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    A Responsibility to Awe

    Page 8
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      Then in that town I fell in love,

      First time, laying my head on the soft shoulder of hills

      The wind shaking the tent like a dust cloth

      All night long, and the aurora rising from a ridge

      I stayed a summer, and another

      Working in a room of grey metal shelving

      Scanning the universe, looking for certain things.

      But the second one was different. It rained

      Love washed away. Friendship wasn’t good enough.

      I was going down another road.

      I went back to Canada, way out west

      Finding myself my first house

      Five of us, one on his elbow on the sofa

      Smoking or chewing toothpicks, loud jazz

      One plump & lazy & smart.

      One slick, British, little sack of hash in a zipped up boot, shades,

      One a good girl, studious & kind.

      I fell in love again.

      I solved equations. It rained.

      We climbed mountains, and those were the best days

      Coming down in the dark, looking for the shiny blaze nailed on

      trees

      To mark the way, exhausted, aching

      Full of mountains

      It rained. Love moved in and out.

      No friends, just men, and me in the basement, crying and alone.

      I got away, it felt like that

      Selling the bike I had since I was twelve

      The twelve string guitar I paid for with a case of beer

      I went one way, him the other

      But we kept friends. Fifteen years that was.

      He was here last week.

      Came back to England, autumn,

      New in town, smells of coal smoke, beer.

      It rained, & I took on a galaxy

      A certain one, the nearest one, not to feel

      Too far away, too cold.

      The phone rang.

      My grandmother had died.

      Easter came. And Mary. And when she left

      I fell in love again, and this time deep & hard

      Letting go of all the handholds

      All the chocks unzipping

      It was ten years till I hit the ground

      Though there were bumps along the way

      And sometimes a catch on a thin ledge

      And what a view – to convince yourself

      It’s worth the fall. It was.

      Meanwhile, they sent me south, to Australia

      Hot nights, gum tree scented

      My galaxy spinning overhead

      Walking down a valley, down a dusty road

      Waiting for letters from Italy.

      They sent me to Baltimore, mid winter

      Squirrels falling frozen out of trees

      My lover a small bottle of olive oil, cloudy thick

      Waiting for phone calls

      Flying to Italy

      Him, the other woman (me), his wife.

      And no one learning much.

      I thrashed it through. I wrote a thesis.

      I said I didn’t care

      But when the time came to receive that last degree

      To move out of studenthood for good

      He was there again declaring endless love

      Me, the other woman, she the wife, our man.

      I went away. I said goodbye. I went.

      To an east coast autumn. That at least I loved.

      My own apartment, all one room

      And all around me, mathematics, stars.

      No one to tell stories, sing songs

      No one lighted by that land of life.

      Another man came with darkness and fury

      And I was swept away, but found

      The lease on my heart wasn’t up.

      I found the lumps, I fingered them

      And lay awake at night.

      They cut one out. I waited.

      Fear, all fear, no pain, still

      Though I have cut my feet on sharp stones

      And crossed high bridges over black water

      And been chased and bitten by sharp toothed animals.

      I went back, to my England, the house,

      The sisters by adoption

      The garden with its head high summer poppies

      And its winter rain.

      I hit the ground, and landed lightly in the end

      With springs of anger on my feet

      Bouncing from Australia, feeling finally

      Free of falling.

      I went alone to the cinema on Sunday afternoons

      I didn’t have to talk to anyone

      I tossed out all my arms & legs the full stretch of bed.

      I wrote.

      And when the time was right I wrote a postcard

      To a man I knew in Paris

      Had known through all the falling

      Would not have known without it

      And we met like that in a different way

      Sleeping under the stars by the embers of a bonfire.

      11 May

      Science is not what they say, so serious

      The truth being what you imagine

      Not what you see

      And not something useful

      Or something that pays

      18 May

      Like following a small thread

      Out and out and out

      What catches at your core

      How many times you can plant

      In the same earth

      How many more summer nights

      To wait at the window

      For that warm rain

      And how quick the flowers fade

      How many conversations

      Passing under the window

      ...

      September [Ischia]

      Lunar Eclipse

      High noon on the moon:

      The huge blue round of earth

      Slides across the yellow sun.

