a jowl that quivered. Her eyes seemed not to see. The grass,
though abundant and inches from her lips, held no temptation.
Measuring her in perspective, as a painter with a pencil,
I judged her the length of my palm, on the thin side and brown,
a perfectly ordinary rabbit but for her stillness, her patience.
Finally, her trance broken, she jerked her head up, came to life,
listened, heard and bounded off with her white scut into cover.
I couldn’t help but think of my mother – that same stillness,
that same absence of intention, volition, as she lay dying;
that surrendering of a life force that turns you to stone
though the fur is fur, the hair still hair, the posture neither
sleeping nor prone but poised on the cusp of sculpture.
Abney Park Cemetery
The air in the cemetery’s greener, thicker with scent.
Paths wind and twist and, whenever I come this way,
I wonder if I’ve lost my bearings, following tiger stripes
of sun between the graves. But here’s the station café.
A patient I know from the psychiatric ward waves,
smiling his dimpled, toothless smile, rubbing his forehead.
His voice, high-pitched, accented, carries even though
he’s talking to a woman at his table. I’m fond of him –
he inspires affection. The skin around his eyes, wrinkled,
rayed, has the softness of my father’s. He asks after Tom,
shows me the heel of his palm badly burned from the cooker.
‘It’s my mind that does this – God save me from accidents!’
He knows some Iranians, Azeris, just round the corner
at the snooker club. Whenever he goes in for a drink,
a Coca-Cola – and here he gestures, shrugging, meaning
it’s on the house – ‘it’s’, as Hassan says, ‘hospitable.’
Migration
When I see a hand first raised, then placed
on the heart, the head tilted towards the heart,
a greeting exchanged between a pedestrian
and a passing bus driver; when I see a woman
seated at a bus stop wave to a woman passenger
sitting behind me and, picturing them still,
look straight into trees, tears spring to my eyes
even though we’re stopped at Elephant & Castle.
All one way blows the wind in the trees but
which is the way to a staging post between
the Khalvatis now, scattered in the diaspora,
and our very first forebears who struck camp,
loaded their beasts, set their caravans against
a skyline, wind whipping the horses’ manes,
the fringes of their saddlecloths and shawls,
and moved as a whole tribe together?
Her Anniversary
It might be grey, it might be cold, who knows
what the weather’s like out there? Birds know,
so silent in the branches, animals in their lairs.
But I, my blinds drawn down, am blind to all
but my heart’s November, the second anniversary
of my mother’s death. Perhaps I can keep her in,
in the warmth of my rooms, fug of my flat rehung
with her paintings, her tapestried cushions strewn
on chairs and sofas, making them gardens, rosebeds.
I can sit there among them as she did, as we did,
oftentimes together. But where’s the sense in that?
Their velvet backs, rusts and fawns she kept face up
to stop the flowers fading, are already grimed from
propping my back, my head. I can become her instead.
Willingly become her in every meaning of the word.
Daughters who betray mothers are in turn betrayed.
VI The Avenue
Even this garden, a veritable Eden with a keyhole pool,
a white cockatoo glimpsed behind the bars of a cage,
a trailing orange lotus swaying shadows against a wall
and sun beginning to cast its warmth on rattan chairs,
is an orchard of sorts but with nothing wild about it
or left to chance, the body without the soul of an orchard.
An orchard’s soul should be ragged, ramshackle, dapple
throwing honeycombs of shade on soil, weather interstitial.
But every view’s an artwork. Trees laden with oranges
like Christmas trees with glass baubles, paired parakeets
as yellow and green as the orange trees, banana palms
sculptural, fronds sheared and scored, cardones, Magritte-like
– not cacti but as penile – black avocados in the background,
arbours within arbours, round every path another, offer
a series of small warm breaths: seclusion without solitude,
arrival without homecoming, a silence that rings in the ears.
Granadilla de Abona II
We are illicit. We creep around shaded paths, spit pips
into flowering shrubs at the root, leave wet handprints
on poolside tiles where we crouch to rinse our fingers,
talk in the most inaudible of murmurs. A scruffy old hen
crows triumphantly as she lays, a great tit flits into view
and, on being glimpsed, scares; we are here and welcome
only if we whisper without voice, move without noise,
leave pipettes of blossom to float by on stagnant currents.
