Counting Backwards
Page 26
Its stones are taken for sheep-folds,
your circle of hair
hidden beneath the brambles.
Bewick’s swans
Ahead of us, moving through time
with a skein’s precision and mystery
over the navy spaces of winter
the inter-continental migration continues.
It starts on one moment
of one season, when time ripens
down to the soft dawn chill on a feather
or the germ sprouting in winter wheat
ready to be grazed by the wild swans.
Hour by hour the birds move up the wedge
until they fly at its point, in the keen
apex, the buffet of wind.
A dark triangle of birds streams backward
and peels away and reforms like rain on glass.
Sometimes they fall almost to the white waves
then stretch their necks and call and begin
the long pull onward, leaving a swan plunged
like an untidy bundle of sheets
swept in a ship’s backwash.
See them nose the long coastline
in a glide of perfected instinct.
To their preferred feeding-grounds
they are a long arrow
shot from unimaginable nowhere.
Here they are keeled, treading
the known roughness of grass tussocks.
The private swans arch out their feathers
and preen and nourish themselves.
The mild floodlights each night
and people gathered to watch
are no stranger to the swans than the prickle
of green waiting in the wheat stripes each winter.
The sea skater
A skater comes to this blue pond,
his worn Canadian skates
held by the straps.
He sits on the grass
lacing stiff boots
into a wreath of effort and breath.
He tugs at the straps and they sound
as ice does when weight troubles it
and cracks bloom around stones
creaking in quiet mid-winter
mid-afternoons: a fine time for a skater.
He knows it and gauges the sun
to see how long it will be safe to skate.
Now he hisses and spins in jumps
while powder ice clings to the air
but by trade he’s a long-haul skater.
Little villages, stick-like in the cold,
offer a child or a farm-worker
going his round. These watch him
go beating onward between iced alders
seawards, and so they picture him
always smoothly facing forward, foodless and waterless,
mounting the crusted waves on his skates.
In the tea house
In the tea house the usual
customers sit with their cooling
tea glasses
and new pastries
sealed at the edge
with sticky droplets.
The waitress walks off,
calves solid and shapely as vases,
leaving a juicy baba
before her favourite.
Each table has bronze or white chrysanthemums
and the copper glass-stands imperceptibly
brush each other like crickets
suddenly focussed at dusk,
but the daily newspapers
dampened by steam
don’t rustle.
The tea house still has its blinds out
even though the sun is now amiably
yellow as butter
and people hurrying by raise up their faces
without abandon, briskly
talking to their companions;
no one sits out at the tables
except a travel-stained couple
thumbing a map.
The waitress reckons her cloths
watching the proprietor
while he, dark-suited, buoyant,
pauses before a customer.
Her gaze breaks upon the tea-house
like incoming water
joining sandbanks swiftly and
softly moving the pebbles,
moving the coloured sugar and coffee
to better places,
counting the pastries.
Florence in permafrost
Cold pinches the hills around Florence.
It roots out vines, truffles for lemon trees
painfully heated by charcoal
to three degrees above freezing.
A bristling fir forest
moves forward over Tuscany.
A secret wood
riddled with worm and lifeless
dust-covered branches
stings the grass and makes it flowerless,
freezing the long-closed eyelids of Romans.
They sleep entrusted to darkness
in the perpetual, placid, waveless
music of darkness.
The forest ramps over frontiers and plains
and swallows voluble Customs men
in slow ash. A wind sound
scrapes its thatching of sticks.
Blind thrushes in the wood blunder
and drop onto the brown needles.
There are no nests or singing-places.
A forest of matchwood and cheap furniture
marches in rows. Nobody harvests
its spongey woods and makes the trunks sigh
like toy soldiers giving up life.
All over Italy and northward
from fair Florence to München
and the cold city of Potsdam
the forest spreads like a pelt
on meadows, terraces, riverbanks
and the shards of brick houses.
It hides everywhere from everywhere
as each point of perspective
is gained by herds of resinous firs.
There may be human creatures
at nest in the root sockets.
They whicker words to each other
against the soughing of evergreens
while the great faces of reindeer
come grazing beside the Arno.
Missile launcher passing at night
The soft fields part in hedges, each
binds each, copse pleats
rib up the hillside.
Darkness is coming and grass
bends downward.
The cattle out all night
eat, knee-deep, invisible
unless a headlight arcs on their mild faces.
The night’s damp fastens, droplet by droplet,
onto the animals.
They vibrate to the passing of a missile launcher
and stir
their patient eyelashes.
A blackbird
startled by floodlights
reproduces morning.
Cattle grids tremble and clang,
boots scrape
holly bursts against wet walls
lost at the moment of happening.
FROM
The Apple Fall
(1983)
For my parents
The marshalling yard
In the goods yard the tracks are unmarked.
Snow lies, the sky is full of it.
Its hush swells in the dark.
Grasped by black ice on black
a massive noise of breathing
fills the tracks;
cold women, ready for departure
smooth their worn skirts
and ice steals through their hands like children
from whose touch they have already been parted.
Now like a summer
the train comes
beating the platform
with its blue wings.
The women stir. They sigh.
Feet slide
warm on a wooden sta
irway
then a voice calls and
milk drenched with aniseed
drawls on the walk to school.
At last they leave.
Their breathless neighbours
steal from the woods, the barns,
and tender straw
sticks to their palms.
A cow here in the June meadow
A cow here in the June meadow
where clouds pile, tower above tower.
We lie, buried in sunburn,
our picnic a warm
paper of street tastes,
she like a gold cloud
steps, moony.
