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Drawing Bea
Her voice had that dreamy quality that made me think
she had been watching telly, so early on Sunday morning.
When it brightened as I said ‘It’s Granny Mimi’, I did,
for a moment, feel like Granny Mimi as if she had brought me
slippers, a cup of coffee. ‘What were you doing?’ ‘What?’
‘Were you watching telly?’ imagining her under a blanket,
curled on the sofa, slightly sulky. ‘Mum’s drawing me.’
‘Drawing you?’ ‘Yes, Mum’s doing a drawing of me.’
I saw the darkened room and, in a spotlight somewhere,
Bea keeping unbelievably still. I heard the stump of charcoal
hatching, shading, stroking her hair, her mother breathing;
felt her whole outline being transposed, lifted like a transparency.
But the reality was they were facing each other, like card players,
across the kitchen table. While Tara drew Bea, Bea drew Tara:
heads down, heads only, a shoulder, an arm maybe, no hands,
quick sketches on copy paper – Tara’s to bin, Bea’s to sort out later.
Nocturne
Parked cars are sleeping like animals in their baskets.
Sally, Bea’s corn snake, coils by her rock and the mollies
who know neither night nor day keep swimming round
and round behind glass. Lucky the brain awash with sleep
flushing its toxins out. However, according to my mother,
so groggy in the mornings, she never slept a wink all night.
What did she do during those long useless hours? Worry,
endlessly worry, take more pills, eat something sweet, biskwits
as she called them, never more than one or two at a time?
The dead have taken our questions with them, leaving,
in their stead, fresh shocks: discoveries in drawers, files,
that become the significant things we remember them by:
not the memories that swim round and round behind glass
– how they were, how we knew them when they were alive –
but realisations after the fact, small sleepless leapings
and floodings, spasms, nocturnal poundings in the heart.
The Waves
Every day the world is beloved by me, the seagull eager
for its perch. I woke this morning to a darkened room,
my soul stabled at the gate. We grow older, quieter,
hearing degrees of movement, distance, and the dead
would listen if they could to the voices of the living
as bedrock listens to the ocean. I listen to the waves,
trying to make them go one, two, one, two, to hear
what Virginia Woolf heard. But she heard it in memory,
darling memory that delineates. One, two, one, two,
and all the variable intervals in between surrendering
to ‘the very integer’ Alice Oswald rhymed with water,
creating a thumb-hole through which to see the world.
Light fluctuates and my soul fluctuates like a jellyfish
underwater. My hand throws animal shadows on paper
and there, outlined, is a single goat, black and white,
standing on top of the mountain, like a tiny church.
Similes
The yacht lies like an elegant equation in the mind.
Last night it lay on black velvet like a glasswing butterfly,
wings folded, two tall masts. The straightness of the horizon
never ceases to be astonishing, putting one in a daze –
only a slight swell in the water to prove that we are not
in a painted vestibule, that this is not an annunciation.
And here’s the yellow ferry which reminds me of
Elizabeth Bishop’s desk; my table, metallic, sunflecked,
of Hockney’s swimming pools. Everything is always
like something else. Each makes love to the other.
You are like me, they say. Blue paint has spattered
the whitewash, speckled the flagstones – the eye jumps
from blue to blue, island to island, raisin to raisin in a cake.
was salt and pepper, white at the time of death. To have
one terrible disease gives you no immunity against another.
Cherries and Grapes
He stood up in my dream, very tall, and said: Mum,
I’ve got — Syndrome. The missing word’s a dream word,
a bottom-of-the-sea, a carried-on-the-wind word.
Being so tall, my son has eyes like fruit in a tree, glassy,
Rainier cherries very high up. One cannot reach them.
The worse the news, the further they recede on the branch.
Talking of Richard who had an epileptic fit this morning,
Giorgos, who has seen it all, with that warm faraway look
in his eyes, stands shaking his head, ‘So young…’
while his father, still spry, turns aside, shaking out nets –
but what’s the fishing like these days? No one says.
