Eat all my crumbs.
I hear you down there in the dark
When your cousins in my head
Are waking up,
Whiskers stirring synapses,
Sharp tail points flicking
At the base of my skull.
Cozy up behind my fridge
But watch out for the trap,
The why-me box.
Once you’ve started in
It snaps you shut.
These Two Candles, Saint Pantelehm
1
Afterwards we could remember passing the taverna
With the hunters drinking in the shade,
Their dogs chained, and the smell of grilling meat,
And turning an eye to the dry hills
We wondered what they killed.
And killing seemed something separate from death,
And death seemed something geographical,
On the map, an exit point for every individual.
Sometimes you come so close to yours
You feel your body passing.
2
I saw the oil snaking down the road
And was about to warn when
Very close and very far away
I saw the tire going sideways
In a terrible distortion of motion and of time
And then a body, which was mine,
Sliding and sliding down the tarmac,
And a head flicking back, but softly,
As if a hand, arriving finally, had made a sign.
Then the motor cutting, everything still.
3
Across the empty road an olive tree
Received us in the shadow of its grace.
And all the possibilities of death
And life, and luck descended
Like a flock of swallows,
None of them coming to rest.
4
Waiting in the hour of siesta,
The hunters and their dogs gone dreaming,
The heat rising from the road,
And a kind of death, like sleep,
Passing over the unknowing town,
A beetle fell from nowhere to the pavement
With a small thud,
Lay stunned on its back for a moment,
Then began to move its legs.
5
So we came to you like that, at dusk,
To the dark space of your altar,
Touched by miracles,
Let two coins echo in the box,
And set those two small lights beside each other
To consume themselves in peace.
6
And that same night a wind came up,
You must have heard it,
Howling from a clear sky
For days and days, night after night,
Everything dancing, crazy,
Sea, stars, mountains with their dust,
The trees, the jasmine on the terrace,
Summer chairs, the dead September leaves, all flying,
And us climbing, painfully, the road above the bay.
Antidotes to Fear of Death
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometimes it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
Extracts from the Notebook
Editorial note
Becky kept her notes in Chartwell A4 hardback volumes of 160 pages. There are four of them represented here, beginning with the first, undated, entry in Spring 1991, when she returned to England, and ending with the final entry on Monday 3 May 1999, thirteen days before she died.
She wrote in pencil, legibly and freely, drafting and redrafting poems, stories and essays. She would tackle a difficult idea again and again to clarify its expression. Among these entries, she developed the habit of making verse-notes, a discipline of observing and exploring, written at speed directly into the book. Occasionally she would draw on one of these entries to inform a poem, but most remain as they were first written – fresh, unguarded, illuminated by their own discovery. These are the majority of the pieces here.
The selection has not been an easy task. We wanted to show something of the range of her notebooks while hinting, without unnecessary duplication, at her working methods. Inevitably, there is some repetition of phrasing between the notebook and a number of the finished poems. We have included some examples of this (the barest minimum necessary) to illustrate the patterns of association and thought in the shaping process.
Apart from the very rare spelling error, no corrections have been made – except that where she used US spellings, they have been altered. Dates have also been put in, to mark the beginnings of new years. Nothing else has been tidied up, but much has been omitted.
AB, AdC 2001
Spring 1991
Metamorphoses
And so, spreading our wings, we become night
...
And so, flexing our toes, we become trees
And so, filling our lungs, we become wind/light
And so, stretching our limbs, we become light/wind
And so, rattling our bones, we become reeds/fire
And so, settling our bones, we become sleep
And waking we become all that we have loved
That spasm of remembering
We become the grasses of the field
And fear explodes in us like small pods
Scattering its seeds
Released me from my bones
From the grip of toes on the cold earth
From what the fingers must endure
And having gone one thousand times to the water’s edge
And found the same shells, and all of them empty
stack my bones on an empty bench/bed
And endure, with sleep, the small emptinesses of the afternoon
...
The mind that holds itself beyond the universe that it beholds
The House of Science
Hey you! Dishevelled in the back pew
Slept all night with your temple to the earth
Ears filled with the roar of life
What are you doing here?
Missing Mass Degrees of Freedom
The room at the back of the house
The plastic dancer turning in pink
In the birthday jewellery box
You did not want
How soon we become strangers
For the first time you know yourself to be a stranger
The watermelon on the screened back porch
...
19 June
They are terrifying, these mushrooms, the way they push up overnight,
And spread, and you know they are feeding off decay,
That death is just below the surface, just, and they grow so fast
Like a cancer, I would go out into the night, as in a nightmare,
And rip them up, and scatter them, with my bare hands,
But the death would still be there.
...
19 August [Sutton]
Digging Potatoes with my Father
Autumn again
The absolute safety, the und
erstanding
Khaki pants & muddy workboots
Leaning into the pitchfork, and the pitted steel tines driving into
the soil that we turned, the spring before, my sister & I, and
dug in with sheep manure from the garden supply centre at
Abercorn, when she was back east, & I was up north
I crouch in the earth and scoop the potatoes out as he turns the soil with his fork
Thoughts of mortality
Memories of all the autumns, the flaming trees, the apples, the woodsmoke.
...
5 October
When sleep won’t come
And your whole life howls
And words dive around your head like bats
Feeding off the darkness
...
8 December
The Foundations of my Father’s House
Were deep in prairie grasses, which stretched
As far as you could see
Only the church still standing
Still painted white, a sharp steeple against the blue,
And a minister in robes, black as a beetle
On a summer day
Saying where it went? / How 50 years can extinguish a town I couldn’t hear them
As I walked the low stones
Waist deep in clover & wild barley
And sweet humming bees
Guessing at a woman I was told was my grandmother,
Who I never knew
Hanging out the white sheets in the prairie wind
The small bed of iris, gone wild
And wondering if it ever hummed with people, this place,
Or how the snow settled on it on a winter night
And whether lights burned in the windows
The bit of board walk where my father turned his tricycle wheel into the crack to stop
...
