Book Read Free

Swimming Chenango Lake

Page 6

by Charles Tomlinson


  Gobble a street up, but already a future seethes

  As if it had waited in the crevices:

  A race in transit, a nomad hierarchy:

  Cargoes of debris out of these ruins fill

  Their buckled prams: their trucks and hand-carts wait

  To claim the dismantlings of a neighbourhood –

  All that a grimy care from wastage gleans,

  From scrap-iron down to heaps of magazines.

  Slowing, I see the faces of a pair

  Behind their load: he shoves and she

  Trails after him, a sexagenarian Eve,

  Their punishment to number every hair

  Of what remains. Their clothes come of their trade –

  They wear the cast-offs of a lost decade.

  The place had failed them anyhow, and their pale

  Absorption staring past this time

  And dusty space we occupy together,

  Gazes the new blocks down – not built for them;

  But what they are looking at they do not see.

  No Eve, but mindless Mnemosyne,

  She is our lady of the nameless metals, of things

  No hand has made, and no machine

  Has cut to a nicety that takes the mark

  Of clean intention – at best, the guardian

  Of all that our daily contact stales and fades,

  Rusty cages and lampless lampshades.

  Perhaps those who have climbed into their towers

  Will eye it all differently, the city spread

  In unforeseen configurations, and living with this,

  Will find that civility I can only miss – and yet

  It will need more than talk and trees

  To coax a style from these disparities.

  The needle-point’s swaying reminder

  Teeters: I go with uncongealing traffic now

  Out onto the cantilevered road, window on window

  Sucked backwards at the level of my wheels.

  Is it patience or anger most renders the will keen?

  This is a daily discontent. This is the way in.

  At Stoke

  I have lived in a single landscape. Every tone

  And turn have had for their ground

  These beginnings in grey-black: a land

  Too handled to be primary – all the same,

  The first in feeling. I thought it once

  Too desolate, diminished and too tame

  To be the foundation for anything. It straggles

  A haggard valley and lets through

  Discouraged greennesses, lights from a pond or two.

  By ash-tips, or where the streets give out

  In cindery in-betweens, the hills

  Swell up and free of it to where, behind

  The whole vapoury, patched battlefield,

  The cows stand steaming in an acrid wind.

  This place, the first to seize on my heart and eye,

  Has been their hornbook and their history.

  The Marl Pits

  It was a language of water, light and air

  I sought – to speak myself free of a world

  Whose stoic lethargy seemed the one reply

  To horizons and to streets that blocked them back

  In a monotone fume, a bloom of grey.

  I found my speech. The years return me

  To tell of all that seasoned and imprisoned:

  I breathe familiar, sedimented air

  From a landscape of disembowellings, underworlds

  Unearthed among the clay. Digging

  The marl, they dug a second nature

  And water, seeping up to fill their pits,

  Sheeted them to lakes that wink and shine

  Between tips and steeples, streets and waste

  In slow reclaimings, shimmers, balancings,

  As if kindling Eden rescinded its own loss

  And words and water came of the same source.

  Class

  Those midland a’s

  once cost me a job:

  diction defeated my best efforts –

  I was secretary at the time

  to the author of The Craft of Fiction.

  That title was full of class.

  You had only to open your mouth on it

  to show where you were born

  and where you belonged. I tried

  time and again I tried

  but I couldn’t make it

  that top A – ah

  I should say –

  it sounded like gargling.

  I too visibly shredded his fineness:

  it was clear the job couldn’t last

  and it didn’t. Still, I’d always thought him an ass

  which he pronounced arse. There’s no accounting for taste.

  The Rich

  I like the rich – the way

  they say: ‘I’m not made of money’:

  their favourite pastoral

  is to think they’re not rich at all –

  poorer, perhaps, than you or me,

  for they have the imagination of that fall

  into the pinched decency

  we take for granted. Of course,

  they do want to be wanted

  by all the skivvies and scrapers

  who neither inherited nor rose.

  But are they daft or deft,

  when they proclaim themselves

  men of the left, as if prepared

  at the first premonitory flush

  of the red dawn

  to go rushing onto the street

  and, share by share,

  add to the common conflagration

  their scorned advantage?

  They know that it can’t happen

  in Worthing or Wantage:

  with so many safety valves

  between themselves and scalding,

  all they have to fear

  is wives, children, breath and balding.

  And at worst

  there is always some sunny

  Aegean prospect. I like the rich –

  they so resemble the rest

  of us, except for their money.