Her silky rump dips
into the grasses, buffeting
a mass of seed ready to run off in flower.
We stroll under the elder, smell
wine, trace blackfly along its leaf-veins
then burning and yawning we pile
kisses onto the hot upholstery.
Now evening shivers along the water surface.
The cow, suddenly planted stands – her tender
skin pollened all over –
ready to nudge all night at the cold grasses,
her udder heavily and more heavily swinging.
Zelda
At Great Neck one Easter
were Scott
Ring Lardner
and Zelda, who sat
neck high in catalogues like reading cards
her hair in curl for
wild stories, applauded.
A drink, two drinks and a kiss.
Scott and Ring both love her –
gold-headed, sky-high Miss
Alabama. (The lioness
with still eyes and no affectations
doesn’t come into this.)
Some visitors said she ought
to do more housework, get herself taught
to cook.
Above all, find some silent occupation
rather than mess up Scott’s vocation.
In France her barriers were simplified.
Her husband developed a work ethic:
film actresses; puritan elegance;
tipped eyes spilling material
like fresh Americas. You see
said Scott they know about work, like me.
You can’t beat a writer for justifying adultery.
Zelda
always wanted to be a dancer
she said, writhing
among the gentians that smelled of medicine.
A dancer in a sweat lather is not beautiful.
A dancer’s mind can get fixed.
Give me a wooden floor, a practice dress,
a sheet of mirrors and hours of labour
and lie me with my spine to the floor
supple secure.
She handed these back too
with her gold head and her senses.
She asks for visits. She makes herself hollow
with tears, dropped in the same cup.
Here at the edge of her sensations
there is no chance.
Evening falls on her Montgomery verandah.
No cars come by. Her only visitor
his voice, slender along the telephone wire.
Annunciation off East Street
The window swings and squeaks in the sun.
Mary says to the angel: ‘Come.
My husband is sleepy.
You’re rapid and warm-winged.’
First Elizabeth, breathless,
ties up her dates in her heart.
How can a woman be so fortunate?
‘Precious baby,’ they write on her chart.
Elizabeth the ageing primipara
reminded of her ancestress Sarah
who also slept with an old man.
Bearded, whuffling,
his flesh drew like chicken-skin.
Mary sat with Elizabeth
chopping up parsley, their breath
pregnant, settling the room.
Here Elizabeth crouched for six months
uterus bubbling
while Zacharias snipped the altar flame.
‘So it turns out at last.
You and the holy spirit –
I guessed it.
We’re both gigantic
at night, feeding our great babies.
I gorge where no one can see me,
count days, walk tiptoe
still fearing the bloody trickle.’
Mary answered her laughing:
‘Elizabeth, let’s tell them everything!’
The Polish husband
The traffic halted
and for a moment
the broad green avenue
hung like a wave
while a woman crossing
stopped me and said
‘Can you show me my wedding?
– In which church is it going to be held?’
The lorries hooted at her
as she stood there on the island
for her cloak fell back
and under it her legs were bare.
Her hair was dyed blonde
and her sad face deeply tanned.
I asked her ‘What is the name of your husband?’
She wasn’t sure, but she knew his first name was Joe,
she’d met him in Poland
and this was the time for the wedding.
There was a cathedral behind us
and a sign to the centre of the town.
‘I am not an expert on weddings,’
I said, ‘but take that honey-coloured building
which squats on its lawns like a cat –
at least there’s music playing inside it.’
So she ran with her heels tapping
and the long, narrow folds of her cloak falling apart.
A veil on wire flew from her head,
her white figure ducked in the porch and blew out.
But Joe, the Polish man. In the rush of this town
I can’t say whether she even found him
to go up the incense-heavy church beside him
under the bridal weight of her clothes,
or whether he was one of the lorry drivers
to whom her brown, hurrying legs were exposed.
The damson
Where have you gone
small child,
the damson bloom
on your eyes
the still heap
of your flesh
lightly composed
in a grey shawl,
your skull’s pulse
stains you,
the veins slip deep.
Two lights burn
at the mouth of the cave
where the air’s thin
and the tunnels boom
with your slippery blood.
Your unripe cheeks cling
to the leaves, to the wall,
your grasp unpeels
and your bruises murmur
while blueness clouds
on the down of your eyes,
your tears erode
and your smile files
through your lips like a soldier
who shoots at the sky
and you flash up in silver;
where are you now
little one,
peeled almond,
damson bloom?
In Rodmell Garden
It’s past nine and breakfast is over.
With morning frost on my hands I cross
the white grass, and go nowhere.
It’s icy: domestic. A grain
of coffee burns my tongue. Its heat
folds into the first cigarette.
The garden and air are still.
I am a stone and the world falls from me.
I feel untouchable – a new planet
where life knows it isn’t safe to begin.
From silver flakes of ash I shape
a fin and watch it with anguish.
I hear app
les rolling above me;
November twigs; a bare existence –
my sister is a marvellous
dolphin, flanking her young.
Her blood flushes her skin
but mine is trapped. Occasional moments
allow me to bathe in their dumb sweetness.
My loose pips ripen. My night subsides
rushing, like the long glide of an owl.
Raw peace. A pale, frost-lit morning.
The black treads of my husband on the lawn
as he goes from the house to the loft
laying out apples.
The apple fall
In a back garden I’m painting
the outside toilet in shell and antelope.
The big domestic bramley tree
hangs close to me, rosy and leafless.
Sometimes an apple thumps
into the bushes I’ve spattered with turpentine
while my brush moves with a suck
over the burnt-off door frame.
Towels from the massage parlour
are out on the line next door:
all those bodies sweating into them