Counting Backwards Page 4
You too will go down.
February 12th 1994
No one else remembers that room
With the blood pressure cuff and the plastic cot
And the bag on its stand dripping
Millilitre by millilitre
When the visitors had gone home
And the tyres six storeys down
Skidded, infrequent.
Snow on the window ticked
The glass, becoming sleet
And the sheets for all their stains were white.
No one else remembers that room
Where you cried each time the lights
Went off and the nurses were absent
For hours by morphia time,
I reached for you in pain
And lifted you in your hospital nightgown
To wedge you against me
For we were both falling
You with purple, dangling limbs
Ecstatic, all lips
And quick, hot breathing,
I watching a nurse who did not exist
Write her hieroglyphics
As the snow thickened.
I made a vow to you then
In our solitude
That you would never remember,
With two fingers I smoothed the ruck
Of the gown against your back.
What shall I do for my sister in the day she shall be spoken for?
I have a little sister, she has no breasts.
I buy her face covering at the shop
Where they have nearly run out.
So, we are lucky. Black cloth sucks
Into her nostrils. My sister screams.
When she’s finished saying she can’t breathe
When I’ve cleaned the snot from her face
And rearranged her so she’ll be safe
I say: It’s for your own good.
Do as I do and walk close.
I have a little sister, she has no breasts.
She would like to be an ophthalmologist.
When she was three she had a cyst
Removed from under her left eyelid.
I say: Don’t cry, you can still see out.
I tell her to walk between me and the wall
And keep her eyes downward. We scuttle
Like crabs in a black wrapping.
We shall buy rice, we shall go home.
What shall I do for my sister
In the day when she shall be spoken for?
In Secret
And this is where they met in secret.
Follow my pointing finger. Now you see it
Quite empty. Those curtains that veiled it
Are rags, and the bed stripped bare.
Here she played for him, there
He placed his shoes in the corner.
Piano from an upstairs room,
Wanton extravagance of scales falling
As we imagine birdsong –
But only slow it down
And hear the gong-repeat of a rhythm
Like the treading of rubble over a woman.
All the breaths of your life
There is a gargoyle look when the mouth caves.
No more words can be hoped for, the lips
Are not for speaking, the tongue
Is all sag and distortion.
I might think that your kindness is effaced.
No more look can be hoped for, your eyes
Are not for seeing, the skin
Is a drawn curtain over them.
I hear your breath, now failing
As all the breaths of your life become
Petals endlessly opening
Inward, where the dark is.
Her children look for her
Life and death are in the hands of God she said
As a boat is in the hands of the dark water,
And now her children look for her
In the zizz of her sewing-machine each evening
And the smell of cardamom.
She said: life and death are in the hands of God.
As the sun beat on the roof of the van
She closed her eyes to dream,
And her children look as the Pole Star goes up
Close to the moon.
Little papoose
If I were the moon
With a star papoose
In the windy sky
I’d carry my one star home,
If I were the sea
With boats in my arms
On this cold morning
I’d carry them,
If I were sleeping
And my dream turned
I would carry you
Little papoose
Wherever you choose.
Cliffs of Fall
(to the memory of Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Spring of turf and thrift, tangle of fleece, sheep-shit,
Subtle flowers where honeybees knock
At the foxglove lip and the gorse trap
Then sheer on our left the drop. Spatter of bracken hooks
Misleading the lambs. In the bank, marsh violets
Wet, lovely, minute. We need not look for the fall, the chink
Of pebble that tumbles. All the grey scree stirs
Slip-rattles and stills itself. Here is the slope’s
Angle, implacable. Here’s where you look
Touch, unbalance, dislodge. Infinite drop
Where the bee burrs at the foxglove’s lip,
All quick-tongued, intimate.
Time to step back to the wide margin
Cleave to the path’s dapper attention
Unspring each poem,
Pitch each new note to the key of loss,
Lose nothing. Stay clear of the drop
Where the world bursts through its dirty glass.
Sun on your neck, a dazzle of violets
Infinitely slipsliding –
No quick wing-beat of flight, but a slope
Of gravel-rubble, its angle implacable
stripping you raw. From here your fall
Is a matter of form: a slow marvel.
Five Versions from Catullus
1 Through Babel of Nations
Through babel of nations and waste of water
I come my brother. What are these rites to us?
Your ashes are speechless
My words falter.
Blind fate has taken you, brother,
You and I are undone.
The wine I bring you is spoiled
With the salt of parting –
What else can I give?
Only a last greeting.
2 Undone
What you have done to me has undone me.
You have led me so far from myself
That my mind loses its bearings.
Even if you shape-shifted
To your best and dearest
I couldn’t care for it. Dark love drives me on.
3 Sirmio
Almost island and jewel of all islands
In lakes stiller than thought or in wild oceans
Sweet or salt as the sea-god makes them,
Sirmio,
I see you, all of you, I take you in
I see you, barely believing
I’ve left those featureless, endless Bithynian plains.
We travel over many waters
To reach home-coming,
Struggle and suffering over, the mind dissolved
Of all its troubles, burdens laid down –
The soft bed waits for our exhaustion.
I see you, all of you, I know your
Confusion of ripples against the lakeshore
Welcoming laughter
The sounds of home
Ringing like masts in harbour:
Sirmio.
4 Dedication
My slim volume, polished almost to nothing –
Shall I dedicate it to you, Cornelius?
You thought something of my songs
Even th
ough you were the only man in Italy
Who could wrap up the world in three tomes
Of flawless erudition.
My God, your learning and labour
Lean heavily against my little volume,
So take my book, this fingernail’s width
For what it’s worth.
5 Sparrow
Sparrow, my girl’s delight
And plaything held to her breast,
Sparrow whom she teases with one finger
Daring your littleness to peck harder –
Sparrow, I burn for her
And crave the smallest crumb
As the pair of you play
Folded together in rapture
Under one wing.
