Swimming Chenango Lake
Page 6
Gobble a street up, but already a future seethes
As if it had waited in the crevices:
A race in transit, a nomad hierarchy:
Cargoes of debris out of these ruins fill
Their buckled prams: their trucks and hand-carts wait
To claim the dismantlings of a neighbourhood –
All that a grimy care from wastage gleans,
From scrap-iron down to heaps of magazines.
Slowing, I see the faces of a pair
Behind their load: he shoves and she
Trails after him, a sexagenarian Eve,
Their punishment to number every hair
Of what remains. Their clothes come of their trade –
They wear the cast-offs of a lost decade.
The place had failed them anyhow, and their pale
Absorption staring past this time
And dusty space we occupy together,
Gazes the new blocks down – not built for them;
But what they are looking at they do not see.
No Eve, but mindless Mnemosyne,
She is our lady of the nameless metals, of things
No hand has made, and no machine
Has cut to a nicety that takes the mark
Of clean intention – at best, the guardian
Of all that our daily contact stales and fades,
Rusty cages and lampless lampshades.
Perhaps those who have climbed into their towers
Will eye it all differently, the city spread
In unforeseen configurations, and living with this,
Will find that civility I can only miss – and yet
It will need more than talk and trees
To coax a style from these disparities.
The needle-point’s swaying reminder
Teeters: I go with uncongealing traffic now
Out onto the cantilevered road, window on window
Sucked backwards at the level of my wheels.
Is it patience or anger most renders the will keen?
This is a daily discontent. This is the way in.
At Stoke
I have lived in a single landscape. Every tone
And turn have had for their ground
These beginnings in grey-black: a land
Too handled to be primary – all the same,
The first in feeling. I thought it once
Too desolate, diminished and too tame
To be the foundation for anything. It straggles
A haggard valley and lets through
Discouraged greennesses, lights from a pond or two.
By ash-tips, or where the streets give out
In cindery in-betweens, the hills
Swell up and free of it to where, behind
The whole vapoury, patched battlefield,
The cows stand steaming in an acrid wind.
This place, the first to seize on my heart and eye,
Has been their hornbook and their history.
The Marl Pits
It was a language of water, light and air
I sought – to speak myself free of a world
Whose stoic lethargy seemed the one reply
To horizons and to streets that blocked them back
In a monotone fume, a bloom of grey.
I found my speech. The years return me
To tell of all that seasoned and imprisoned:
I breathe familiar, sedimented air
From a landscape of disembowellings, underworlds
Unearthed among the clay. Digging
The marl, they dug a second nature
And water, seeping up to fill their pits,
Sheeted them to lakes that wink and shine
Between tips and steeples, streets and waste
In slow reclaimings, shimmers, balancings,
As if kindling Eden rescinded its own loss
And words and water came of the same source.
Class
Those midland a’s
once cost me a job:
diction defeated my best efforts –
I was secretary at the time
to the author of The Craft of Fiction.
That title was full of class.
You had only to open your mouth on it
to show where you were born
and where you belonged. I tried
time and again I tried
but I couldn’t make it
that top A – ah
I should say –
it sounded like gargling.
I too visibly shredded his fineness:
it was clear the job couldn’t last
and it didn’t. Still, I’d always thought him an ass
which he pronounced arse. There’s no accounting for taste.
The Rich
I like the rich – the way
they say: ‘I’m not made of money’:
their favourite pastoral
is to think they’re not rich at all –
poorer, perhaps, than you or me,
for they have the imagination of that fall
into the pinched decency
we take for granted. Of course,
they do want to be wanted
by all the skivvies and scrapers
who neither inherited nor rose.
But are they daft or deft,
when they proclaim themselves
men of the left, as if prepared
at the first premonitory flush
of the red dawn
to go rushing onto the street
and, share by share,
add to the common conflagration
their scorned advantage?
They know that it can’t happen
in Worthing or Wantage:
with so many safety valves
between themselves and scalding,
all they have to fear
is wives, children, breath and balding.
And at worst
there is always some sunny
Aegean prospect. I like the rich –
they so resemble the rest
of us, except for their money.
After a Death
A little ash, a painted rose, a name.
