supporting it on their backs –
a dead moth
as large as a bird.
As the shadows densen
in the gazebo-shaped bandstand
the band are beginning to congregate.
The air would be tropical
but for the breath of the sierra:
it grows opulent on the odour
of jacaranda and the turpentine
of the shoeshine boys
busy at ground-level,
the squeak of their rags on leather
like an angry, repeated bird-sound.
The conductor rises,
flicks his score with his baton –
moths are circling the bandstand light –
and sits down after each item.
The light falls onto the pancakes
of the flat military hats
that tilt and nod
as the musicians under them
converse with one another – then,
the tap of the baton. It must be
the presence of so many flowers enriches the brass:
tangos take on a tragic air,
but the opaque scent
makes the modulation into waltz-time seem
an invitation – not to the waltz merely –
but to the thought that there may be
the choice (at least for the hour)
of dying like Carmen
then rising like a flower.
A man goes by, carrying a fish
that is half his length
wrapped in a sheet of plastic
but nobody sees him. And nobody hears
the child in a torn dress
selling artificial flowers,
mouthing softly in English, ‘Flowerrs’.
High heels, bare feet
around the tin cupola of the bandstand
patrol to the beat of the band:
this is the democracy
of the tierra templada – a contradiction
in a people who have inherited
so much punctilio, and yet
in all the to-and-fro
there is no frontier set:
the shopkeepers, the governor’s sons,
the man who is selling balloons
in the shape of octopuses, bandannaed heads
above shawled and suckled children
keep common space
with a trio of deaf mutes
talking together in signs,
all drawn to the stir
of this rhythmic pulse
they cannot hear. The musicians
are packing away their instruments:
the strollers have not said out their say
and continue to process
under the centennial trees.
A moon has worked itself free
of the excluding boughs
above the square, and stands
unmistily mid-sky, a precisionist.
The ants must have devoured their prey by this.
As for the fish… three surly Oaxaqueños
are cutting and cooking it
to feed a party of French-speaking Swiss
at the Hotel Calesa Real.
The hornets that failed to return
stain the fountain’s edge,
the waters washing and washing away at them,
continuing throughout the night
their whisperings of ablution
where no one stirs,
to the shut flowerheads and the profuse stars.
Oaxaca
The House in the Quarry
What is it doing there, this house in the quarry?
On the scrap of a height it stands its ground:
The cut-away cliffs rise round it
And the dust lies heavy along its sills.
Still lived in? It must be, with the care
They have taken to train its vine
Whose dusty pergola keeps back the blaze
From a square of garden. Can it be melons
They are growing, a table someone has set out there
As though, come evening, you might even sit at it
Drinking wine? What dusty grapes
Will those writhen vine-stocks show for the rain
To cleanse in autumn? And will they taste then
Of the lime-dust of this towering waste,
Or have transmuted it to some sweetness unforeseen
That original cleanliness could never reach
Rounding to insipidity? All things
Seem possible in this unreal light –
The poem still to be quarried here,
The house itself lit up to repossess
Its stolen site, as the evening matches
Quiet to the slowly receding thunder of the last
Of the lorries trundling the unshaped marble down and past.
At the Autumn Equinox
for Giuseppe Conte
Wild boars come down by night
Sweet-toothed to squander a harvest
In the vines, tearing apart
The careful terraces whose clinging twines
Thicken out to trunks and seem
To hold up the pergolas they embrace.
Make fast the gate. Under a late moon
That left the whole scene wild and clear,
I came on twenty beasts, uprooting, browsing
Here these ledges let into the hillside.
They had undone and taken back again
Into their nomad scavengers’ domain
All we had shaped for use, and laid it waste
In a night’s carouse. Which story is true?
Those who are not hunters say that hunters brought
The beasts to this place, to multiply for sport
And that they bred here, spread. Or should one credit
The tale told of that legendary winter
A century since, which drove them in starving bands
Out from the frozen heartlands of the north?
Ice had scabbed every plane and pine,
Tubers and roots lay slabbed beneath the ground
That nothing alive or growing showed above
To give promise of subsistence. They drove on still
Until they found thickets greening up through snow
And ate the frozen berries from them. Then
Down to the lowland orchards and the fields
Where crops rooted and ripened. Or should one
Go back to beginnings and to when
No men had terraced out these slopes? Trees
Taller than the oaks infested then
These rocks now barren, their lianas
Reaching to the shore – the shore whose miles
On miles of sand saw the first approach
As swarms swam inland from the isles beyond
And took possession. Are these
The remnant of that horde, forsaking forests
And scenting the orchards in their wake? I could hear them
Crunch and crush a whole harvest
From the vines while the moon looked on.
A mouse can ride on a boar’s back,
Nest in its fur, gnaw through the hide and fat
And not disturb it, so obtuse is their sense of touch –
But not of sight or smell. I stood
Downwind and waited. It takes five dogs
To hunt a boar. I had no gun
Nor, come to that, the art to use one:
I was man alone: I had no need
Of legends to assure me how strange they were –
A sufficiency of fear confessed their otherness.
Stay still I heard the heartbeats say:
I could see all too clear
In the hallucinatory moonlight what was there.
Day led them on. Next morning found
These foragers on ground less certain
Than dug soil or the gravel-beds
Of dried-up torrents. Asphalt
Confuse
d their travelling itch, bemused
And drew them towards the human outskirts.