Even our thoughts intrude, being the wiliest of burglars.
Sleep too is a violation or so the parrots would have you think,
screeching warnings enough to wake the dead. Don’t breathe,
don’t listen, walk if you can on air. Every path is a dead end.
Under the arch, the wrought-iron gates are not only padlocked
but so entangled with lotus – an explosion of orange fireworks –
they seem locked in perpetuity while, passing in a street, blaring
through loudspeakers, gospel singers belt out ‘Oh Happy Day…’
Granadilla de Abona III
Well, no wonder. This is the site of the Garden of the Hesperides.
These the Islands of the Blessed, the Fortunate Isles where,
Sertorius waxed, ‘the air was never extreme, which for rain
had a little silver dew, which of itself and without labour,
bore all pleasant fruit to their happy dwellers.’ Pleasant fruit
was had in plenty – reach up and twist the golden apple
which will drop into your hand, the banana from its own hand,
the madroño from its cluster. Oranges will rain down like
starlight through a telescope, a green and golden galaxy.
Near enough to spy cobwebs between their nodes, leaves,
drained of their sap, crack and burn at the tip – the more
brittle they grow, the weightier grow the oranges. By their song,
imagine the size of canaries, goldcrests, lovebirds, lorikeets,
their invisible throats and beaks smaller than pumpkin seeds.
The length of life remaining to be lived can feel infinitesimal
and interminable too. Not every poet longs for immortality.
Granadilla de Abona IV
Periquito and I have the garden to ourselves.
Periquito has the shade and I the rising sun,
fierce as Periquito’s fierce. ‘Dominion’ as in
‘Multiply and have dominion over all the creatures
of the earth’ has, in Hebrew, another meaning:
‘understanding’. But Periquito talks Canarian,
a parrot dialect thereof which, all ears though I am,
signifies nothing but sound and f
ury. Periquito
has the aviary birds to chorus him. They twitter
like background water, he on one end and I
on the other of a diagonal across the morning.
Released from his cage he teeters along a parapet,
a white quiff, a waddle and limp. Nothing to say
for himself now that he’s free. Later they’ll call,
‘Periquito, hola hola’ and ‘Hola’ he’ll answer
as clearly as a boy, albino, hiding in the bushes.
Granadilla de Abona V
He whistles once, crosses from one citrus tree
to another along a hammock bridge, raises his quiff,
tests a twig with his beak, one foot held quivering.
In a sleek white tailcoat, his dress shirt ruffled,
he skids up a rope, waving a hand, claws curled,
attentive as a child in a playpen to the movements
of all and sundry. Diario de Avisos, freshly laid,
collects his droppings. Lord of the green canopy,
he swings below the hammock ties, perches in a cleft
to peer towards the sound of a generator whirring,
taps his left hand on the branch excitedly and twice
raises two white wings, once to declare himself an angel
and once for balance as he grows ever more excited,
hanging by his beak alone, doing chin-ups, sipping water,
shaking diamonds in a spray around him, at the approach
of Señora coming and going about her daily bustlings.
Granadilla de Abona VI
Here they come, the insects, feasting off the money plant
under the drago tree whose bloodsap and attendant cures
gave the Guanches health and longevity. My mother was
ninety-two when she died, last and oldest of three siblings.
Her family history died with her, none of it lives in my
or my children’s memory. We are yesterday’s people,
provisional, adaptable, borrowing and assimilating.
The Guanches were said to have been exiled by Trajan
whose captains cut off their tongues, put them in ships
laden with animals and seed and forcibly settled them
in the Canaries. Silbo Gomero, their whistling language,
has survived to this day along with municipal place names,
gofio, their staple bread, and mummies – light as scrolls
with skin thinner and softer than our best kid gloves –
that lined their burial caves. But the Guanche themselves,
decimated, enslaved, were erased from memory and texts.
