by Adam Thorpe
but we were alone on the bank.
A single boat nuzzled the crowfoot.
The whoop was when I saw the name –
I could hardly believe it. I told you
how I’d played him in the show –
the killing of Balder with the spear
of mistletoe (him on the sly)
and the hopeless ride to Hel
on Sleipnir, that refusal to cry
that made him much more evil
than trickster. Loki was a role
I’d very much enjoyed, distorting
my face to make the kids laugh
till the final enormity of malice
hissed me off (in tears). Loki’s
oars were in there, crossed like arms –
waiting demurely, it seemed. After
twilight we unlooped the chain
and sculled towards an island’s hump.
The pines withdrew, the shore became a whim
below the huddled stars. That shriek
was a rowlock. We sped forward
as the prow chuckled and the hull
incited us with gleeful squeaks
to continue, despite the leaks.
No one roared from the shore
that we were thieves. The world was
as it was, before: a huge
unpeopled wood of pine and fir
with wealds of water for the moon
alone to look in. But you were still
so scared we had to turn back then.
Tying him up, I joked about Loki
the shape-changer, how the chain
had better be knotted fast
(what the gods had said, I said)
or he’d slip it with an otter’s neck
and all night heard him scrape and slide
yards from the tent – surprised
to find him in the morning, snout
still nuzzling the crowfoot, firmly boat.
But the car wouldn’t start. No reason.
And in all of mostly dead flat Sweden
we’d parked her at the bottom of a brief
but steep slope we couldn’t get a grip on,
slipping and sliding its scree from under us
till I, for one, could have cried and cried.
GHOSTS
In memoriam. Camargue, 1995.
What faces haunt us in our sleep
out of rolling combers
come from the deep; they are our dread
that there’s not breath enough to save
the two whom we shall see
strolling over sand towards us, an age from death.
If they are limp in our arms and warm,
what wall now lies between us?
Was it the sea that delivered them so,
or have we blown too softly into their shells?
Let our lungs be taken with theirs
and stretched as trophies on the shelves of Tartarus;
amidst the kite-clattering winds
that they dragged for the elusive, silvery thing
there was air in plenty for our shouts
(as the firm heads rolled in our hands)
of despair. Let the two go well
into their separate sands;
keep about their necks their good-luck chains
and do not clothe their nakedness.
If what slipped on their flesh was our hands
scrabbling for the heart’s impatience,
its pluck, pounding our palms upon a drum
that did not sound, then do not blame us
who hold the taste of their death in our mouths,
whose skin is tainted by their failing.
They’ll come to Tartarus with the bruises
we planted: how they came by these wounds
is living’s business, not to do with there –
that life can be left so easily under a flail of blows
sufficient to strike death cold
and bring the aghast blood back to its senses
makes us wonder why the waters
should ever have delivered us
from the gilled and ghostless world
into this, induced by breath
and the profit of a certain dryness.
Limp amphibians, those who are drowned
are guests among the anchors and the amphorae;
like the other dead, they do not rest for long,
dwelling in our dreams or the gull’s mute song.
(Or are in hiding, and have not truly gone.)
PICKINGS
Our ogres’ steps of earth,
dug, yield a trove
of what they used to chuck:
keys stuck in rust’s lock,
lots of bits of pot,
jabs in glass for goats
and knobs for doors long shut
from hands; each clink is luck
or a stab of sharp loss.
Jaws laid as if meant,
hips like open wings,
the lead weight of a wine
glass, snapped at the neck.
Tins, the tines of forks,
light francs from the war,
each worth what we find
to say about it; words
strung back to phrase a dream
lost like the old dame
who lived here when le maire
was a boy (who’d see her
propped in the dark door
with a bowl of gruel, a grin),
laid to rest just where
we light up all these things.
‘She’s much too deep,’ I say –
my kids in hope she’ll rise
one day, tucked on a spade,
like the small flask I earthed
once but did not break
marked Prix 3 Frs,
‘La Miraculeuse’.
EVA
for our children
She outwitted history.
Now the memory of her runs in your blood.
You have a great-grandmother
who outwitted it, and may her
jinking ability course in you
when the guns come and you need it.
You might, you might! She, once,
was a pretty little thing –
Warsaw, timber-yards, the future as sweet.