And I walk the low stones
Shoulder deep in clover & wild barley & sweet humming bees
And from where he stands watching it is only my path
through the prairie that marks his walls.
...
1992
15 March 1992
Simulations of the Universe I
Begin with particles which could be dust
Or stars, it makes no difference
And put them in a box from which they can’t escape
Except into another box which is identical
Or else another, and then
Abandon them to their trajectories
The language of encounters
The elliptic passages, hyperbolae
The magnetism of each mutual centre
When sufficient time has elapsed then
Mapping them onto the dark plane
Of probability, or space
You’ll see them, so much like you saw once
Waking in mid flight, the lights below
The cities strung out across a continent in knots and filaments
So beautiful your breath rushed out
As only in the face of truth
...
28 May
This, and other paradigms
As if it were nothing but memories
Flying out from the spinning axis of existence
Mass as memories as if mass were memories memories were matter
And the further out you go, the further back, the faster they fly
We are each our own centre
Until we reach the threshold, With our own threshold
Surface of last scattering Missing mass and memories/most of them gone/
except one summer evening
Where I sat with my sister on my great aunt’s screened back porch
Eating watermelon
The vestigial/and undifferentiated/heat
From a wicker chair from which my feet cannot touch have not yet reached the ground
Since there is no centre we are each our own
Where I sit with my sister
On the steps of my great aunt’s screened back porch
Eating watermelon spitting the dark seeds out into
In the vestigial undifferentiated heat from
13 July [Beauchamps]
The seeds we spit as dark as evening
Fireflies
Explaining Dark Matter
As if all there were, were fireflies
And from them you could infer the meadow
*As if, from fireflies, you could infer the field.
Infer the day from vestigial heat
...
26 July
Surface of last scattering
Beyond which you can’t see
Earliest memories → eating watermelon on my great aunt’s/Aunt
Eleanor’s screened back porch
Flying out from the spinning axes of existence
The further back you go, the faster they are flying away
Mass as memories memories as matter
We are each our own centre, our own threshold
In the vestigial and undifferentiated heat
As if from fireflies, you could infer the field
...
30 August
Explaining Relativity
From Einstein: ‘A Clear Explanation that anyone can understand’
to give: exact insight
to require: patience and force of will
no attention to elegance
‘In this way the concept of empty space loses its meaning’
...
Figurehead
Look how she holds her shoulders
Rigid against adventure
Her breasts erect with the slap of spray
Intent on nothing
But the slow curve of the horizon
Though always in her ears
There are the murmurings
And sleeping now & then, she dreams
Of an elastic moment when, turning, she looks back
And understands, at last, the creak & snap
And the great white voices.
...
6 September
Story – With D., the time the woodpecker flew into the window & killed itself, & I try to tell him why I’m so sad.
In the garden, hot, May, the birds are singing like crazy in the forest all around, I am barefoot, in my pyjamas still, maybe a cup of tea, hot. I am trying to tell him something when the bird flies into the window, crack, and falls stunned onto the patio, its red throat thrown back in a kind of ecstasy, in a kind of posture that says ‘take me’, to the sky, to the sun, and a small drop of blood grows round at the corner of its beak.
For months now, it has been like this, it seems, they don’t ask, and because they don’t ask, I don’t talk, I ache, I am far away & silent. Sothat when the tears come, which I can no longer keep back, he puts an arm around me and says, ‘Don’t be sad, it’s only a bird,’ though he himself is sad, and I say, of course it isn’t the bird, and I manage to say a bit more, enough, so that later, when I pick up the bird and carry it to the edge of the woods so impenetrable there is no simple walking in, there is a kind of peace in dropping its small body into a thicket, making sure it reaches the earth, and covering it with the dead leaves that have lain all winter underneath the snow.
...
4 October
I. Evening, and the air fills with darkness,
And the darkness with wind
And the wind with moths
And the moths with motion
You are among them
And they touch you, telling you
There is no solitude we have not all passed through, or will in time
And you wonder how you came to be here
And you remember, as a child,
How, in ignorance, you left your thumbprint
In the dust of one moth’s wing
And how they told you, later,
It would die.
We come as children.
...
II. Turning nightward in thes
e domes
Our shutters opening like secrets
We set our silvered cups to catch
The fine mist of light
That settles from our chosen stars
On the edge of the unanswerable
Even here, our questions
And all of it eclipsed by the cold and catholic colours of dawn
Though we know better, seems so much more
That it has come to us
Than that we have travelled
In one still night
...
1993
24 January 1993
After the sheets and the towels are folded, and put back in the cupboard, and quiet has come again, like the dust in sunbeams, and my father has returned to his ancestors, and the sloped script of their voices, and my mother dusts away the last dry needles, and still the snow does not come. ‘It rained,’ the letter says, ‘and the brook swelled over its banks of ice, and the next morning our little bridge was part of a dam of dead wood & rubble, 300 yards downstream.’
We are standing still, mittened, in the forest. It is snowing gently. We have carried this small construction of planks and two-by-fours down to the brook, a small brook we would certainly have played in as children. My father is hammering in nails, with great precision. Always more nails than I would have, solid, precise. Then we lift it on end, and let it fall like a drawbridge, walk, ceremoniously, across its nine foot span. Then we pad home through the snow and the descending dark, and leave my father by the brook, adjusting the branches of the trees. I am the good daughter. I am only half there.
Sarah is in the downstairs bedroom …
We make angels in the meadow, in the snow.