Granadilla de Abona VII
On three dry pumpkins, some little white pebbles,
timples, a very small drago tambourine, a blonde flute
with a hollow reed and four pipes with green stems
and knobbly joints of barley, how sweetly they played
endechas: ‘What does it matter if they take and bring
milk, water and bread, if Agarfa will not look at me?’
And while they played and sang songs of love and death,
the old Gomera people, bearers of wisdom and knowledge,
who kept their mysteries to themselves and never divulged
the sacred site of their necropolis, the mysterious words
pronounced when sowing seed or how their ancestors,
the indigenous people of these islands, came to be here,
saying only that a higher being had brought them, left them,
then wiped them from memory, while the old native songs
played on, the elders wept and rocked, leaning on their sticks
with the same, same veined hands as the mummy of Madrid’s.
Plaza de los Remedios
It’s the childlike geometry of the square –
the octagonal bandstand in the centre, the ring
of café tables and chairs around it, the outer ring
of bifurcating trunks, their packed suitcases of leaves,
benches, balconies, windows that ask to be counted –
that calls to mind set squares, rulers, compasses
and a head bent over a see-through protractor,
an angle of time arrested in the impalpable air.
The scene is as mild as a nativity and beyond this
simple geometry, immense, immeasurable mountains,
a stormy Atlantic you can hear at night, snoring
like a sleeping leviathan. I would like a small life.
I would like a son who takes both my hands in his
and, walking backwards, inches me towards the end
of a cobbled street where a door opens and a daughter,
taking my hands from his, helps me over the doorstep.
The Wheelhouse
Sun sinks behind the massif before it blazes, fires off
shadow through the balustrade. The square is a great ship
floating, rising and sinking on sun and shadow, a ship
in harbour. We stroll the decks, let wind rest in our sails.
But I know nothing of ships, wanting my feet on earth.
My mother’s ashes under the cherry trees, her house
occupied by someone else. I never go there, just as she
will never sit in a café, holding her handbag close on her lap,
her scarf, her hair in place. Memory would fill her smile
as she swayed her head from side to side and breathed
sweet exhalations of regret. Peremptorily, she’d ask
for an ashtray, offer me cake. I loved forever being a child
at my mother’s side, the captain of my ship whose railings
I peered over. All her absences are final now. Like wind
they’ve run in together. Now they form a wake; a house
I am more than welcome in, a wheel I must learn to steer.
Finca El Tejado
The juniper glistens with rain. Plumes, shadowed on the urn,
waver indistinctly. The fountain gushes, gushes, wind moans
and tugs at the palm fronds – join me, join me. Raindrops
hang two by two from railings. Everything has the shine
of black on it. Marina turns the music on and the room fills
with candlelight and yearning. Lamps throw umbrellas of light
against the walls, the red check tablecloth, a bottle of wine,
its candleglints, wait for company and we must stay with them,
listening to the fountain, gutters and the plucking of guitars
before the song begins. I have slung a quilt with violet roses
over the curtain rail to keep out the light in the morning.
Now I long for it, to see the sky, the golden stars of hamlets
high in the hills. I long to see the rain in massive drifts
open its fan, lay fan upon fan above the road to Buenavista
so that even the petrol station’s blinded. Rose/leaf/rose/leaf
and through the open door a closed door, a shining lock and key.
The Avenue
I always knew my mother’s funeral would be unseemly.
I never had the wherewithal. To have the wherewithal
is to inhabit a frame of mind that will stand one in stead.
In my dream a long avenue, pale with spindly poplars,
descended from the mountain – a peak like El Teide –
and along it walked on hind legs, but as naturally as men,
polar bears and among them my mother walked towards me.
Then I knew that all the separations I had suffered, all
the anguish they had caused me were but one separation,
one ball of anguish. And when I woke, I still could see
the avenue stretching to the mountains in mountain light,
the polar bears in file, solemn and steadily walking,
at intervals the silvery poplars on either s
ide of the road
and in the middle my mother drawing slowly ever nearer
as if the avenue were a travelator moving in both directions,
carrying me forward towards her, carrying her forward towards me.
Ghazal: In Silence
Let them be, the battles you fought in silence.
Bury your shame, the worst you thought in silence.