      Down here, above the table of Capri

      Dusk and a full white moon goes smoky red and dim,

      Long shadows streaming into space

      Snuff out the shimmer on the sea.

      ...

      23 November

      Sutton in October

      ‘Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver’

      Going up into the forest after a snowfall

      I climb away from the house

      Stand still, so still the only sound

      My pulse in my ears

      A branch creaking in a high up wind

      It comes to me that

      Though I cannot recall generations in this place

      And am a seed that blew here from somewhere else

      Made shallow roots, & grew a bit, & moved on,

      That whenever I found myself, if it looked like this,

      The quiet grey poles of trees,

      The snow smoothing and silencing everything

      The cold in my lungs making my blood race

      It would feel like home.

      Opening boxes in the basement

      All the little things that belong to me

      30 November

      Sutton in October

      How families can be fragmented and together

      I go down to the brook

      Which is tiled now with fallen leaves

      Which runs cold over the smooth stones

      And think of all the brooks where I have sat

      And the comfort in a brook

      The way the water keeps coming

      Keeps singing

      I shovel away at a big pile of earth,

      Duck manure & woodchips

      With my father, methodical

      For five years I have not been here

      In this forested place

      With its cold clean air

      And long views

      And low orange light

      Always a bird flies against a window Confused by reflections

      Drops, at breakfast time, neck back

      One drop of blood at its beak

      These small cruel things

      We rake up leaves into a pile


      High enough for all of us

      Bury ourselves in that smell

      Of summer going back to earth

      Two children, not mine, squealing

      Running, my sister like an anchor now

      Around which we swing at our moorings

      Our ropes loose and long

      The sheep in the warm sweet barn

      Where someone has left the radio on

      And an aria mixes with their sounds

      ...

      It snows in the night

      A soft, deep snow, piled along each twig & branch

      Muffling the brook

      Flattening our leaf pile

      We watch our childhood repeating

      The toys, the stories, the things they do

      Not knowing that we did them once before

      The same toboggan, the same books, the wooden blocks

      Me beached across an ocean

      My sister on another shore

      A big land

      A flat place crossed by a power line

      The edge of town

      A cold wind whistling through

      The bees all Italian

      Surprised to learn

      That the Roman Empire still exists

      Spread now to the Americas even across the Americas

      Still with ruthless hierarchies

      Each small province with its workers

      With its guards, its rigid paving

      Its foray of discovery

      ...

      1998

      1 January [Scanno]

      Me, dazzled to be handling something

      Precious as the stars,

      Opening and opening this box of jewels

      Arrows of time

      Flying in all directions

      We have come again to this high valley

      This house by the lake

      These blue winter skies

      By four o’clock, the sun already gone

      Behind the mountain at our back,

      The ridge across golden just above Frattura

      And reflecting in the water,

      Almost touching our shore

      A new year has begun

      Tomorrow I am thirty-eight

      And still striding up mountain paths

      With the sun on the snow

      And the cold air filling my lungs

      And still prodding under my arms

      My neck, my groin,

      Hoping not to feel lumps

      Yesterday we went to see Liborio,

      Nudging along the icy road

      Coming down into his valley,

      To his basin of sunshine,

      Found him by his barn, his huge hands and great hooked nose, lamenting a sheep lost to a wolf, remembering all over again the years in Montreal, in Beaconsfield, the French, De Gaulle, the tunnel, Expo 67 … Only this time I can understand it all, and at lunch, at a long table by the fire, I am made an honorary Abbruzzese. And I would come here too, to be old, like the women in black with their fine skin & their eternal, shining eyes. Going about the passageways & streets & squares like guardians of something secret & sublime, with a posture & a dignity as erect as mountains, clean as snow. I would be one of them. They shine like priestesses among the Roman women in their store-bought furs.

      Coming down from the hills this afternoon we heard a flute across the little valley, something ancient, from some more eastern place, a handful of notes in a minor key. We saw sheep flowing along the hillside, rivulets of sheep splitting & merging & splitting again, & pooling & flowing, their bells too in minor keys coming so clear across the cold, still air.

      2 January

      My thirty-eighth birthday. A disorganised day, waking up late, grey & cold. A walk up high, a coffee in Scanno. Saw a pig drawn up by its hind legs under a stout tree at the edge of town, head soaked in blood, a dozen men around sliding out its entrails, carving it up. Packed, drove back to Pescara, a simple supper, bath. Tired now. A few small lumps. Praying & praying that they’ll stay away & let me get on with my life.

