Cusp

by Graham Mort

  void of memory: nothing

  nil, nix. French dark is the old

  song of absence and benighted

  prayer. It’s the hiss of blood

  in narrowed veins; the shaved

  throat of harvested fields

  killed game, baled straw

  the inheld breath of woods

  where a barn owl floats

  in a pale aura, its sudden

  migraine bringing you awake.

  French dark has the numb

  weight of human guilt where

  the living struggle to exist like

  thoughts without history;

  by day it’s sun-struck glass, a

  a windscreen blazing, a straight

  road, your furious blinking

  startling its after-image –

  that inky thumbprint on your eyes.

  Fricative

  The poem was wary but

  in love: it set out in search of its

  Other, it set out on sturdy

  legs through buttercups and sheep

  shit, through mare’s tail and

  lady’s smock and eyebright’s light

  hail on the grass; it scooted

  like a baby rabbit in fear of the new

  life it had; it eeled through

  a hulled swan’s ribs then into a blue

  plastic bag, as beautiful as

  anything it had seen because everything

  was good, because it was in

  love with its voice, with crushed herbs

  black-bellied clouds, the

  unassailable smell of things – scents

  of dirt, death or procreation –

  ewes trailing their afterbirth, dugs

  tight with milk, tight as the

  poem was, sculling its skiff of images

  through rivers of grass, cloud

  creeks, fjords of tidal blue sky

  the hydrogen of galaxies.

  The little raft of words disintegrated

  and formed again with new

  meanings or without meanings:

  one minute a fridge-magnet

  babble, the next the holy bible, the

  next just itself: a poem

  dissolving into sprigs of speckled

  hawthorn blossom or a line

  of ducklings piping to their mother

  with all the uncertainty and

  certainty of a language without

  words under the lexicon

  of the clouds’ dark bellies which

  should by now have awoken

  the old fallacy. How cool, how

  confident it was until it

  trod on something hidden, a thing

  formed of metal’s stiff

  grammar, its unforgiving syntax

  unfurling below a dune of

  unexpectedly hot sand; then orange

  fire and the faraway sound

  of its own legs crackling, crumpling

  everything into the shock of

  its body blown to bits – astonishing

  stumps where its lines, caesuras

  and sunlit stanzas might have tip

  toed into further doubts

  towards conclusions it could never

  reach through an everlasting

  fastidiousness, the scrupulous grace

  that is a kind of joy; its aesthetics

  a tremulous fluttering now, all ribbons

  tattered, the way metre falters

  and is recast as fricatives pent in

  the poem’s mouth to

  pronounce the other selves it

  sought and recognises

  here without affect; as if it had

  walked calmly through

  a city’s stammering walls of plate

  glass, or time’s reprise or

  a night-tarnished lake; as if it

  had trudged into the

  vastness of nothing much at all.

  Io’s Sisters

  The usual English summer:

  early heat stoking speedwell

  dog’s mercury stealing

  a march, then months

  of drizzle until rosehips

  were fading coals

  in the hedgerows

  sloes a hidden bruise

  slugs cruising a lacework

  of green and bodies coming

  home under Union Jacks

  salutes, tributes, the Last Post.

  Then on the fading cusp

  of August, cows calling

  nightlong into rain that

  pelted the village:

  knock-kneed, teats dragging

  in mud, their lungs’ bellows

  working the drenched ember

  of summer, as if Hera’s spite

  stranded them beyond

  phonetical love; their eyes

  goaded by flies, their tongues

  turning a hoarse cud of longing.

  Even in darkness

  we question their sad

  calling with the glib surety

  of words, shaping these

  smallest sounds as if glass

  had broken in our mouths

  to join up again as meaning

  measure the loss in their

  inhuman mooning yet

  still fall short of ours.

  Engorged, drooling

  teat-sore, they drag their

  banishment through wet

  fields, call for their stolen

  calves in pain so large

  so inexpressible so deep

  it erupts from the colossal

  absence they circle as if

  they have known in one

  form, one incarnation, one

  language of consonant

  delight a delicacy they

  could never speak in this

  brute sphere, nor ever be

  transfigured to themselves.

