by Adam Thorpe
Up, down, down, up. Horizontally speaking,
the infinite depends on our feet.
There is nothing we could do that we cannot.
Only the tiger appals us more
than our own intelligence. Even the thought
of its big pelt shaking off snow
might bring one leaping through a clever brow.
12
There are various matters to be seen to,
but I need the landscape to swallow
more than procreational activity
this afternoon, so I drift to the boulder.
Great danger attends the lone one, as once I
will be old. Anyway, here is the view.
Tundra. White birch holding purple thickets
either before or after. Whin, too.
Right now it’s in a crucial phase of sheer
lichen. When I stand up, the sky does too!
13
The fuss attending the corpse is birds.
Meat is everyone’s prerogative.
We’re hauling on tendons with our teeth
at least twice since, plus the singe of moss.
Your lights bother me at times, in my sleep.
They criss-cross and spear and dazzle
as up they growl or grind like bears
the crag of my nightmares. Our refuge must be
plumb in the way, just as over the grasslands
clouds make their shadows move swifter than them.
14
In the upside-down bit of the lake
the plovers are just as good at swimming
as their aerial partners: they imitate
so exactly I have the heretical thought
that they might be the same, that a being
can occupy two places without splitting
and roar to scare the weakness away.
My partner, struggling with a duck, looks up
and hisses. I have brought, of course, a now
extinct genus of wolf the width of my fear.
15
From the moment she invented the cradle, perhaps.
Where our vague recognition, advance,
took shape and wing, fluttering in our heads.
Our heads became cages before the cage was invented.
Now we think in these flocks of geese and starling.
Some with the arrow-heads of geese.
Some with the twirling scarves of starling.
I think the geese are a head ahead, frankly,
barking the ghosts to their slumbers.
The noise these thoughts make affronts, but they pass.
16
The wind hauls the dawn into our home
for the night, making us leave it
for fear of ceasing on the spot. The boulders
here bear smiles of lichen: inviting types
between whose tufts of emergent firs
all manner of cracks might open up
into chasms: we keep to the tops, leaping
like goats, the type with curious hind legs
that swiftly dissolved through the following epoch,
the one that was merciless with oddities.
17
In the period of the juniper berry’s ripeness
and the blue bilberry, we confronted a fire.
A high bluff of air had decided to flame.
It flamed and walked. Pine trees toppled
towards us. It flamed and walked quite steadily on
through the bilberry fields and the ripe juniper.
The sky took it as its lover. The procreational
activity of wind and flame was a wonder
that singed our foreheads and brought us the pain
continuance entails and which death runs from.
18
The seer said here will be traffic. Where the pipeline
runs unattended, legends of Yetis. The rocks will smile
and many people will tumble in a heap. Big ideas
will replace the long-toothed tiger in nightmares
and many the mammoth never born, herds and herds of them:
like a great inconvenience to the earth
bravely borne, the great pelts trailing juniper branches
and literally quivering at each percussion
of ice on hoof not equipped for something
he can’t quite see, but is longer than an afternoon.
19
The shrubs are gathering in
their signs and symbols:
it is winter again.
So frail, the summer,
I would like to plait it
like grass, and keep my place
in the book of my life
forever, now, here.
I’ve noticed this is not possible.
Something is always ushering us.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following:
Critical Quarterly, Hablar de Poesia, Independent, Jellyfish Cupful,
London Review of Books, Poetry Review, Sibila.
‘Ghosts’ was commissioned by the South Bank Centre.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
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Published by Jonathan Cape 1999
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Copyright © Adam Thorpe 1999
Adam Thorpe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Jonathan Cape
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