Between that garden and us
they trundled the unimaginable
guns you couldn’t crouch from.
Cousins – she had so many cousins!
The unimaginable took them, and now
they are stranded in their frocks
in albums: pretty little things
for always. And her sister.
And her sister’s son.
She jinked while the others
stayed put, or ran too straight.
Her pride, her anger: Germans, Poles –
all pigs! Forget and forgive
in that order, that was the problem.
The tea trembling in its saucer.
She jinked to the end, in the ward:
that last, intent stare above the mask
and the sudden grip that made me lean
to whatever she was telling me,
in silence. The writer’s hand.
That grip on it. Everything else
slipped, slipping away at last.
ANOTHER BAD YEAR
Each time we look for definitions
the river rubs the bank away.
No one can say
where the edge is with any precision
for the floods come most years
flailing their detritus of trees,
the hawthorn seized
in the teeth of the surge, sheared
rock whetted on the pelted mountains.
Here was a kink scythed through
to a reach, a new
and ruthless look that’d cuff our shins
were we to stand where we did
a week ago: and here our boots stay dry
where the swirl once tried
to shock us, where our bare heels slid.
Look, a broken chain marks the mooring –
here nothing’s held sacred
or for long: the acres
splash where the barley swung, the floor
hits the ceiling and a family flees
or can’t and stops. But the rain has no routine
and doesn’t mean
to heft us under, to leave us in trees.
KING CNUT
Cnut, knotted against it, toggled and bound
like a furrier’s bale on the wharf,
marmenill from the knees down, taking it ill,
loathes the blatant ocean and possibly spits
though the wind returns it to its owner.
Knowing that this’ll mark the annals forever –
spritelier than battles lost and won, outbreeding
his sons and the sons of sons, clotted
and burred on the long cloak of repute –
he stands and does not turn, but hums
with the surf outwrestling his shins
something a child might hum to encourage sleep.
The people, cudgelled from the cliff’s summit,
merge into gulls. Cnut would like to interrogate
the sky or sail for weeks to the other edge
and shields his eyes with his hand an inch
under the crown’s unrivalled metalwork.
Either the sky contends with the swell out there
or commands it. It is relatively simple.
Only the land succumbs, lets its pebbles sink like kings.
HOT-AIR BALLOONS FROM MARSH BENHAM
None of them fret.
They bloom from the inaccessible parts of trees,
creak past our roofs
then roar
with, for God’s sake, a tongue of flame
under the hemmed-in air.
Insouciant:
exactly what they make you feel you aren’t
as the fields yield them
from where you thought
you’d be panting towards for their lives
through lustrous moths of smut.
FOSSIL
Nürnberg, 1997
for Sabine Hagenauer
The first globe was modelled here,
in Dürer’s time;
now we climb the steps of Hitler’s stadium,
tight-lipped, secretly aghast.
This is where he flipped
and the world followed, spun
by so many leather gloves
it took this pleasant park to hold them.
A playpen for demons,
their beaten childhoods, it’s fanged
by broken glass and twisted cans.
It seems too vast to be bombed,
or delivered from its past.
These are not steps, but seats;
the Romans sat on theirs
for long enough to wear out dips
but Nazi bottoms barely polished these.
Then I spot, puffing near the top,
a small shell whorled into the stone
like a birthmark,
a sort of saving scar;
what years it swam to end up here,
numbered in the lives this arena took,
whose wall-eyed thrash was never dignified
by such seniority of time but mocked,
mocks also all that loss.
ANNIVERSARY
for Jo
Butterflies iced on the wedding cake
as if my own had flown and settled there;
Mike with his home-made reflector out of card
behind him like a strange bloom, looming up
on so many feasting
who have since departed the warmth for good.
His photos show us how we stood,
not how full of winter air the cheeks were
when we kissed them, nor how fast the blood
came back like luck in the wood-lined, tin-walled hut
that day of sheer
steady joy in a polar poise of fields.
Time’s wedded to what it wields,
shirks nothing after the day; we do not know
as the happy couple or as sozzled guest
how touch and go this is, nor what misgivings
might give way to:
boredom smoulders but may not ever catch.