This is how the world is today. And this is how I am in it,
rising from a siesta. My granny would have brought me
grape juice, white asgari she had crushed and sieved herself
and I would have drunk it slowly, ruckling, then smoothing,
the green chenille at her table. This is how the world was then.
Kusa-Hibari
It was June and every barnacled brick of the sea wall
was drying out as we were. Had it been October,
had I been Hearn, I too would have kept a grass lark,
a Kusa-Hibari. Why? Not only because he sings,
not only because he is also called Autumn Wind,
Morning Bell, Little Bell of the Bamboo Grove,
or because he’s worth more than his weight in gold,
being half the size of a barley grain, or even because
his antennae, longer than his body, are so very fine
they can only be seen when held against the light
as they will be held since to find him, you must turn
his cage round and round to discover his whereabouts,
but because, as his guardian tells me, his tiny song,
song of love and longing, ‘is unconsciously retrospective:
he cries to the dust of the past – he calls to the silence
and the gods for the return of time’ is why I’d want him.
Tears
In the first weeks after my mother’s death,
I curled up like a foetus on the side of my heart.
My tears were like fresh water, warm and clear.
They flowed of their own accord, soundlessly,
while my body, my mouth and even my eyelids
lay as peacefully as in sleep and the more tears flowed,
the more I wanted them. World was foetal then.
But in the months that followed, tears dried up
and world took up its stick and walked blindly
through the riverbeds. Had they been floodplains,
had there been no dams to render them obsolete,
nilometers would have measured the overflow
from faraway monsoons on stairs, pillars, wells.
Too high and there’d be famine, too low, the same.
I measured distances by her. My mother my compass,
my almanac and sundial, drawing me arcs in space.
V Her Anniversary
The Goat
The goat, the earliest known ruminant in the world
and hence, one might say, our first poet-philosopher,
is not ruminating now but, nose against purple plastic,
is dr
ibbling a ball among pigeons. When he rears
against the wire fencing, towering above us, he displays,
dangling on his neck, his two wattles or toggles or tassles –
a dimorphic trait maybe, caruncles with no known function.
We cannot touch the goat or feed him. But children do,
they want to feel the fearful thrill of his tongue, his lips,
they want to console, thank him for being among us.
Does he miss his mountains? The properties of spheres
in motion are no compensation for limestone gorges,
healing dittany and sage. The pigeons peck peck peck.
The old buck ruminates. And a toddler stoops to grass,
tugs at a handful she thrusts into the air above her head
and lets fall on her father’s shoes, like Newton’s apple.
On the Occasion of his 150th Anniversary
Let’s fling down a cloak of gold leaf on wove paper,
let’s do the pavement like Klimt. Like his father
before him, Ernst Klimt the Elder, gold engraver,
and his brother who took up engraving later –
whose deaths in one year were the fount of his vision –
let’s do acacia in a shower of coins, engrave each face
with The Kiss. Semen is flowing like golden rain,
double yellow lines meander in gold metallic ink
and the streetlamps are on – O spark of the Gods! –
it’s snowing gold flake, sweeping mosaics along the kerb,
spandrels of gold between car wheels. Werewolves,
gorgons, are sauntering out of their lairs, trick-or-treaters
with quince-red cheeks and my beautiful girl in a tent
of yellow roses twines her corn snake round her wrist.
As a night fox trots through a gold-barred gate, trapping
gold-dust in his fleece – quick, hammer him into the frieze.
In Search of the Animals
It’s not that I went in search of the animals
though occasionally one crossed my path
or stole out of Wikipedia as if it were a wood
in an English shire but looking, for example,
at a daylight moon steadfast behind drifts
of cloud I’d follow my own drift of thought
and who’s to say I wouldn’t trip up –
moon not moon at all but a platinum sun,
a frieze of haunches, heads, ears and mouths
evening out, dissolving back to cloud?
And look how morning becomes evening
accidentally, heuristically, in the miracle
of language leading us up the garden path
a white rabbit crosses, a badger, our local fox
who is the last commuter padding home
apart from me, lagging behind on a crutch.
