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    A Responsibility to Awe

    Page 7
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      The dense body of a passing god.

      ...

      4 September Modena

      And now, September with its rare light

      A night train, rain coming down warm

      On the fields outside

      How completely different each from all the others

      We are, how one thinks of a soft space beyond

      The mechanics of our current cosmos

      Where things merge & mix & lose time as an

      Arrow, or more a sphere, things we can almost

      Remember, a space accommodating

      Only the appearance of zero, minus one and one, always

      Because nothing has no sense

      And the other with the power of science

      The childhood of knowledge, to control all

      To condemn poetry, the spirit

      Because curiosity, after all, is also of the spirit,

      And so is the desire to control and reduce

      And rebuild according to uniform law.

      Is this what I do too, with all my days

      Recording the arrangements of stars

      And their possible destinies

      But the other senses – the sound, the smells

      Where are they in this world we immerse ourselves

      That we should think, not feel –

      Our poems should be dismantled

      Leaving bare paths, and our religions –

      Our religions stripped of all their skins

      As if there were explanations

      The god of explanation rising supreme

      Gods of the smallest particles

      But explanation is not understanding

      And what is understanding, does it not involve

      As well the souls, & is it not itself a feeling

      That moment of connecting two things, or three

      That pleasure, the revolutions of the soul

      7 September Pescara

      Cold, grey, rain coming slanting down,

      Violin without a string, without a tune

      Trees without leaves, earth without grass

      Without care, without love, we live in our cement towers

      Elbows on windowsills, looking out

      Antiseptic, no muddy feet, no marching over fields

      No cycling through winds, sad, empty, a bit lost

      Like all of us, returning to work without adventure

      And no one to sweeten our souls

      I would say it comes to this:

      Grandparents married fifty years today, & angry

      Sharp & thin with hand raised as good as a curse

      But kindness too, in a little breeze,

      And after the suffering, the rain

      Figs, the most sensuous of trees,

      Their grey formings mocking the crevices

      Of our own bodies, our thighs,

      Our buttocks, the backs of knees

      And beyond, ivy rising thick & purposeful

      Thinking itself to have found its ruin

      The brick wall three storeys high,

      To be painting it in slow strokes of green and red.

      I would like to be beside the river

      Where I was as a child

      Sun coming through the trees

      A pool too deep & shadowy

      And nothing to do but watch for fish

      And come away from there and run

      Over all the same paths of my lives

      Climbing towards a sunlit meadow

      Where finally I might rest.

      Like the joy of listening to the wedding bells

      And knowing they are yours

      That clamour, all that joy, for you.

      And walking in a bride’s clothes

      Through a garden in a hot sun.

      Here, look, the horses, wingless

      For the footless angels

      The earth spinning

      Under the strike The Earth sent spinning

      Of their feet Underneath their sinking hoofs

      ...

      11 September

      Then the sun & finally the sea and, you know

      The hot sand under your feet & then your belly

      And a green horizon, small waves coming in

      Yesterday a sea bat, a dense black mollusc

      Rippling its velvet wings just below the surface

      In the shallow sea, tentacled head raised upwards

      And velvet to the touch. What deep pleasure

      This heat, this air, this September sun

      The beach abandoned, the small fish returning

      This place is no longer old

      No longer with its old men sitting

      No longer the faces from Roman villas, from Etruscan tombs

      And all women growing to the same shape

      Travelling Light

      Time no longer moves

      But who made light move at a certain

      Speed & only that, & why that

      Whose idea was that?

      Even light takes time to move across a room

      So that as it passes, so things change

      And so, looking far away, we look into the past

      Even as light perceives us as inanimate

      Motionless, static in our elements of air and earth

      So we see other things that move more slow than us.

      And so with speed things move outside our

      Window of perception, like the blades of a fan

      Space contracts, in its elegant rapport with time

      Things are only what they seem

      And nothing more

      Our perceptions squeezed into a tiny space of speed and colour

      Imagining all the things we cannot see

      A pale, dark sun, a star too bright to look

      The sky in pieces, the way the earth, with its slow ageing

      Sees the stars shoot past like meteors

      We too are free to see things as we choose

      With patience we could watch a flower open

      A mushroom push above the earth

      The stars heaving and contracting, surging & fading

      We carry what comforts and sustains

      Which can be space itself & time

      Not things, which only weigh us down

      Stepping gently over the earth

      If you could move like light

      How things would slow, & stop

      17 September

      Still on the beach, still the wind fresh off the sea

      But the mountains shining with snow, and untouchable

      Still the sky blue to the horizon

      Meeting respectfully the other blue of the sea

      A fringe of little rippling waves, then honey sand

      With its display of shells & sticks & lost things

      And me, still here, still present in this world.