  After a Death

  A little ash, a painted rose, a name.

  A moonshell that the blinding sky

  Puts out with winter blue, hangs

  Fragile at the edge of visibility. That space

  Drawing the eye up to its sudden frontier

  Asks for a sense to read the whole

  Reverted side of things. I wanted

  That height and prospect such as music brings –

  Music or memory. Neither brought me here.

  This burial place straddles a green hill,

  Chimneys and steeples plot the distances

  Spread vague below: only the sky

  In its upper reaches keeps

  An untarnished January colour. Verse

  Fronting that blaze, that blade,

  Turns to retrace the path of its dissatisfactions,

  Thought coiled on thought, and only certain that

  Whatever can make bearable or bridge

  The waste of air, a poem cannot.

  The husk of moon, risking the whole of space,

  Seemingly sails it, frailly launched

  To its own death and fullness. We buried

  A little ash. Time so broke you down,

  Your lost eyes, dry beneath

  Their matted lashes, a painted rose

  Seems both to memorialize and mock

  What you became. It picks your name out

  Written on the roll beside a verse –

  Obstinate words: measured against the blue,

  They cannot conjure with the dead. Words,

  Bringing that space to bear, that air

  Into each syllable we speak, bringing

  An earnest to us of the portion

  We must inherit, what thought of that would give

  The greater share of comfort, greater fear –

&n
bsp; To live forever, or to cease to live?

  The imageless unnaming upper blue

  Defines a world, all images

  Of endeavours uncompleted. Torn levels

  Of the land drop, street by street,

  Pitted and pooled, its wounds

  Cleansed by a light, dealt out

  With such impartiality you’d call it kindness,

  Blindly assuaging where assuagement goes unfelt.

  Hyphens

  ‘The country’s love-

  liness’, it said:

  what I read was

  ‘the country’s love-

  lines’ – the unnec-

  essary ‘s’

  passed over by

  the mind’s blind-

  ly discriminating eye:

  but what I saw

  was a whole scene

  restored: the love-

  lines drawing

  together the list

  ‘loveliness’ capped

  and yet left

  vague, unloved:

  lawns, gardens, houses,

  the encircling trees.

  Hill Walk

  for Philippe and Anne-Marie Jaccottet

  Innumerable and unnameable, foreign flowers

  Of a reluctant April climbed the slopes

  Beside us. Among them, rosemary and thyme

  Assuaged the coldness of the air, their fragrance

  So intense, it seemed as if the thought

  Of that day’s rarity had sharpened sense, as now

  It sharpens memory. And yet such pungencies

  Are there an affair of every day – Provençal

  Commonplaces, like the walls, recalling

  In their broken sinuousness, our own

  Limestone barriers, half undone

  By time, and patched against its sure effacement

  To retain the lineaments of a place.

  In our walk, time used us well that rhymed

  With its own herbs. We crested idly

  That hill of ilexes and savours to emerge

  Along the plateau at last whose granite

  Gave on to air: it showed us then

  The place we had started from and the day

  Half gone, measured against the distances

  That lay beneath, a territory travelled.

  All stretched to the first fold

  Of that unending landscape where we trace

  Through circuits, drops and terraces

  The outworks, ruinous and overgrown,

  Where space on space has labyrinthed past time:

  The unseizable citadel glimmering back at us,

  We contemplated no assault, no easy victory:

  Fragility seemed sufficiency that day

  Where we sat by the abyss, and saw each hill

  Crowned with its habitations and its crumbled stronghold

  In the scents of inconstant April, in its cold.

  The Shaft (1978)

  Charlotte Corday

  O Vertu! le poignard, seul espoir de la terre, Est ton arme sacrée…

  – Chénier

  Courteously self-assured, although alone,

  With voice and features that could do no hurt,

  Why should she not enter? They let in

  A girl whose reading made a heroine –

  Her book was Plutarch, her republic Rome:

  Home was where she sought her tyrant out.

  The towelled head next, the huge batrachian mouth:

  There was a mildness in him, even. He

  Had never been a woman’s enemy,

  And time and sickness turned his stomach now

  From random execution. All the same,

  He moved aside to write her victims down,

  And when she approached, it was to kill she came.

  She struck him from above. One thrust. Her whole

  Intent and innocence directing it

  To breach through flesh and enter where it must,

  It seemed a blow that rose up from within:

  Tinville reduced it all to expertise:

  – What, would you make of me a hired assassin?

  – What did you find to hate in him? – His crimes.

