New Poetries VII

by Michael Schmidt

  But everything was in English: Favourite Watch Co,

  Fifteen Years Guarantee. Eighty-six years on,

  Still ticks comfortably. They must have turned them out

  With Singapore in mind, for planters, smoking concerts,

  The Straits Settlements, maybe as far west as Calcutta,

  For the leather-faced conquerors, always from colder farms.

  Business is business. Belongs in some Waiting Room,

  Some dead-end branch line somewhere high: tea growing, mist.

  Somehow the old thing made it farther, past the palms,

  All the way past the tired pirates, past the shimmering coast,

  On, on, to the dusk-glad harbour. Cargo. Oriental provenance.

  Some good pieces. But still not this one really after all.

  These days, it hangs on a wall four hundred years older,

  In England, among snow and rain, fields and ditches.

  You could imagine this as home, somewhere to stay.

  But really it’s about explaining what happened once,

  And about what will happen later on, long beyond

  Anything we might guess now. About the hours till it’s day.

  Diagnosis

  They’ve just told you, and quite unexpectedly

  Your mind walks out of your head and stands

  On the other side of the room, frowning.

  Somewhere else, a duck makes its way over a lake;

  There are stationary locomotives in sidings,

  Their beautiful lights still on, in the morning.

  The doctor uses doctor’s words, going fast,

  Hoping to get past the shadow at the edge.

  One of your two selves asks: What have I just been told?

  They will tell you a second time, leaving out nothing,

  Stepping carefully on every gaudy hope

  As a woodsman treads out camp-fire embers.

  The word means: insight, ‘knowledge that goes through’.

  But through you goes only rage and flames

  That are both dread, and the defiance of dread –

  Those two tall gentlemen who have supervised

  All history, how we came out of the dark,

  And how we still fight it, always and everywhere.

  Later the same day, you step outside and find

  Buildings and trees have taken up new positions.

  Someone industrious has scrubbed the world with light.

  Double History

  Floyd and Sookie pass out cigarettes;

  Everyone takes a breather.

  It’s hot as a chimney, has been since first light

  Somewhere in the valley

  A river ladles from pool to pool.

  Every so often, when it least ought,

  Something knocks on the inside of the vault.

  The gate in the wall for once is unlocked,

  And an apple garden is just off the street.

  Someone’s left a basket on the path.

  History is what history begets:

  A cover story usually, neither

  The image nor the memory of sight,

  A lightless alley,

  Something they do at school.

  Not this, this seismograph of thought.

  Sudden adjustment in the fault:

  The surprise of taking a wound; the heart rocked;

  A voice that says: ‘This happened’; sandalled feet

  In the stairwell; someone running a bath.

  Here’s the wood where they really killed the King.

  Here’s the town they set on fire from the sky.

  Here’s where the stone belongs.

  Someone stood here on this corner smiling,

  Watching real Romans with real swords marching by

  Whistling Latin songs.

  Towelling Dry

  We all held hands as far as the lake’s edge and then

  You walked in until it was up to your shoulders, where you stood

  Looking around you at the brown water’s lap, at intersecting rings of light

  And the smudge of blue trees on the opposing shore.

  For which reason we are now here: the woman in the water,

  Elapsed time swaying about her, and the rest of us

  On the bank, shadows behind us, conversation

  Audible at some distance, everything clearly lit except

  For this circumstance, which is you there and us here.

  We are pretending if we talk for long enough

  Then you will turn and wade out shaking off rain

  And towel dry and dress and walk back across the fields.

  Except that really we are both expecting something else

  And you will turn and swim beyond earshot

  Beyond the skim of a stone into open water where it is

  As wide as the traverse between two stars,

  Poised over fathoms of clear glass.

  September’s done

  September’s done. The elevated sky

  Burns blue like gas jets. And me and the dog,

  Both dipped in ochre, go over the stubble

  And along the edge of the wood,

  Lamp-lit with hawthorn berries, blackberries,

  And, by the fence, this one wild apple tree,

  Well-fruited, strung with globes, which says

  There was a house once, in under there

  Among the snickering wings, among

  The green maze.

  After some time, a slow-rowing heron comes past

  Filled with disdain for earthbound things,

  Angling over the field to where the road

  Dips to the ford, and the dog chases him

  Along the ground and in and out of shadow.