      What next in life?

      After the year I bought a house, and married, & was cured (I pray)

      What next, what now?

      Not to let the years go by unaccounted for, unnumbered

      Not just here under the Universe

      But in it, growing out of it

      And you for whom the stars are not always out

      For whom the daily chores eclipse the universe itself

      Never to lose the poetry that runs through things

      That you should sit with your Repubblica

      Spread on a beach chair, the pages flipping

      And curving in the breeze

      On the beach where you played as a child

      Only a few old men strolling along the water’s edge

      And a dog, probably abandoned,

      Delirious with pleasure racing up & down the sand

      Into the waves, barking now & then in the hope

      Of a stick to chase, with pure joy

      Not knowing that winter is on its way.

      ...

      23 October

      Creation

      The Universe spilt

      And spreading

      Like a stain

      Dark Matter – I

      A
    bove a pond

      An unseen filament

      Of spider’s floss

      Suspending a slowly

      Spinning leaf

      ...

      31 October

      Dark Matter II

      Like the thing you were about to say

      The thing that pulls you to a certain room

      And leaves you standing, mystified

      Isaac & Eve

      Before the Fall After the Fall

      Of the apple Of the apple

      Mutual attraction Mutual attraction

      Was not fully understood Was better understood

      28 November

      Tomorrow is one of the days

      I have left to live

      1 December

      Grey day

      Damp wind in the fen

      Left leaves

      Sometimes the mornings light up with frost

      Attention to detail

      At the iron bridge

      Its lattice sides

      Each with a spider’s web

      And sometimes, each strand

      Beaded with dew

      And sometimes ice crystals

      Beading each and every strand

      ...

      Riding to Work

      1. Cemetery – puddled path, leaning stones,

      Sometimes berries, sometimes birds

      This film of broken ice

      A bench, a person with a dog

      And open iron gate

      2. Grafton Centre

      All the sellers showing all their things

      Stop at the red letter box

      Cheerful cylinder, like something for a child

      And the postmen on their bicycles, like boys

      3. Across the green, the common

      Through the tunnel of plane trees

      Slanting light, leaves papering the grass

      4. Crossing the river, there the iron footbridge

      There by the paved stepped bank a man

      A child, feeding bread to the ducks, to swans

      Maybe a mist, maybe a spiderweb in every

      Lattice diamond, beaded with mist

      5. St Edmund’s apples

      Like small yellow lanterns

      On a leafless tree

      23 December [Anstruther]

      Here the sea again rolling and rolling

      The never silent sea, that could suddenly be split

      Into stillness and silence

      Sun rising late, rising all day long until it sets

      Sun somewhere else and here all day the orange clouds

      And us on a black topped heather mountain

      Springing down a long slope, ducking our heads beneath

      The ceiling clouds scudding up to mountains

      Lit by snow and shining, magic totems you must hold

      And blow on till they melt & fade green again

      We stand above the harbour, we listen to the waves

      Small shop in Falkland

      Man in an armchair sketching a trophy from a postcard

      White hair, earring, and all around him, violins

      Two transparent ones made in 1956 by a man in Kirkcaldy

      From the perspex cockpit of a Spitfire crashed in town.

      ...

      1997

      9 February 1997

      Home from college, the summer before it all changed

      Working two jobs, one an office

      Sitting by a phone that never rang

      A novel open in the top desk drawer

      The other, nights, a cigarette shop

      Men coming in, their cars idling outside

      How young I must have looked

      About to go to Europe for a year

      Waiting for closing time

      The sweet tobacco smell

      Leafing through a Playboy

      Eating smarties, one from each box

      Scotland at Christmas

      Sun rising all day long, rising

      Till it sets

      Spring down a hillside on black heather

      Head ducking under clouds

      And down there, snowcapped mountains

      Shining totems you might hold

      And blow on till they melt

      ...