The crossed threshold, the dropped latch;
like a furious mist the future veils its shapes,
but not today. The past is given away
with the bride, the present toasts itself with pride
and cannot say
more than something it will not regret.
Happiness is caught with its mouth still wet,
looking shyly at us from the mirror, twelve
years on; what we really meant that day
still means, and the candid criterion of children
holds us in thrall
to their love, their here-bound and tearful being.
With glass in hand, each moment fleeing
our gaze, we’ll again not mind the empty restaurant –
the first hard frost falling as it always does
this November night; remembering the mothball vestry,
the stroke of the pen
that signed us to this forever in the parish
register of 1820: our marriage
drying on the page there only to stay
among shepherds, spinsters, clerks and milkmaids,
binders, thrashers, all the vanished trades
and teachers like us –
right back to the first, that awkward cross,
its butterfly kiss long flown from loss
not cited here but through the vestry’s door,
outside, where some names share a page again
of stone this time, and mossed, and hard to read.
So to the death,
my love: as it was said, and as I still believe.
PLAYGROUND ACCIDENT
My son’s forehead’s snickered across
yet again by thread; like tiny flies
the stitches have settled for days, but a year
and a half is the scar’s reign,
according to the doctor.
All his life remains
to bounce off where it’s hard enough
(this time a gate) for boys of eight
to bloody themselves, for grown men to wail.
Where the font-shell’s sacred water
made him cry that day in church,
I press the lint. He’s brave, now.
I remember the stain his birth made
on the carpet, its rose preserved
long after his head had been washed
of the perfumed afterbirth
that streaked it. He admires his wound
in the mirror: walking back from school
this evening, he was feinting (I saw)
with a rapier cast from air
and God knows where he was, then.
I think of war and all that wars
have done so far to our families’ pasts –
his hurt is his, not mine,
but what I bear less well
than dabbing at the flesh of my flesh
lightly split by iron
is the thought of the unknown
iron that remains:
of all this head must pass.
LICHEN
Winster’s rocks my father clambered over
welcomed you and I each morning
from the cottage window, back of Main Street.
Laval lumps like a giant’s porridge
left out all night, flanked by oaks
yet gaunt and still on the skyline.
I’d lean on the sill and stare it
into my father’s boyhood, immensely
long ago but close enough to touch,
and he in turn imagining his mother’s –
and she her mother’s in a strange skirt,
clambering the clefts and ledges to the ‘summit’.
This is my pedigree. I cling to it.
I cling to the place where the lava cooled
for as good as forever and the clump’s
endurance was surer than sunlight
for God knows how many souls in this stony dale,
measured by whatever weather brought them
to the coffin. Trees come down or grow
but rocks don’t. Neither does a skyline offer
more than the changing of light or the rim
of what is loved or hated. Nor do the houses
mean more than what is scrabbled for within –
the faces that alter as the sky does, and the barren fields.
Only the rocks were the hub, I think,
the nave through the turning wheel;
those ugly, lovely lumps I’ll one day
bring my own to (the cottage sold)
and let them clamber; and tell them how,
once, on a visit, I did the same
in schoolboy shorts and odd haircut
while my father told how he’d done likewise
day after day till the war came.
So flimsier it grows, the chain;
prehistories of hand-holds and lost squeals,
my father’s boyhood careering down the slope
in a race only the rocks reveal
the outcome of, bare against the twilight:
landmark of lives and lava,
bearer of tiny fonts in the wet,
gathering acorns in the folds
of its rough skirt between the fairy flax
and sea-complexioned assimilations
impressed on it in furry crusts
neither quite living nor dead
the clumsiest boot won’t mark
but softer to the grasp than where it’s not.
Softer, and with a million delicacies
of coarseness, of points and frills
and microscopic continents of mouths
sucking in the clean air’s wet,
the pelt of the lichen remains
rootless as paint on the outcrop,
on the bumps and ledges, in the clefts.
It grows so slowly, but it grows
and dies out under itself, carbuncles
to a bristly grey or ripples to a stain
or crawls its moss over itself once more
so rock just there looks as if it’s breathed
and has a mind, has awareness.
For lichen is more the phantom of the rock
than the desire of the rock to be covered
in fur, to rise as a living thing;
so barely clinging to the world
we know from the leaves, from the stem