  These things of no significance are turned

  By autumn’s sly approach to something else,

  Arrival, maybe, or an assembly of light,

  A bit like meaning, anyway.

  Hartland Point

  An envelope of mist up here, and a cream sea under the cliff,

  Four gulls twenty feet off the geometry, vectoring,

  Sea-roof patrol, slideways, nothing to report, no fish anyhow.

  Somewhere down there you can hear the lighthouse singing,

  Sitting under the headland, dressed entirely in pearls,

  Patched into history, calling them all back, over and over.

  What I like is that they thought this up, they wanted it

  Enough to climb down, morning after morning, carrying stones,

  And build a tower in the grey-green roar, the sloping.

  Each one was dangerous, each one took years and lives.

  Promising starts would wash away; so would the careless.

  They did it for the drowned to be undrowned. For love, really.

  Anyway sometimes after a hard day you’d get a sunset.

  You could sit on the rocks and smoke a pipe,

  Looking at Lundy Island, hoping for porpoises.

  Sorry for your loss

  I don’t feel loss. Nothing is lost, you fools.

  I’m only crying because this boat won’t stop,

  I’m only sad because the running sea’s so deep.

  I want those clouds repealed,

  These stars rewound,

  I want this ocean lit exclusively by hanging planets

  Larger and better than moons.

  Perhaps then we might strike land again,

  And come ashore at Leigh,

  And go by Kinder Scout, and Arnton Fell, and Applecross,

  Or walk the Ring of Mourne together –

  Windy Gap, the Hare’s Gap – see

  Green Donard shrug the slow mist from his flank

  Very early one summer morning, very long ago.

  Fortingall

  It was probably a day just like today

  The day they brought him down from off the hill.

  You can imagine how his knees stuck up wax-white

&nb
sp; From the birch-branch litter whipped together

  Out of the last tree that he ever cut

  And his eyes that were so blue all gone into slush.

  Just like today: clouds piled like dirty snow,

  The hissing sun unseen that starts a burning in the sky,

  The wind off the mountains taking the smoke,

  And the blue bite of the river when the boys

  Climbed down together to pull up a big stone for him

  Bigger than he was anyway lying there.

  So then they turned the holy man out of his cot

  And made him come down to the chapel

  Even though it was by now raining across the glen.

  No one knew the prayers, not even the holy man,

  Who couldn’t write his name it was so long ago

  And so many dead already since the Spring.

  But after they dug the hole and put the stone on him,

  One of them came back the next day and the next

  And since they couldn’t give him the axe to sleep with

  Cut its shape instead deep in the granite stone

  To show what his father had done and how he lived

  No one knows when.

  Marvels: the yew tree has been here

  Four thousand years, and probably is really

  The oldest tree in Europe. And a daft story tells

  How a Roman envoy and his wife,

  Touring up north of the border,

  Stopped here because the baby was early,

  And named it Pontius Pilate. Also

  The mound is still there in the flat field

  Where the old woman leading her white horse

  Buried the whole village after the plague.

  But better than all of these on a day like today

  Is to stand in the churchyard by his stone

  And hear him singing and the iron ring

  Of his axe high in the woods in October.

  The Gypsy’s Chandelier

  Electric lamps illuminate

  The terrace and the trees behind,

  Where unsurprisingly we find

  The chauffeur of the potentate

  Asleep under the gate.

  This isn’t silence. There’s a shade

  Of traffic from the boulevard.

  A lone cicada in the yard

  Pipes midnight. Everything is made

  Of molecules of jade.

  French windows, opening, impose

  An amber flag along the grass.

  Four bars of conversation pass.

  A man comes with a large pink rose

  Rehearsing as he goes.

  That’s her new raincoat on the chairs,

  Balloon glass on the balustrade.

  Her lovers, and the friends just made,

  Are gathered by the pantry stairs

  Extemporising airs.

  Nothing is said and nothing spent.

  That which occurs is what occurs.

  Somebody finds a shoe. It’s hers.

  The lantern and its filament

  Irradiate what’s meant.

  Why don’t we just get out of here,

  And ditch the mermaid and the priest.

  Somewhere slightly south of east

  The foreshore burns before the feast,

  Portents and wonders will appear,

  Orion’s dog will fire the year,

  The gypsy’s chandelier.

  Lamu

  By the mangrove jetty sits the Captain

  And all his bad teeth

  Shine in the sun like ivory because

  That’s what they’re made of.

