Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  The cold sheets taut, undented,

  All the meaningless lights-outs.

  History

  The child is father to the man, they say,

  And sometimes you can have the fancy

  That all the creatures of history are children.

  We are the only sad, wise grown-ups now.

  To have lived in their day!

  On a sledge, say, in St Petersburg, in 1904.

  Or on the old ranch, out west,

  Before Pearl Harbor, chasing the kicking maverick,

  Watching the still wet foal find its legs.

  Those simple, carefree times!

  Borrowers

  Who’d have credited it fifty years ago?

  This genie in our wallet:

  Yes, O master, it shall be so.

  Was it a trick perhaps, we thought at first,

  But, ‘Live now, pay later,’ came the cry

  And, not to be left out, we took it up

  With interest. Look at us living now.

  So does that mean for those who came before

  The rule was: Pay now, live later?

  So it seems. Poor fools.

  Life was always over the rainbow then.

  And some of them paid the highest price

  And never lived later at all,

  Lying where they do

  In Africa, Burma, Italy or France

  Or where all the dreamed-of treasure lies,

  If not over the rainbow, under the sea.

  Credit where it’s due, but they never knew

  The sweet scam of living on it.

  Judy Garland made them cry,

  Madonna made us buy.

  And the ones still left from those sad days

  Shuffle now round Happy Homes, or,

  Worse, wait bedless in some corridor,

  Their cheated faces saying, I paid, I paid—for this.

  So how shall it be for us

  When our day of reckoning comes?

  Having had our run of plastic bliss

  Shall we all topple nobly,

  Smiling fair’s-fair smiles,

  Into the black pit? Singing as we go,

  Oh but we lived, boy, how we lived,

  Bye-bye.

  The Virtuoso

  Sometimes, now it’s impossible,

  Now it’s all useless,

  He pines not for the great days,

  The tours, the concert halls,

  The roar of orchestras and applause,

  But for days, long ago,

  When he’d make his way

  To the Academy. Some crisp morning

  In autumn that seemed there

  Just for him. Leaves on the cobbles.

  The sun glittering along alleyways.

  People passing, muffled, gloved,

  In little clouds of steam.

  His own hands, of course, were mittened,

  And held, before he left (his mother

  Filled the bowl), in hot water.

  He’d hug them, even so,

  Under his armpits. On Wilhelmstrasse

  The tram bells rang.

  Mornings he’d feared and loved.

  One of those mornings (it was all still a dream)

  When he’d climb those stone stairs,

  Enter that tall, stern, merciless chamber,

  Take up his instrument,

  Take up his bow,

  And (why this morning, what

  Was magic about this morning?)

  Everything sang.

  We Both Know

  We both know, we both knew.

  It hovers now around us when we meet

  Like some trick of light.

  And those images of what might have been

  Can’t be so different now

  From images of things that really were,

  Memory and longing amounting to the same.

  Our eyes meet. We never say, we never will.

  Is this the sweetest, surest thing, in fact?

  A poise, a tact unknown to the young.

  We burned but never were consumed,

  This soft ash keeping in the fire.

  Breadcrumbs

  Once, just glancing through the window

  (Why should it have fixed him in his place?)

  He saw his wife, with breadcrumbs for the birds,

  Standing at the kitchen door.

  Just a woman in a doorway with a breadboard,

  A streak of sunlight, on a dull day, touching her hair,

  But also his wife.

  She never looked up to catch his stare.

  Now that she’s gone from his life

  And he doesn’t know what to do with the years,

  He walks round galleries, and before

  Those pictures painted by the Dutch—

  Bits of yards, bits of rooms, a door, a figure,

  Bits of nothing much—

  He finds it hard to choke the tears.

  The Trespasser

  He never could quite grasp it,

  A boy in school assembly:

  ‘Forgive us our trespasses …’

  What kind of word was that?

  He only understood the sense

  That had to do with property,

  Or with not being on it.

  Trespassers were people

  Who weren’t supposed to be there.

  And wasn’t that, he knew by then,

  Exactly where he was at?

  An intruder in this place:

  Common mishap of us all.

  And wasn’t that the simple trick of it,

  To know that you’d be always

  On the wrong side of the fence?

  He knew it even as he mumbled

  Through those morning prayers,

  Meek expression on his face.

  It led him to a life (as he would call

  It later) of ‘adventure’:

  Con man and wife-stealer to the gentry,

  Maestro of the sham,

  Always creeping over someone else’s carpet,

  Always stealing down someone else’s stairs

  (Always stealing anyway).