  Happened

  I saw the spider at its work, couldn’t

  help it – even after making love – even

  after Ingleborough rising through

  aluminium vapour as if streaming

  bright metallic dust. The spider, leisurely

  at the kitchen window winding its sarong

  around a louse like any butcher wrapping

  meat (my mother pulling me to the street

  corner shop to buy lungs for the cat, to

  gawp at death). The spider toiling even

  after sun had stared in at the blinds

  after the lawn’s fine grass had tilted under

  dew, adept at its old trade; even after

  pavements in Rangoon washed clean

  the monks shot down, bullets lashed

  into the neem tree; even after Iraq’s epic

  genealogy of loss, its Gilgamesh of names

  inscribed upon each day where we’d buried

  conscience the way a kill is wrapped –

  hidden – the spider skating over torn silk

  with its haversack of palpitating life.

  There was home-baked bread on the

  table, the espresso grumbling steam

  the scent of coffee, and beans dark as

  healed skin. There was honey from

  Cumbrian hives varnishing the table’s

  oak; there was the planet warming

  up, we guessed – you’ll know now how

  right we were. But what you don’t

  know was that a woman was brushing

  out her sable cloud of hair into that

  moment’s scent of lavender cologne;

  that there was a tap gushing, the

  water garrulous, then silent. Do you

  know what a spider does to live?

  Then imagine it. Then see the day lapping

  at the window, leaking in. That was

  then, you’ll say, another time, the past

  scrubbing something from your

  fingernails, but wondering idly if her

&n
bsp; breasts were warm against my

  hand, and if it happened like I said

  if it happened at all: our flat

  topped mountain’s blaze of silver

  mist, its bog cotton, harebells

  and pyre of cloud still there to see.

  Geraniums

  on the Cardiac Ward

  You brought them to

  my white room –

  white mist outside

  and faintest trees –

  three flowers purple

  as a cardinal’s hood

  each petal delicately

  etched

  elegantly opulent.

  That Indian summer

  turned to gales

  chasing paper on

  the golf course;

  the flowers lived

  three days then

  dropped at my

  bedside

  the filaments of

  each anther blown.

  I swam out from

  morphine dreams

  a golden river

  god roused from

  sleep to see them

  scattered there

  not knowing if

  I’d ever wake

  with you again.

  Then winter sun

  stark-lighting

  each window

  white sheets

  billowing to spiral

  incense-smoke

  my heart wired

  to a VDU that

  threw its skipping

  rope of life over

  all that room’s

  stalled time

  and stillness

  its dreamed-over

  days a fading draft

  of all I never

  wanted to forget.

  Montalto

  The path slinks

  above stone huts;

  derelict, dung-floored

  their stacks of dried

  olivewood inhaling

  horizons’ turquoise

  their smoke of

  burnt-down suns.

  Terraces fall

  to rosemary

  balm of valerian

  wild marjoram;

  the valley sieving

  lavender mist onto

  aprons of cedar

  and bristle pine.

  I’m naked in

  the river pool

  its sudden green

  gasping depth

  swimming its

  shoal-glimmer

  dust scrim

  indigo veil of

  butterfly wings

  the quenched

  blade chill of

  deep sunk rock.

  Martins slowmo

  above a painted

  church – arrow

  tailed, white arsed –

  they ride a soaring

  instinct only to rear

  their young in humble

  spittle-mud below: how

  like us they are to

  slum such coruscating

  visions of height

  and roofless air.

  Pylons simmer

  electrifying altitude;

  each mountain

  pass, each scraped

  out col drifts belly

  full of thunder.

  Clouds saturate

  and darken; the

  river’s sacral flow

  quickens, deepens

  to cataract my frozen

  thighs, as if I was some

  spirito del’acqua rising

  you say, laughing, bent

  double under hissing

  trees, your smile satirical

  and unconvinced

  as summer rain.