      3 January

      Brilliant warm sunshine, almost hot, pooling here against a whitewashed wall. Impossible to imagine Cambridge dark & cold & grey. These days I would travel a long way for a few rays of sun.

      It’s a numbing kind of place, the constant stream of cars & people & food. The hours spent at the table, eating, talking, eating.

      At Liborio’s it seemed to me there is still a foreignness in the world. Still the possibility of difference. And how we might have crossed before Expo 67, the Italian pavilion with its reinforced concrete and its carabinieri. And now in the mountains, each abandoned house.

      This mountain valley

      Everywhere traces of the people who have left

      These houses with their stone walls bulging here

      And toppling there, still a vine climbing the back

      And the small stony plots of earth

      You wonder which pizzerias in America

      Are run by the grandsons of the people who lived here

      Which antique families became immigrants

      The ladies of Scanno with their long black skirts

      The long lines of children, almost holy.

      Have intoxicated [sic] with too much food & wine, I sleep

      The brain sleeps, circles like a water bug

      Without diving

      Looking through bags of old photos

      Children on beaches, dancing, stylish women

      In piazzas, we pass like photos, click, click

      And we’re gone. To some, children. To some, none.

      ...

      14 February [San Valentino]

      Today has been like May

      We remember how it is to feel warm,

      How we too open like buds

      How fast this winter went

      (‘We’ll pay for this at Easter’)

      ‘Nothing good comes free’

      I don’t believe that

      Coming home over Grantchester meadows

      The sky pink,

      The willows still naked along the river

      The wind almost warm

      But these times can’t last.

      In California, the rains have not passed.

      What speaks to you most now?

      Last month I was in Germany,

      It was so grey, so cold, for three days

      I didn’t leave the manor

      Where the taxi left me,

      Where my room was three floors up

      Its windows almost curtained by the dark cedars

      Looking down across the lawns

      To the far road, a cyclist passing, a walker, a car

      (Cathy lived in this town, before her father died)

      I rode here in a train, all along the grey Rhine,

      The rain slanting,

      The flat boats going up & down

      In my compartment was a priest,

      Though you’d never know

      19 February

      After a lecture on superstring theory

      How language & sculpture interact in the mind

      Dimensions curl up

      Is there anything special about a string?

      So that illuminating it

      From another angle

      You see projected on the wall a fox

      And then a tree

      And then a bird

      And you know it’s all one thing

      But you don’t know it’s a hand

      And has four fingers & a thumb

      And knuckles that bend

      All particles are waves in the field

      We are only seeing things from different points of view

      In certain limits a theory metamorphoses

      Into another, and another

      Space curving in on itself

      What is a field?

      ...

      5 May

      Life à la carte, and why not, order it up

      Not really understanding anything

      Just skimping across the surface

      Like going upstream on stepping stones


      You don’t really know the meaning of river.

      Cold wet feet, a current against you

      You might get there, but you haven’t understood.

      So many stones

      Building a cairn on a mountain top

      Where few will go

      I lift & place my few stones

      And the wind & snow might knock them down

      My sureness falters

      ...

      30 August

      Desire Lines

      Blood thinned, the air holding tight

      Oxygen is responsible for our thoughts

      The molecular structures of our ideas

      The clear liquids dropping into my veins

      Not seeming to think too much

      About the value of my life

      Not consumed with questions of whether

      Because staying alive is hard enough

      And staying happy is even harder

      So if you can do it, or help someone else

      A little bit, to stay alive, or happy

      Then that’s enough

      So why are we made to question

      The value of our lives

      La vita é un pelo perso sotto il letto

      These small cells

      Lighting their fires

      In the Aladdins caves

      Of your bones

      Sown in the red earth of marrow

      To swell and bring life

      Could our bones be like that

      The big thigh bones

      The heart

      The cavern

      The dance in a bear skin

      Thin air, this blood

      Still asking personal questions

      Still prying into the private life of stars

      The when & where & which encounters

      What was transformed

      What torn out and lost

      6 September

      Post, a day of hard rain,

     


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