  Not a ‘stranger in this world’, as some

  Weird people liked to say,

  Oh no, but just a trespasser.

  Chekhov at Melikhovo

  Of course, a doctor, he knew.

  He’d never grow old.

  All through those quick June nights

  The yellow light burned in his window

  While the moths danced in and out

  And the scent of hay and honeysuckle

  Failed to distract him.

  As if he needed, for his true mania,

  These mere remissions in the summer fever,

  This cool, dark flavour of brevity.

  And he’d sleep, anyway, like a dead weight,

  Like some useless thing,

  Through the long boring fire of day.

  Watched

  Once, there were our parents to watch over us

  And God, of course (we were told), looking down,

  And it was a comfort bigger than we knew then,

  Not to know the loneliness which we know now

  Of our own devices.

  To be watched. Isn’t that the trick?

  Isn’t that the knack of those characters

  Up there on the screens,

  To whom we glue our eyes?

  They are watched—we ourselves confirm it.

  They have us to turn to, us to thank.

  If only life had an audience, a theatre for each one of us.

  Watched. Saved.

  Extinction

  What do ten vanished species of moth or mollusc

  Matter to you or me?

  The world will have gone before it is gone.

  Or the hieroglyphics of the ancients?

  Or even the quaint anachronism of a still-current phrase?

  ‘Changing horses in midstream.’

  Leave all
that to the specialists and saddos.

  We’re not special, you and I,

  Or sad.

  The world will have gone before it is gone.

  The Anatomist

  Of course he remembers it,

  The funeral, the procession, the crowds

  And (as if by command) a weeping sky.

  In those days even the weather adopted style.

  Of course he remembers. The great weight

  Of importance, like those pressing clouds,

  That somehow he had to shoulder now—

  ‘Brave little man’, as they called him.

  Only six, but how could he forget?

  His mother’s hand clutching his (everyone

  Noticed that), as if he had to steady her.

  And later, in private, her hugs, her tears,

  As if he were some leftover part of him.

  But she married again inside two years.

  And that, really, was the whole story:

  The young wife, from the beginning,

  There to adorn her husband’s glory.

  And that’s why there’d been that gap not just

  Of decades but of pretty well everything

  Between himself and him. Six years!

  ‘But aren’t you proud?’ they’d say. ‘You must

  Be proud to have been his son.’ And yes,

  He’d say, for decency’s and simplicity’s sake.

  Though pride never really came into it,

  Except, maybe, on that grey, wet morning,

  The plumed horses stamping and steaming

  (How like a fairy tale it would one day seem).

  But mostly what he felt was the great, grey yawning

  Of his own decades stretched before him.

  How could they be anything but lesser, small?

  Not pride, not pride at all.

  And when, later, they came, the biographers

  And researchers, asking for his memories,

  His ‘child’s-eye view’, he had the perfect

  Excuse. It was never exactly like lying.

  I was only six, he’d stress, and he was always—though

  Don’t get me wrong—a rather distant figure.

  He didn’t say: What I remember is a man dying.

  That house, that dreadful room, that bed.

  It was a long slow illness, you know,

  Not a ‘valiant battle’ like the papers said.

  What I actually remember is a wasting, shrinking

  Body, what happens (but I was only small)

  To any mortal human animal.

  Later, as it turned out (raised by a grudging

  Aunt, who had her secret viewpoint too),

  He took up medicine. Or not medicine so much

  As that strictly scientific stuff: anatomy, pathology.

  Became not undistinguished in his way.

  Students would whisper now and then

  (There was nothing he could do about the name):

  Yes, he’s the son. But he would always say,

  Offering them his prefatory remark or two:

  What, ladies and gentlemen, is our study?

  It’s the study, ladies and gentlemen,

  Of how we’re all the same.

  Civilization

  Would you have it any other way?

  This cosy collusion in the trivial,

  Much fuss and much indecision,

  Then much preening

  Over a new pair of shoes.

  You want drum rolls and proclamations

  And noble leanings?

  Would you have it any other way?

  Unlooked-for

  These moments that come like gifts,

  Ordinary moments that aren’t so ordinary at all.

  Like the sun on a cool day

  Suddenly warming your neck.

  My God, this is all you could wish,

  Simple unlooked-for heaven.

  While a thousand engineered occasions,

  A thousand worked-at culminations fail.

  Once, perhaps, you’d hardly have noticed.