A moonshell that the blinding sky
Puts out with winter blue, hangs
Fragile at the edge of visibility. That space
Drawing the eye up to its sudden frontier
Asks for a sense to read the whole
Reverted side of things. I wanted
That height and prospect such as music brings –
Music or memory. Neither brought me here.
This burial place straddles a green hill,
Chimneys and steeples plot the distances
Spread vague below: only the sky
In its upper reaches keeps
An untarnished January colour. Verse
Fronting that blaze, that blade,
Turns to retrace the path of its dissatisfactions,
Thought coiled on thought, and only certain that
Whatever can make bearable or bridge
The waste of air, a poem cannot.
The husk of moon, risking the whole of space,
Seemingly sails it, frailly launched
To its own death and fullness. We buried
A little ash. Time so broke you down,
Your lost eyes, dry beneath
Their matted lashes, a painted rose
Seems both to memorialize and mock
What you became. It picks your name out
Written on the roll beside a verse –
Obstinate words: measured against the blue,
They cannot conjure with the dead. Words,
Bringing that space to bear, that air
Into each syllable we speak, bringing
An earnest to us of the portion
We must inherit, what thought of that would give
The greater share of comfort, greater fear –
&n
bsp; To live forever, or to cease to live?
The imageless unnaming upper blue
Defines a world, all images
Of endeavours uncompleted. Torn levels
Of the land drop, street by street,
Pitted and pooled, its wounds
Cleansed by a light, dealt out
With such impartiality you’d call it kindness,
Blindly assuaging where assuagement goes unfelt.
Hyphens
‘The country’s love-
liness’, it said:
what I read was
‘the country’s love-
lines’ – the unnec-
essary ‘s’
passed over by
the mind’s blind-
ly discriminating eye:
but what I saw
was a whole scene
restored: the love-
lines drawing
together the list
‘loveliness’ capped
and yet left
vague, unloved:
lawns, gardens, houses,
the encircling trees.
Hill Walk
for Philippe and Anne-Marie Jaccottet
Innumerable and unnameable, foreign flowers
Of a reluctant April climbed the slopes
Beside us. Among them, rosemary and thyme
Assuaged the coldness of the air, their fragrance
So intense, it seemed as if the thought
Of that day’s rarity had sharpened sense, as now
It sharpens memory. And yet such pungencies
Are there an affair of every day – Provençal
Commonplaces, like the walls, recalling
In their broken sinuousness, our own
Limestone barriers, half undone
By time, and patched against its sure effacement
To retain the lineaments of a place.
In our walk, time used us well that rhymed
With its own herbs. We crested idly
That hill of ilexes and savours to emerge
Along the plateau at last whose granite
Gave on to air: it showed us then
The place we had started from and the day
Half gone, measured against the distances
That lay beneath, a territory travelled.
All stretched to the first fold
Of that unending landscape where we trace
Through circuits, drops and terraces
The outworks, ruinous and overgrown,
Where space on space has labyrinthed past time:
The unseizable citadel glimmering back at us,
We contemplated no assault, no easy victory:
Fragility seemed sufficiency that day
Where we sat by the abyss, and saw each hill
Crowned with its habitations and its crumbled stronghold
In the scents of inconstant April, in its cold.
The Shaft (1978)
Charlotte Corday
O Vertu! le poignard, seul espoir de la terre, Est ton arme sacrée…
– Chénier
Courteously self-assured, although alone,
With voice and features that could do no hurt,
Why should she not enter? They let in
A girl whose reading made a heroine –
Her book was Plutarch, her republic Rome:
Home was where she sought her tyrant out.
The towelled head next, the huge batrachian mouth:
There was a mildness in him, even. He
Had never been a woman’s enemy,
And time and sickness turned his stomach now
From random execution. All the same,
He moved aside to write her victims down,
And when she approached, it was to kill she came.
She struck him from above. One thrust. Her whole
Intent and innocence directing it
To breach through flesh and enter where it must,
It seemed a blow that rose up from within:
Tinville reduced it all to expertise:
– What, would you make of me a hired assassin?
– What did you find to hate in him? – His crimes.