  Easter Messaging

  You text me snow on Whernside hill, a

  verge of daffodils in hail – their trembling

  carillons – then black-faced ewes

  lagged by thorns in the east wind’s numb

  degrees of ice. A continent apart, I mail you

  the brief dusk of Abuja, the way those hills

  like puys behind the town go milky grey

  before a storm, that neon sign pinking a

  street of royal palms, cars’ headlamps

  silaging the night; then remember

  to say that yesterday I saw a net of stars

  cast from a mango hull of moon, the port

  light’s wide-eyed constancy. Now a

  space in which I brew black tea. Then yours

  to tell our son is home tonight to keep you

  company, down in the kitchen cutting up

  courgettes. That brings the blue vein in

  his baby neck, the way his eyes and yours

  conflate in deeper brown, sheer aureoles

  of watered silk. Here, the screen flares, a

  crushed mosquito specks my arm; at home, the fire’s

  down, he fetches logs, the door rattles in

  its frame. I’m at the window’s double pane

  where a siren scours the street below, such

  a long fall of heat ebbing at the glass. I’ll

  send you this as well, pushing words at

  pixel-glittering space, remembering

  the moon again, its birth-marked face

  yawning on the wing as we turned to land

  remembering your hand leading me to

  bed before I left again for Africa. He’s stroking

  bluesy chords; your lips are wet with Vei Cavour.

  I don’t say how I think that nothing dies, yet

  see him bent at my guitar to make its birch

  throat sing, the way he will when we go under

  grass and snow to launch the spring, the

  ecstatic feet of lambs that earth electrifies.

  Moon Illusion

  Our biggest moon all winter

  ripens over Kingsdale, one day away

  from fullness, left-side licked

  the way a horse laps snow.

  A roan mare whinnies for her

  mate; I passed a horse and rider in

  the dusk, remember now she

  raised her whip to greet me.

  Moon floats towards a snow

  dappled ridge; this moment

  is cochineal, sunset blazing

  at a cleft in basalt cloud.

  Moss on the paddock fence is

  this amazing green; my heart

  pads out towards night’s deepest

  shades, the licked moon’s

  illusion, the mare’s inexplicable

  loss; the way all sense of scale

  is changed this close to dying

  where everything is huge.

  Cusp

  December sky turns fire to earth

  Sagittarius to Capricorn, mutable

  to cardinal, the archer to the goat.

  Windows’ white cataracts of

  slowly pouring glass are blind

  to the thinning milk of dawn.

  Sleep’s vapour leaves our mouths:

  in mine a jagged cusp of tooth my

  tongue works, raw with speech.

  Five degrees of frost sift over

  fields; rabbits frozen to the road

  their guts scarved out by crows.

  Sky is cooling steel, the waterfall

  a stiffened crinoline; cow parsley

  a paper-cut, air the thinnest blade.

  Herdwicks limp between thistles

  fresh soil mounds: moles thresh

  soil’s black curd below, breasting

  revetments, tunnelling towards

  faint susurrations where worms

  glide in mucous, eating the dark.

  We leave the house to itself, chose

  a route, hike all day, silent as if our

  thoughts never touch, fingers

  stung by cold’s asp, breath’s white

  grief in our hair, following the track

  to the gill’s ruined mines – their

  lost lode, slag-scatter,
milled

  spoil, stubs of clay pipes hollow as

  hawk’s bones. We creak over ice

  panes, duck under thorn trees

  rimed with spider silk: skeins of

  all their deadly industry revealed.

  We walk the valley’s shadow-side

  back to a house dug so deep in

  clay no weight of coal can heat

  its glacial stone; flames braze

  the fire-back, suck air through

  cracked sash and dropped door.

  No moon blurs clouds; a single

  planet sets at the horizon, its slowly

  swinging plumb line telling depths

  of night so cold we hardly sleep – the

  way we were as kids in our unheated

  homes, the future somewhere else

  but always curving back to us.

  Each word hurts my tongue which

  finds a chasm in the small space

  mortality begins. Tonight, we

  enter a new house, the night sky’s

  shattered ice of stars, only

  part awake, sapped by the febrile

  cholera of dreams, our fading heart

  rate, cold’s enchantment, the

  clock’s false account of each

  inseparable moment – cusp

  of love’s last, longest state.

  ELECTRICITY

  èle’ctric a & n Of, charged with, capable of generating, operated or produced by, electricity; suddenly exciting, as if caused by electricity. – OED

  “Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.” – Michael Faraday