      24 February

      February day

      The teasing yellow /colours/ of the crocuses

      Scattered like Easter eggs across the lawn

      The grey, the wind

      The dripping of the gutters on the pavement

      Underneath your window

      All night, moonless night

      Month too short to grow a moon

      The fire sparking like magicians

      What matters now is what goes on

      In the reefs of your bones

      In the oceans of your flesh

      What whales are bellowing across your blood

      Heart thrumming like an ocean liner

      What small fish are pecking at the coral reef of your bones

      What strange colonies are flourishing

      What transparent creatures run along your nerves

      Rising like bubbles from the hot vents of creation from your deep

      ...

      28 February

      Crossing

      What touched me

      Diving through the currents

      Of your blood,

      The clouds of red and pale plankton,

      Coral reefs of bone,

      Was not your deepest, blackest canyons,

      Not the vents, the alchemy,

      The strange, transparent, half-thought things,

      But the thrumming of your ceaseless,

      Your disturbing heart:

      That untried ocean liner

      On its maiden –

      On its only –

      Voyage

      February gone now, for another year

      The wind dropped, the bravest flowers unfolding

      What will summer bring. Don’t ask.

      If pleasure, suffering, don’t ask

      So many plans & projects, so many things still to do.

      ...

      Poem for my Father’s Seventieth Birthday

      Letters from the past

      Too much living in the adventures of another’s life

      An ancestor, a way of trying to be there

      Always in a woman’s world

      Of elder sisters, wife, & daughters

      Shrewish, moody, cross, demanding

      Always scolded, never left to be,

      To clatter, play the trombone

      Like an elephant stampeding through the basement

      Telling stories, gentle with the chickadeeds, [sic]

      The jays, and always watching,

      Measuring, the natural world:

      The way a mushroom grows

      The way frost heaves

      A moonscape erodes

      A green plant shrinks

      The temperature goes up and down beneath the roof

      Your daughters grow

      Capturing snowflakes on the driveway

      On a black velvet cloth

      And keeping them, like magicians.

      ...

      7 May

      I was born in the coldest hour of the night

      At four in the morning in a blizzard

      At the time of the year when the earth comes closest to the sun

      On the second day of the decade of free love

      And walking on the moon.

      There was my sister, fourteen months already in the world

      My mother, a sensible age I would think it now, for children,

      Having already worked & lived & been in Paris at the end of the war

      And my father, a professor in a sunny study with geraniums and maps

      My grandmother came from time to time

      On something called a train from somewhere far away

      Wearing dark dresses with cloth whose patterns I could see

      long after I pressed my hands hard against my eyes.

      And Daisy who taught us to curtsey & soften butter

      by holding it on a knife ab
    ove a steaming bowl of soup,

      and once stood by my bed

      in the dark on New Year’s Eve, holding a radio

      to my ear, a bell striking faintly midnight, though it /wasn’t my bedtime/

      wasn’t yet, & telling me it was Big Ben

      (brought enormous copper pennies)

      10 May

      In the summer, every summer, we were gone

      Out west, up north

      Measuring stick, sample bag, tent

      Blue hooded jackets, mosquito repellent

      Smelling of canvas tents & mosquito repellent & sweet clover

      Lakes in the woods, lakes in the prairies

      Cotton fluff trees, poplars, pines

      Mud, minnows, pebbles,

      Me in a canvas tent bag jumping across a field of thistles

      Winter snow, walking to school in big boots

      Pushing cars out of snowdrifts

      Long winter nights & Christmas skating, tobogganing, boys

      Went on a trip with my mother, south

      To colleges with green campuses, red leaves

      To choose, to go away

      Bands playing, crowds of young people

      Bus rides at night

      Snow falling on the quadrangle

      China with small flowers, and dancing

      Third year we went abroad, me & Mary

      To a tiny Scottish town, cathedral ruins

      Castle ruins, west sands, east sands, fishing harbour

      Cold sea licking & sucking, rain, all-day sunsets.

      Come Christmas we got a train to Europe, we did

      Weighed down with things, cold in stations

      Sleeping, waiting, everyone else at home, and us

      Adventurers reading our maps, & trying to be brave

      In Monte Carlo, and Florence at dawn dozing on a pew in a cold

      church

      Drinking coffee from tiny cups, Rome, Munich, Salzburg,

      Paris, sheets of grey ice under the Eiffel Tower,

      And north again.

     


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