is dusk,
dusk in the heart, in all our finer feelings. Had I
a wardrobe of my mother’s furs, mink, fox, Persian lamb,
how my heart would sink. I’d slide my fingers along the rail,
feel the carcass weight of coats, shoulders zipped in plastic,
how the metal hook of the hanger sticks, see the bridge,
German bridge, where I wore my own grey astrakhan,
a yellow patch of impetigo on my chin. A dirty disease.
From masturbation, unclean hands, some kind of lonely shit.
It has to be foetal or under three days old, a Karakul lamb,
barely able to stand on the kill floor where dozens more
are bleating, or its pelt will lose colour, curl, lustre,
and its meat is simply tossed, too meagre even to eat.
Fog
World is headless, cut off at the waist and we, bundled,
seeing snowflakes only as they pass across a face,
we earth dwellers who know heaven’s a cloud, a bank,
an upperwhere, otherwhere, whose cloud deck homes
lure our spirits with lights in the fog, paraffin stoves,
our Bethlehems, our backyards become Bethlehems,
we whose hearts race the blinder we grow, we moles,
we dirt-tossers, we mouldywarps with no eyes or ears
with a mouth at one end, anus at the other, we pipes,
we cylinders, who have stockpiled our subterranean hell,
our mole runs, underground galleries, larders for a clew
of earthworms, we labour of moles with paws like rakes –
what have we left but these hands now, we boars, we sows
with four limbs, one nose, a body plan and a taupe pelt?
World is headless and we, who have only touch and smell,
must touch and smell gas, smoke bombs, blood meal, bait.
Snow is
Snow is a rubbing of sorts, a wax heelball on ground,
an impress of ribs – exoskeletons in high and low relief.
Each snowflake is witness to the cloud-womb that formed it,
how wet, how warm, the union of crystals, how powdery.
Trapped in firn, air will evidence ash from Krakatoa,
deposits from lead smelters, pollen and greenhouse gases.
Snow is adjectival. On foliage particularly, discriminates
between the feathery and lobed, the linear and pointilliste.
In itself is silent, but on contact, creaks. Acquires an air
of sanctity in repose but in action earns oaths and profanities.
Snow is a friend to children, those who have scarves, mittens,
snowboards and wooden sledges. To others, it is the devil’s own,
akin to the djinn who frequent sinkholes, wherever mud rejoices.
To the children housed in sheep sheds, chicken coops, tents,
dressed in cut-up blankets, seeing things that aren’t there in forests,
snow is the devil they know. Better him than the live bombing.
The Blanket
Cold, yes, under a sodium sky at three o’clock in the morning.
But there’s this shawl to wear and tea with Manuka honey
and across the only gap in the border, a thousand refugees an hour
pouring through Ras al-Jedir. An hour? By morning, my morning,
another five thousand, by lunchtime, another five and how many
have even a striped hemp blanket? Fifteen thousand blankets!
Imagine one. The way it folds stiffly as a tent around the head
bent back, the shoulders jutting, knees drawn up, wrists free,
the lone triangular edifice. Feel the weave. Hairy, ridged.
Smell it. Determine the sightlines either side of the hollowed cheeks.
Imagine the scene in silence, not as it would be. The blanket
as a block, a wood carving. The tools: straight gouge, spoon gouge,
back bent, dog leg, fishtail chisels, V-tools, punches, vices;
hook knives, drawknives, rasps and rifflers, mallets, saws, abrasives;
slip waterstones – how quiet they sound – and strops for sharpening.
Figure in a blanket. In acacia, sycamore or, most likely, olive.
The Swarm
Snow was literally swarming round the streetlamp like gnats.
The closer they came, the larger they grew, snow gnats, snow bees,
and in my snood, smoking in the snow, I watched them.
Everyone else was behind the door, I could hear their noise
which made the snow, the swarm, more silent. More welcome.
I could have watched for hours and seen nothing more than specks
against the light interrupting light and away from it, flying blind
but carrying light, specks becoming atoms. They flew too fast
to become snow itself, flying in a random panic, looming close
but disappearing, like flakes on the tongue, at the point of recognition.
They died as they landed, riding on their own melting as poems do
and in the morning the
re was nothing to be seen of them.
Instead, a streak of lemon, lemon honey, rimmed the sky
but the cloud lid never lifted, the weekend promised a blizzard.
I could have watched for hours and seen nothing more than I do now,
an image, metaphor, but not the blind imperative that drove them.
Model for a Timeless Garden
You are the shadows who have miniaturised the cryosphere
into a garden of paradise, yours the silhouettes facing fire.
Yours the skeletons, crystal wasps in the long black coffin,
spiders with egg sacs and glass intestines, stalagmites, goblins,
vertebrae and antlers, melting candles, yours the serpents
swallowing mice; infinite, interminable, your Lazarus dance.
Have you seen aerial fossils, spiculae, birdwings frozen in flight?
Kittens iced to branches, glazed drops, objects crystallised by light?
Yours the glass apple, glass core, that ballooning missing bite;
the wedding arch of crossed swords, apertures jagged as kites.
Go home and imagine them, you can’t. Even as they’re here,
now, they’re gone. And everything outdoors, buildings by the river,
boats, buses on the bridge, everything that runs in lines will run
into fountain, the beauty of the arc against the formality of line.
Yours this catwalk, ghastly, spectacular, and all the faery forms
of fungus, plankton, Venus’s girdle, that have swum through time.
The Soul Travels on Horseback
and the road is beset with obstacles and thorns.
