by Adam Thorpe
for hours, sometimes: branch, blossom, bird, berry. Unfortunately born,
to arrive at the moment when promise was burned, exile,
family not buried, smoke above the ghetto, the Ukrainian colonel
head-tapping casually the queue, every other man, to the firing squad
(closest friend so tapped in front of him), Dante survived
to fire in ash his bowls that require (he said) a whole wall of white
emptiness behind, limned by the ash-breath of art.
7
Lead mines such as they were dug by Romans
on moors where the Thorpes had land, mute tussocks
coming to no more than a few acres ‘somewhere up there’ –
my father waving his hand in the car as we passed
and me yearning, on grassed slopes mottled by cow’s dung gazing
and on the buckled barbed wire about the lead mines
‘fallen into disrepair’, deep and dangerous, harbouring
skulls of those who called for a while, and no one to hear them.
8
Bramble-hid, the little fall of stream that no one sees,
night-noise of tiny Niagara roar under the clear stars
and smell of water. I once made love under a tree
with a clear view over pasture heights
and was barely screened, wincing at roots
and acorns, the clue of dead leaves on the duffel
brushed before home. The origin of writing is indents
in bare skin, verse of water under the covers hidden,
love-cry under the sky’s openness in March’s Berkshire cold,
lying on uncomfortable roots and sheep-dung, exposed to one’s land.
9
I knew waiting for school’s boarding by the bingo hall in Watford
the coach would come, the inevitability of deathly things,
sad things, the sadness in me always like a thorn, coach-sick –
then staring at my reflection in the coach’s glass
as it trembled up the broad road past homes and windows
to the black Wiltshire spaces, downs, like space itself
a vacuum into which I am thrown, the pure unknown,
reluctant, sickly with fear, bullies’ thrones on knees before,
sick for home or for my own career, not bred for this,
England-outsider, not quite stranger but not friend either, nor foe.
10
Vapour hazing the valley, mournful all morning, though
at two in the afternoon the sun breaks through
and curtains the view in shafts below dark cloud,
hill after hill descending to the plain in blues and greys,
watercolour country today, but oil usually,
sharp, though all grey shades say painters when the sun’s not
glittering on the leaves of ilex, every
hill draped with ilex as downlands with grass,
the breaks of vines autumnal in red and orange,
the impossible-to-capture groves of olives
puffed like smoke, and the sharp little flames of poplars.
Countless times I’ve been up here behind
our house, yet never described it; Blanche’s castle
sitting on its saddle over haze like a conning tower
and sprawled around it the sea-green pines and ilex,
the odd half-buried roof of a farmhouse down to the village
and way out sometimes the line of silvering sea when the light is clean
and the sharp little teeth of the Alps on their mimicking cloud.
11
Not surer than this as stone is, slabs of it,
sunlit in Nîmes where a Roman company
slumped to from Egypt conquerings, notable massacres –
war-excused as always have been, bombs and civilians
marrying in pain’s ensign of smoke, ghastly
wet wounds glimpsed then talk only of equipment,
Rome’s hardware the same though not these planes,
not the finesse screwed up to such destruction, quarry
a pinpoint number, heartbeat turned to vague green star
and out of it all Nîmes’ beauty coming like a captured woman
freed on the plain, not crocodile at all on its lead
but a woman, graceful, in ivory of old stone
and olivey skins, Spanish-Arab, French like an afterthought,
the water whelming there in the Jardins de la Fontaine
that Henry James thought perfect in its way,
the mysterious source of water poured like a blessing,
oasis in the dry plain of suddenly-pointless mammoth aqueduct
as some time we shall have no use for anything essential now.
HONESTY
Lunaria rediviva
There is honesty everywhere, we see,
on our long road back from Germany
this Easter of war; sprawled on verges
and road-banks, scattering its lilac,
honesty was even in that grey village
with its two routiers and the alcoholic chef
(thundered through by lorries escaping the tolls),
where we searched for a bed. It’s rained all day,
and honesty thrives on the wet slopes
and the earth-spills near those broken sheds
of some long-abandoned enterprise
or in the slim gleam of the beechwood.
Honesty, though wild, is rare in the wild
yet here it seems to outdo the rest,
the ramsons and knapweed and stitchwort.
A few days back in Germany we saw it
garden-tamed, filling a bed
in a village encircled by the Teutoburg forest
where Arminius fell upon the legions of Rome,
whooping and wailing and wheeling
into them until they were as gone
as extinct species, felled like trees
under the darker trees, armour
thumping on the soft pine-mould
through the screams and moans, the snortings
of gored horses. The honesty
was serried into a square between
a pink rose-bush and the mown lawn
where plastic toys were liberally
scattered; it was almost a statement,
the toys and the honesty, though the villa
itself was as trim as could be. I wondered, then,
whether honesty’s look – gawky stems
where petals attempt some point and class
against rough-toothed, careless leaves –
is a fall from cultivated grace
or one step up from a former state:
is ascent or decline . . . At any rate, I allow it
to flower where it will in my own
garden; a wind’s cast off
from last year’s blooms, the few always
appear in a new position, half
a surprise, half an expectation – their flat
seed-pods gathered to be dried, silvery
as coins once the film’s peeled
then tarnished by months of household dust
to something awkward caught on sleeves . . .
as if honesty in all its states is made
to be a not-quite thing, neither one
nor the other, neither here nor there;
a half-cock, an in-between, too common,
too rare. I would have it sown
in thick clouds everywhere, that honesty
might rise, unexpected, from rifts and cracks
in drifts of lilac, like thunder, like seas,
happy with its wildness and not waiting on us
to judge or decide, who know only lies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With grateful thanks to the following publications where some of these poems first appeared: Hudson Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Metre, London Review of
Books, PN Review.
‘Honesty’ was commissioned for broadcast by BBC Radio 3’s The Verb.
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Epub ISBN: 9781446442746
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Published by Jonathan Cape 2003
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Copyright © Adam Thorpe 2003
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First published in Great Britain in 2003 by
Jonathan Cape
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