I too long to comfort her
In grief or oppressive longing –
If only I could play with her as you do
Until she forgets her soul’s sadness.
Rim
Here is the bowl. Do I want it still
Chipped as it is and crazed,
Its lustrous cream no longer running
Over the body in fleet glaze,
I’m getting rid, getting shot, cleansing
Dark cupboards and fossil-deep
Drawers lined with historic newspaper.
I stop to read about the three-day-week.
Here are gewgaws with tarnished clasps
Here is the gravy-boat, the one item
Surviving from the wedding service.
Here’s Ted Heath’s improbable grin.
I flick the rim and it gives back a tang –
Yes, I remember that, the exact sound
Of early curiosity and boredom.
Bowl on my palm, I twist it round
And round again, unsure.
Do I hold or let it fall?
On looking through the handle of a cup
On looking through the handle of a cup
I spied a nest of green: the spout
Minus the can, a bunch of leaves
Big as my hand: two trees
In the palm of the wind,
On looking through the hole made by a pin
In a plane leaf twirled
All ways to catch the world
I saw a drop of rain, swollen
On the petal of a rose,
On looking through the fault in my eyes
With their arrhythmias of vision
I saw what no one has seen:
My cup-handle of a world,
My pinhole morning.
Ten Books
Jacketless, buckled, pressed from the voyage,
Ten books that once were crated to America
And back again,
That have known the salt sea’s swing under them,
Oil stink, the deep throb of the engines
And quick hands putting them back on the shelves.
Spines torn, the paper wartime, the Faber
Font squarish and the dates in Roman:
The Waste Land and other poems,
Poems Newly Selected, Siegfried Sassoon –
How that name conjured with me
As a soldier kicked at a dead man.
MacNeice, freckled with brown
From many damps in many different houses.
On the inner page, under my father’s autograph
An early flourish of blue crayon
Where I scribbled a figure so primitive
There are not even legs for it to walk upon.
Bowed, chipped, darkening, edge-worn
Sunned, loose, fading
Binding copy, reading copy, shaken:
Ten books that I have taken.
From the balcony on an August morning
I see the rest fly to the tip lorry
Where the sofa for a moment reposes
Legs in the air, grinning.
It is soaked through with music
But nothing will save it.
Behind it the sea makes the usual silveriness,
The café opens and the bikes whizz
From end to end of the promenade.
Meanwhile in my father’s hand, a quotation
On the title page of Herbert Read’s
Thirty-Five Poems: ‘I absorbed Blake,
His strange beauty, his profound message,
His miraculous technique, and to emulate
Blake was to be my ambition
And my despair…’ (Faber and Faber,
24 Russell Square.) I see my own hands
Smooth and small as they are not now
Lifting, turning, ‘I am amazed
To find how much I owe to him.’
Subtraction
You always thought that you’d die mid-stride,
Sun on your left hand, darkness
Crossing you out in one swipe.
When you got on to subtraction
It was easy-peasy. Add one
At the top, take one from the next column.
Good at take-away, good at adding,
Revving up for the 11-plus
But no mathematician,
You stumbled upon infinity
With infinite terror, and knew
The limits of divinity –
What you’d been told was wrong.
If all you loved had been given
Then all could be taken.
You knew then that you must blot
In the blue notebook, trim
With happy pencil, the sum
Of what is when it is not.
My people
My people are the dying,
I am of their company
And they are mine,
We wake in the wan hour
Between three and four,
Listen to the rain
And consider our painkillers.
I lie here in the warm
With four pillows, a light
And the comfort of my phone
On which I sometimes compose,
And the words come easily
Bubbling like notes
From a bird that thinks it is dawn.
My people are the dying.
I reach out to them,
A company of suffering.
One falls by the roadside
And a boot stamps on him,
One lies in her cell, alone,
Without tenderness
Brutally handled
Towards her execution.
I can do nothing.
This is my vigil: the lit candle,
The pain, the breath of my people
Drawn in pain.
September Rain
Always rain, September rain,
The slipstream of the season,
Night of the equinox, the change.
There are three surfers out back.
Now the rain’s pulse is doubled, the wave
Is not to be caught. Are they lost in the dark
Do they know where the coast is combed with light
Or is there only the swell, lifting
Back to the beginning
When they ran down the hill like children
Through this rain, September rain,
And the sea opened its breast to them?
I lie and listen
And the life in me stirs like a tide
That knows when it must be gone.
I am on the deep deep water
Lightly held by one ankle
Out of my depth, waiting.
Hold out your arms
Death, hold out your arms for me
Embrace me
Give me your motherly caress,
Through all this suffering
You have not forgotten me.
You are the bearded iris that bakes its rhizomes
Beside the wall,
Your scent flushes with loveliness,
Sherbet, pure iris
Lovely and intricate.
I am the child who stands by the wall
Not much taller than the iris.
The sun covers me
The day waits for me
In my funny dress.
Death, you heap into my arms
A basket of unripe damsons
Red crisscross straps that button behind me.
I don’t know about school,
My knowledge is for papery bud covers
Tall stems and brown
Bees touching here and there, delicately
Before a swerve to the sun.
Death stoops over me
Her long skirts slide,
She knows I am shy.
Even the puffed sleeves on my white blouse
Embarrass me,
She will pick me up and hold me
So no one can see me,
I will scrub my hair into hers.
There, the iris increases
Note by note
As the wall gives back heat.
Death, there’s no need to ask:
A mother will always lift a child
As a rhizome
Must lift up a flower
So you settle me
My arms twining,
Thighs gripping your hips
Where the swell of you is.
As you push back my hair
– Which could do with a comb