  You’d have rolled your shoulders, pettishly,

  Under this unsolicited kiss.

  Just life, for God’s sake,

  It’s just what life brings,

  Plenty more of this.

  Now you’re not so foolish.

  You do the second, the double-blessed thing,

  You heed it, mark it,

  This unremarkable bliss.

  Affection

  And affection too.

  Not love, it’s true, no fires within,

  Just simple affection, flickering from skin to skin.

  Not lust or seduction or desire or possession,

  Just simple affection,

  Warming the air in between.

  There Without Us

  We’ve all been to such places,

  Where the brambles shudder in the wind

  And the branches creak up above

  And rain batters the leaves.

  We went there once when that sudden squall

  Held up our summer walk,

  And waited, watching everything

  As you eye the furniture in a stranger’s room,

  And thought: we’re here now and might never have been

  And soon won’t be, and places such as these,

  Pierced with birds and secret life,

  Must hardly ever get or need a human visitor.

  It must be there still, while this rain beats

  On the window. We think of it suddenly:

  That place where we stood once

  Under sighing trees—

  The smell of roots and deep earth,

  As if our nostrils were required for it—

  And think of all such places

  That are there without us now,

  All the places where we’ve been but haven’t.

  Homings

  Salmon still passage through the estuaries,

  Geese arrow the heavens,

  Turtles tunnel the oceans.

  When shall we tell them we have ravaged their mysteries?

  Whom shall we choose as our spokesman?

  Priam

  Maybe we all end up like Priam,

  Not one of the heroes wreathed in glory,

  Just the man who gets to be king of Troy,

  Father of a hot-headed, cock-happy boy

  Who steals a wife and starts a war.

  The usual wretched soap-opera story.

  But at your level it has to mean more,

  So just when you’ve made your pile and settled down

  And built your topless towers of Ilium,

  You’ve a siege on your hands and now, what’s more,

  This crazy horse outside your front door.

  Was it for this you strove and pushed your luck,

  Just to get pulled back into the muck?

  Who, given the choice, would be a king?

  But you were, and you took it.

  Now here’s this weirdest thing:

  A lull, a silence everywhere. A horse.

  You look around, you stroke your royal chin. Of course.

  Maybe you had your glory all the time,

  And this is what it means: you win.

  A horse. It’s not your common sort of offering.

  Maybe it stands for you, for Priam in his kingly prime.

  Best take a look, best take it in.

  The Bookmark

  All the books you meant to read

  Or reread or try again,

  Having tried once long ago and failed:

  There they sit, spurned, on your shelves.

  And one wet weekend you actually reach

  For an old crinkly-spined paperback and settle down,

  But something stops you before you’ve begun:

  The bus ticket falling from page thirty-one.

  A bus ticket, yellowed and frail,

  Like the pages themselves.

 
And what do you do?

  You read the bus ticket, not the book,

  Marvelling at its weird historicality,

  The story it seems to want to tell.

  Bus tickets don’t come like that any more,

  Nor at that price. You wonder what

  The journey was for such a fictional fare.

  From where to where? And when?

  But mostly you puzzle who the person was

  Who bought this ticket and instead of doing

  All the annihilating things that are done

  To bus tickets, slipped it casually

  Yet fatefully, like a message in a bottle,

  Between the pages of a never reopened novel.

  You’re lost in the bus ticket, you forget the book.

  You know, of course, it must have been you.

  Touch

  Where do we really live?

  Where is the centre of command?

  In our eyes? Our brains?

  In this thing that beats in our chest?

  Or is it in our hands?

  Those canny little twins,

  So good at fending for themselves,

  We can almost forget they’re there.

  Nothing speaks more

  Of our time here than our hands.

  Look how they weather and gnarl.

  A hand is like a face (and sometimes lovelier)

  And what can a face do, make, mend?

  A hand has a mind, a memory surer

  Than that stuff in our heads:

  Ask any musician or draughtsman.

  And what, in a word, do all wise masters teach

  Their daunted apprentices?

  Your hands will do it, give it time,

  Your hands will tell you what to do.

  Aren’t we all apprentices to our hands?

  And isn’t the true mastery in touch?

  Think of it, now you’ve come this far.

  Look at your faithful hands.

  Aren’t you the faithful one, led like the blind

  By those things before your eyes?

  Think of all the moments, all the tests.

  How many times, over and over,

  Have those dumb creatures

  Instructed you in the art of life?

  How to reach out and do exactly what is needed.

  How to comfort, caress, cherish, punish, beg.