  They shine by moonlight and under oil lamps

  Because of smiling

  Constantly upon the Indian Ocean.

  Someone has thoughtlessly left a cannon

  On the waterfront

  For two hundred years. But it doesn’t work,

  Luckily for you.

  He’d make his own gunpowder if he could

  And sling cannonballs

  All day long booming over the green deep.

  He married this boat a long time ago,

  And night after night

  He sleeps with his imaginary niece

  On bosomy swells,

  And dreams of navigation, oranges,

  And a clean salt wind

  That will put everything back as it was

  Before flying-boats, before photographs,

  Before Diet Coke,

  Before the military policemen,

  Before kerosene.

  Then he’ll haul up his mast and all unfurled

  Triangulate south

  Using those teeth as some sort of compass.

  ISABEL GALLEYMORE

  Search for the etymology of the word metaphor and you’ll find fragments of Old French, Latin and Greek, which, when translated, mean ‘to carry over’, ‘to bear’. When I visualise these definitions, I can’t help seeing the former as a husband carrying his wife over the threshold, the latter as a more burdensome relationship – perhaps one marked by imposition. ‘Odd how a thing is most itself when likened,’ Richard Wilbur remarked. But how is that thing also compromised through comparison?

  This question looms largest in my mind when I’m writing about animals. Given the way it foists a human agenda onto nonhuman others, anthropomorphism is sometimes considered a dirty word. Yet, I’m curious as to how these figurative devices can stray from cats in bow-ties and bananas in pyjamas in order to create intimacy as well as estrangement. Perhaps because of these interests, much of my writing starts with research. ‘Kind’, for example, emerged from a day spent at an owl sanctuary where many owls have become ‘imprinted’: a term used, in this case, for animals who become so familiar with humans that they begin to take on certain human behaviours. Likewise, ‘A Note’ was influenced by my reading on bees: in particular, their practice of leaving pheromones to mark used sources of nectar.

  A False Limpet

  Armour tailored to an elbow’s point and wrinkle, and with that same toothy colour: a False Limpet by this encyclopedia – as if it were never itself, only the imitation of something else. It’s the way you hold your mouth so tight; you’re so like someone I once met – but O, watch this slip from the rock with a splashy unclinginess.

  At First

  The seasons grew untidy;

  the months filled up with rain.

  At first it came soft as a sheep.

  Inside the sheep a wolf, of course

  inside the wolf a man intent

  on acting out his tale.

  The Ash

  like a single branch of ash

  honed to the handle of an axe

  and made to take the hand

  of a woodsman as he throws

  his body weight to fell

  all the ash has sown,

  I turn your words although

  the line you spoke was simple

  My Heart’s

  When he says my heart’s a jumper

  caught on something sharp

  like a pheasant hung from the rafters –

  its breast a break-light in the dark,

  the dark like the dark inside the mouth

  of someone singing, and the song

  briskly walked along by breath

  the way the wind will walk a storm

  in a pair of flared, fraying jeans

  beyond the hills, the aspen wood

  where trees are statues honouring

  the sun, which like affection, seems

  so rare these shrinking days, I think

  my heart is not enough for him.

  The Spiny Cockle

  From their metre-deep sandy resorts

  the waves have raised these hard orbs:

  clenched like cement hedgehogs

  they wear their ribs inside out

  and pricked with a white picket fence

  to keep their soapdish interiors –

  their lattice-gill-slith
er selves –

  from the crunch of an oystercatcher’s kiss

  or the orange fog of this starfish

  that causes one cockle to buckle and let

  its long pink foot slip like a leg

  from the slit of its crenulated skirt:

  soft pogo on which it floppy-leaps

  away across the wet desert.

  The Ocean

  Wasn’t walking beside her

  walking with the ocean below

  when you didn’t know her and wanted to?

  In that heat, along that path

  you hesitated

  at a slug, beached

  like a tiny grey whale –

  thirty tonnes and seventy years

  of navigating the continental shelf

  assumed by this soil-scuffing inch

  and what would she make of you?

  The ocean blinked.

  Say you took that step, or say you fell,

  wouldn’t she move you miles in herself?

  Together

  the heart aflame no longer

  shines any light on love

  because they are always together –

  because they are always together

  it’s hard to see them apart

  like the blade in the blade of grass –