Martina’s Radiance
Martina – you are in the mist now, season of mists
and mellow fruitfulness and indeed the apple tree
below my window holds reddening apples up to me
and Jude’s apple tree has dropped enough fruit
for another round of apfelstrudel. Today the weather
suits you, dear Martina – sun’s glow behind the mist,
raindrops I first mistook for petals on the pavement.
And isn’t this what radiance is: the elation, the promise
before sun breaks through, the laugh behind your smile,
answers to questions you withheld – not unkindly or coyly
but because radiance and the soft veiling it demands
was your natural element? The new banisters I had built
will never feel your tread. But I feel it the way I feel
the air – more scent than air. Where would you have gone
with your stick, your crutch, had you been well today?
Where does mist go? Mist clears, Martina, clears.
Mehregan
She lifts the hood of the pram, attaches
a Chinesey floral scarf to the rim to cover
the opening behind which a baby sleeps
as the poem sleeps behind the page.
Wind lifts one corner. There’s no heat
to speak of and the wind is only the earth
stirring as the year turns. But she covers him
as children do a table, making a house for him,
a darkened cave. What will he see but sprays,
borders thinned against the light, a chink
let in on his left? He has no left or right,
no borders, no China. Only this half-light,
the colour of his eyes, a colour bound to change.
Tomorrow is the autumn equinox, Mehregan,
a festival in honour of the Goddess Mehr
for whom my poem has been wheeled away.
Sun in the Window
Sun has propped her bike against the skyline.
She’ll write in gold today. Wear pinks and reds,
wrap up warm and enter always smiling, always
ready to be overlooked, leaning her chin on her hands,
frowning when addressed. And as for desire,
she’ll reserve it for praise, be it modest as an oculus,
a round open fenestration in a wall, set high
and facing west. Terraced, she’ll rest her fingertips
on wooden muntins, angle her glance through windows
splayed in Polebrook or Threekingham. And how
she loves lancets, three trefoil-headed lancets, stepped!
A quiet soul she is, an altar rail around her thoughts,
the silk cordon hooked back on its brass stave.
And shy. But look at what she writes! Outshines
the others, the noisy, vociferous others, any day.
I’d give anything for a glyph from the star nib of her pen.
Bringing Down the Stars
As a mouse sniffs for cheese, so I, reading novels,
am sniffing out scintillas. Sometimes they are few
but enough to keep me going; at other times, rare
and completely enchanting, whole pages, paragraphs,
bring starlight down to earth. Over these I dither,
snuffle back and forth, inhale, raise my nose to weather,
glue it down to sniff the spark, to take the hit again.
I am on the trail of genius whose albedo is nothing short
of fallen snow’s, desert sand’s, who brings me the sky
‘dove-gray with stars’, ‘the diamond lights of Yalta’.
So what difference does it make, under such reflectivity
diffused through time and space, if I’m here at Seven Dials
where the sundial pillar boasts only six blue clock dials
since it counts itself as the seventh or here on Upper Street
where blue battery lights twine round London planes,
each trunk a princely stag, each branch a starry antler?
The Cloud Sarcophagus
When I looked up, I was astonished at the muscularity
of clouds that were rearing up from a marble frieze
in high relief on a sarcophagus of blue. But whose?
Alexander’s routing the Persians? Or Abdalonymus
the gardener king’s, crowned by his very conqueror?
Now they revolved from war to peace and back again –
either way their spears were drawn, warriors, huntsmen,
lions snarling as they went, bundling up their hind legs
as if melting were a kind of leaping in slow motion.
And the cubs that littered their wake, play-fighting,
pouncing, rolling on their backs, were melting too,
panting, paws outstretched. What is to melt?
Into love, into war? Limb by limb to deliquesce,
to reaccumulate into a giant maw that swallows
a sun, a planet, like a ball in a baseball mitt,
a perfect fit, while the jaw, the hand, fragment?
The Doe
For however long it was – it seemed an age – that I stood
leaning over the wall, looking down on the sward below,
edging closer, I couldn’t discern the slightest movement.
Only the wind that moved an ear like a stalk of wheat,