  Every reply was temperate save one

  And that was human when all’s said and done:

  The deposition, read to those who sit

  In judgement on her, ‘What has she to say?’

  ‘Nothing, except that I succeeded in it.’

  – You think that you have killed all Marats off?

  – I think perhaps such men are now afraid.

  The blade hung in its grooves. How should she know

  The Terror still to come, as she was led

  Red-smocked from gaol out into evening’s red?

  It was to have brought peace, that faultless blow.

  Fouquier Tinville: the public prosecutor.

  Uncowed by the unimaginable result,

  She loomed by in the cart beneath the eye

  Of Danton, Desmoulins and Robespierre,

  Heads in a rabble fecund in insult:

  She had remade her calendar, called this

  The Fourth Day of the Preparation of Peace.

  Greater than Brutus was what Adam Lux

  Demanded for her statue’s sole inscription:

  His pamphlet was heroic and absurd

  And asked the privilege of dying too:

  Though the republic raised to her no statue,

  The brisk tribunal took him at his word.

  What haunted that composure none could fault?

  For she, when shown the knife, had dropped her glance –

  She ‘who believed her death would raise up France’

  As Chénier wrote who joined the later dead:

  Her judge had asked: ‘If you had gone uncaught,

  Would you have then escaped?’ ‘I would,’ she said.

  A daggered Virtue, Clio’s roll of stone,

  Action unsinewed into statuary!

  Beneath that gaze what tremor was willed down?

  And, where the scaffold’s shadow stretched its length,

  What unlived life would struggle up against

  Death died in the possession of such strength?

  Perhaps it was the memory of that cry

  That cost her most as Catherine Marat

  Broke off her testimony… But the blade

  Inherited the future now and she

  Entered a darkness where no irony

  Seeps through to move the pity of her shade.

  Marat Dead

  the version of Jacques Louis David

  Citoyen, il suffit que je sois bien malheureuse pour avoir droit à votre bienveillance.

  Charlotte Corday to Marat

  They look like fact, the bath, the wall, the knife,

  The splintered packing-case that served as table;

  The linen could be priced by any housewife,

  As could the weapon too, but not the sable

  Suggestion here that colours all we feel

  And animates this death-scene from the life

  With red, brown, green reflections on the real.

  Scaled back to such austerity, each tone

  Now sensuous with sadness, would persuade

  That in the calm the ugliness has gone

  From the vast mouth and from the swaddled head;

  And death that worked this metamorphosis

  Has left behind no effigy of stone

  But wrought an amorous languor with its kiss.

  ‘Citizen, it is enough that I should be

  A most unhappy woman to have right

  To your benevolence’: the heeded plea

  Lies on his desk, a patch of bloodied white,

  Taking the eye beside the reddening bath,

  And single-minded in duplicity,

  Loud in the silence of this aftermath.

  Words in this painting victimize us all:

  Tyro or tyrant, neither shall evader />
  Such weapons: reader, you grow rational

  And miss those sharp intentions that have preyed

  On trusting literacy here: unmanned

  By generosity and words you fall,

  Sprawl forwards bleeding with your pen in hand.

  She worked in blood, and paint absolves the man,

  And in a bathtub laves all previous stains:

  She is the dark and absence in the plan

  And he a love of justice that remains.

  Who was more deft, the painter or the girl?

  Marat’s best monument with this began,

  That all her presence here’s a truthless scrawl.

  For Danton

  Bound to the fierce Metropolis…

  – Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book X

  In the autumn of 1793 – the year in which he had instituted the Revolutionary Tribunal – Danton went back to his birthplace, Arcis-sur Aube. After his return in November, he was to be arrested, tried and condemned.

  Who is the man that stands against this bridge

  And thinks that he and not the river advances?

  Can he not hear the links of consequence

  Chiming his life away? Water is time.

  Not yet, not yet. He fronts the parapet

  Drinking the present with unguarded sense:

  The stream comes on. Its music deafens him

  To other sounds, to past and future wrong.

  The beat is regular beneath that song.

  He hears in it a pulse that is his own;

  He hears the year autumnal and complete.

  November waits for him who has not done

  With seeings, savourings. Grape-harvest brings

  The south into the north. This parapet

  Carries him forward still, a ship from Rheims,

  From where, in boyhood and on foot, he’d gone

  ‘To see’, he said, ‘the way a king is made’,

  The king that he himself was to uncrown –

  Destroyed and superseded, then secure

  In the possession of a perfect power

 

‹ Prev