But let it take its time for I have hours and hours to wait
here, snowbound in Lisbon, glad of this sunlit café
outside Departures, for an evening flight to Heathrow.
Being my soul’s steed, I should like to know its name
and breed – a Marwari of India, Barb of North Africa,
the Akhal-Teke of Western Asia or a Turkoman,
now extinct? Is it the burnt chestnut colour of the ant,
grey as a Bedouin wind, the four winds that made it?
O Drinker of the Wind, I travel by air, sea, land
and wherever I am, there you are behind my back
pounding the cloud streets, trailing banners of cirrus
or as Platero once did, from fear or chill, hoofing a stream,
breaking the moon into a swarm of clear, crystal roses.
No, no matter your thirst, ride swiftly, mare, stallion,
mother, father, for without you I feel forever homesick.
IV Tears
The Overmind
Even when I was a child, tears were something
other children had – a permission I didn’t understand
other people gave, I thought the children gave it
to themselves: a special treat when they’d already
had their share. My overmind, as H.D. called it,
isn’t a jellyfish, a kind of swimming cap on my head.
My overmind seems to be this sadness – I nearly always
carry it and it is a kind of hat, skysize, skyshape.
I feel sorry for my smallness, short trunk, short legs,
sleeves rolled up, feet too large to be in proportion.
When I sit and plant them squarely, side by side like shoes
with no one in them, I feel how flat they are and firm.
If I were a pot, a round ceramic pot with a mustard glaze
on a whatnot in the guest room or on an outside table,
I’d be, like H.D.’s Delphic charioteer whose feet made
‘a firm pedestal for himself’, I’d be always balanced.
Reading the Saturday Guardian
A yellow ladybird is reading the Guardian Weekend,
alternately reading and grooming, rubbing her hands,
slapping the sides of her face. To do so, she tilts back
on her tail, rearing up as if into a magnifying mirror.
For the time being, she’s entirely forgotten about flight –
the ridgy terrain of a brown paper bag, a valley dotted
Of course she isn’t yellow yellow – more goldenrod
with many black spots, a black and white harlequin head.
I present her with a flake. Momentarily, she looks baffled,
rears again and, in the one instant I look away, disappears.
Next thing I know the ladybird and (croissant) flake –
twice her size – have toppled over the rim of the Guardian,
one on top of the other – a perfect landing, ladybird on flake
like man in boat, then, capsizing out of sight, she sails
over the edge of the table, the table travelling to Portslade.
Midsummer Solstice
Sun keeps taking its jacket off and putting it on again.
So, down here, do I. Of every shape and size and species,
wasps, flies, bees, midges, gnats, gather in this seeded
cottage garden like pilgrims to a church. The foxglove bud
hasn’t yet unfurled, tug at it tug tug but there’s no entry here.
So the blithe bee flies away. How busy skies once were
– as they are now – with a glut of nectar, colour, nestled
between rock walls to draw them in – fleets of giddy insects.
They land on my glasses, thigh, buzz around my hair,
whizz by, zoom in and out of vision but nothing annoys me
except my clumsy language, my laggard apprehensions.
Sleep, sleep is the only word I hear. I’d curl up in it
as a bee in a foxglove bell. And I see the blonde schoolboy
at Leeds station, left on a bench with a younger brother
and a punnet of raspberries to look after, calling out Mum!
holding a finger up in the air, capped with a raspberry bell.
Picking Raspberries with Mowgli
It was when he leant close to me, his little naked torso,
brown and thin, reaching an arm into the row of raspberries,
that I snatched a kiss. The raspberries smelled of rosemary
and among them, like a cuckoo’s egg, grew the odd sweetpea.
Do you know why they’re called sweetpeas? Mowgli asked.
No, why? Because look, he said, fingering a sick pale pod,
this is the fruit and this is the flower and inside the pod are peas.
Mowgli looked inside things. Inside the sieve, a spiderling
trailing a thread his finger trailed up, over, under the pile
of fruit he prodded. Don’t pick the ones with the white bits,
Mowgli ordered, they taste horrid. Sun tangled in the canes,
cobwebs blurred the berries. Mowgli progressed to the apples –
small bitter windfalls. I’m going to test them, he said, for smashes.
Mowgli, throwing apples high against the wall – and missing;
Mowgli squinting, testing the poor things now for bruises; Mowgli
balancing on a rake, first thing in the morning, grinning shyly.
Sniff
It was Sniff who chose Kai, not the other way round, at Sharon’s
Fugly Rats, by licking him all over, grooming him, virtually everything
short of saying please choose me. In the car, he sat quietly in his hand.
And now it’s only Kai he comes to, sniffing, only Kai he’s bonded with.
Sharon breeds dumbo rats, sometimes top-eared, rex and smooth
as well as hairless and double rex in a variety of colours and markings –
great pets, well handled, not ‘the cowaring wrecks you can sometimes see’.
Sitting next to Kai on our deckchairs, I am finally introduced to Sniff
– ‘feel his tail, it’s really soft’ – on my birthday. The size of
him!
Sniff is a cinnamon hooded fancy rat, hooded not only by the fur
cinnamon saddle that runs the length of his spine but also, currently,
by Kai’s t-shirt sleeve, whom I have presented – for his owner’s birthday –
with a three-tiered rat cage complete with double hammock, straw nest,
swinging tunnel, mineral tube, cat litter tray and dog potty training pad.
I hope he knows who he is. To find out more, visit Fancy Rats Forum