Every reply was temperate save one
And that was human when all’s said and done:
The deposition, read to those who sit
In judgement on her, ‘What has she to say?’
‘Nothing, except that I succeeded in it.’
– You think that you have killed all Marats off?
– I think perhaps such men are now afraid.
The blade hung in its grooves. How should she know
The Terror still to come, as she was led
Red-smocked from gaol out into evening’s red?
It was to have brought peace, that faultless blow.
Fouquier Tinville: the public prosecutor.
Uncowed by the unimaginable result,
She loomed by in the cart beneath the eye
Of Danton, Desmoulins and Robespierre,
Heads in a rabble fecund in insult:
She had remade her calendar, called this
The Fourth Day of the Preparation of Peace.
Greater than Brutus was what Adam Lux
Demanded for her statue’s sole inscription:
His pamphlet was heroic and absurd
And asked the privilege of dying too:
Though the republic raised to her no statue,
The brisk tribunal took him at his word.
What haunted that composure none could fault?
For she, when shown the knife, had dropped her glance –
She ‘who believed her death would raise up France’
As Chénier wrote who joined the later dead:
Her judge had asked: ‘If you had gone uncaught,
Would you have then escaped?’ ‘I would,’ she said.
A daggered Virtue, Clio’s roll of stone,
Action unsinewed into statuary!
Beneath that gaze what tremor was willed down?
And, where the scaffold’s shadow stretched its length,
What unlived life would struggle up against
Death died in the possession of such strength?
Perhaps it was the memory of that cry
That cost her most as Catherine Marat
Broke off her testimony… But the blade
Inherited the future now and she
Entered a darkness where no irony
Seeps through to move the pity of her shade.
Marat Dead
the version of Jacques Louis David
Citoyen, il suffit que je sois bien malheureuse pour avoir droit à votre bienveillance.
Charlotte Corday to Marat
They look like fact, the bath, the wall, the knife,
The splintered packing-case that served as table;
The linen could be priced by any housewife,
As could the weapon too, but not the sable
Suggestion here that colours all we feel
And animates this death-scene from the life
With red, brown, green reflections on the real.
Scaled back to such austerity, each tone
Now sensuous with sadness, would persuade
That in the calm the ugliness has gone
From the vast mouth and from the swaddled head;
And death that worked this metamorphosis
Has left behind no effigy of stone
But wrought an amorous languor with its kiss.
‘Citizen, it is enough that I should be
A most unhappy woman to have right
To your benevolence’: the heeded plea
Lies on his desk, a patch of bloodied white,
Taking the eye beside the reddening bath,
And single-minded in duplicity,
Loud in the silence of this aftermath.
Words in this painting victimize us all:
Tyro or tyrant, neither shall evade
Such weapons: reader, you grow rational
And miss those sharp intentions that have preyed
On trusting literacy here: unmanned
By generosity and words you fall,
Sprawl forwards bleeding with your pen in hand.
She worked in blood, and paint absolves the man,
And in a bathtub laves all previous stains:
She is the dark and absence in the plan
And he a love of justice that remains.
Who was more deft, the painter or the girl?
Marat’s best monument with this began,
That all her presence here’s a truthless scrawl.
For Danton
Bound to the fierce Metropolis…
– Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book X
In the autumn of 1793 – the year in which he had instituted the Revolutionary Tribunal – Danton went back to his birthplace, Arcis-sur Aube. After his return in November, he was to be arrested, tried and condemned.
Who is the man that stands against this bridge
And thinks that he and not the river advances?
Can he not hear the links of consequence
Chiming his life away? Water is time.
Not yet, not yet. He fronts the parapet
Drinking the present with unguarded sense:
The stream comes on. Its music deafens him
To other sounds, to past and future wrong.
The beat is regular beneath that song.
He hears in it a pulse that is his own;
He hears the year autumnal and complete.
November waits for him who has not done
With seeings, savourings. Grape-harvest brings
The south into the north. This parapet
Carries him forward still, a ship from Rheims,
From where, in boyhood and on foot, he’d gone
‘To see’, he said, ‘the way a king is made’,
The king that he himself was to uncrown –
Destroyed and superseded, then secure
In the possession of a perfect power