They clattered across its too-smooth surfaces –
Too smooth, yet too hard for those snouts
To root at, or tusks to tear out
The rootage under it. Its colour and its smell,
The too-sharp sunlight, the too-tepid air
Stupified the entire band: water
That they could swim, snow that had buried
All sustenance from them, worried them far less
Than this man-made ribbon luring them on
Helpless into the shadow of habitation.
The first building at the entrance to the valley
Had Carabinieri written across its wall:
Challenged, the machine-gunned law
Saw to it with one raking volley
And brought the procession to the ground,
Then sprayed it again, to put beyond all doubt
That this twitching confusion was mostly dead
And that the survivors should not break out
Tusked and purposeful to defend themselves.
Blood on the road. A crowd, curious
To view the end of this casual hecatomb
And lingeringly inspect what a bullet can do.
It was like the conclusion of all battles.
Who was to be pitied and who praised?
Above the voices, the air hung
Silent, cleared, by the shots, of birdsong
And as torn into, it seemed, as the flesh below.
Quietly now, at the edges of the crowd,
Hunters looked the disdain they felt
For so unclean a finish, and admired
The form those backs, subdued, still have,
Lithe as the undulation of a wave. The enemy
They had seen eviscerate a dog with a single blow
Brought into the thoughts of these hunters now
Only their poachers’ bitterness at flesh foregone
As their impatience waited to seize on the open season,
The autumn equinox reddening through the trees.
The Butterflies
They cover the tree and twitch their coloured capes,
On thin legs, stalking delicately across
The blossoms breathing nectar at them;
Hang upside-down like bats,
Like wobbling fans, stepping, tipping,
Tipsily absorbed in what they seek and suck.
There is a bark-like darkness
Of patterned wrinklings as though of wood
As wings shut against each other.
Folded upon itself, a black
Cut-out has quit the dance;
One opens, closes from splendour into drab,
Intent antennae preceding its advance
Over a floor of flowers. Their skeletons
Are all outside – fine nervures
Tracing the fourfold wings like leaves;
Their mouths are for biting with – they breathe
Through stigmata that only a lens can reach:
The faceted eyes, a multiplying glass
Whose intricacies only a glass can teach,
See us as shadows if they see at all.
It is the beauty of wings that reconciles us
To these spindles, angles, these inhuman heads
Dipping and dipping as they sip.
The dancer’s tread, the turn, the pirouette
Come of a choreography not ours,
Velvets shaken out over flowers on flowers
That under a thousand (can they be felt as) feet
Dreamlessly nod in vegetative sleep.
Chance
I saw it as driving snow, the spume,
Then, as the waves hit rock
Foam-motes took off like tiny birds
Drawn downwind in their thousands
Coiled in its vortices. They settled
Along ledges and then fell back,
Condensed on the instant at the touch of stone
And slid off, slicking the rock-sides
As they went. The tide went, too,
Dragging the clicking pebbles with it
In a cast of chattering dice. What do they tell
These occurrences, these resemblances that speak to you
With no human voice? What they told then
Was that the energies pouring through space and time,
Spun into snow-lace, suspended into flight,
Had waited on our chance appearance here,
To take their measure, to re-murmur in human sounds
The nearing roar of this story of far beginnings
As it shapes out and resounds itself along the shore.
The Door in the Wall (1992)
Paris in Sixty-Nine
for Octavio Paz
‘I love’, I heard you say,
‘To walk in the morning.’ We were walking,
Spring light sharpening each vista,
Under the symmetrical, freshly-leafing trees,
By boulevard, bridge and quays the Douanier
Had painted into his golden age
Of a Tour Eiffel perpetually new.
I replied: ‘I trust the thoughts that come to me
When walking. Do you, too, work when walking?’
‘Work when I am working…?’ My error
(Traffic was too loud to fight with words)
Came clear to me at last – for I
Am far too fast imagining that my friends
Prefer, like me, the stir of street or landscape
To four walls to work in. Sunlight
Had begun, after a night of frost, to warm
The April air to temperate perfection,
In which the mathematics of sharp shade
Would have gratified Le Nôtre, ‘auteur de ce jardin’:
His bust surveyed it: in the pavilion there
The subtler geometries of Cézanne. Refaire
Poussin après la nature! – he and the auteur
Might have seen eye to eye, perhaps,
But for the straight lines and the grandeur.
All was not easy here. Gendarmerie
Clustered at corners, still unrelenting
After the late events, although the theatre
Deserted by its actors now, lay silent
But for the sloganned walls. ‘De Gaulle’, I said,
‘Is an unpleasant man.’ ‘But a great one,’
You replied, to my surprise, for you
Believed when the students had their Day
It was a sign that linearity
Was coming to its close, and time
Was circling back to recurrence and fiesta.
Before the walker the horizon slips from sight.
What matters in the end (it never comes)
Is what is seen along the way.
Our feet now found confronting us
The equestrian bulk (‘Paris vaut une messe!’)
Of Henri Quatre in the Place Dauphine,
Horsed on the spot that Breton called
‘The sex of Paris’, legs of roadways
Straddling out from it. Was it the image
Drew him to that statue, or had he
(Eros apart) a taste for monarchy?
‘Pope of surrealism’ is unfair, no doubt,
And yet, it comprehends the way he chose
To issue edicts, excommunicate his friends.
I saw his face look out from yours –
Or so it seemed – the day that I declined
To dine in company, which led you on to say:
‘Always the Englishman, you want to found
Another church.’ So, always the Englishman,
I compromised and came – Paris vaut une messe.
For it was Paris held us on its palm,
Paris I was refusing as well as you
And should have said no to neither:
Paris looked in on all we were to say and do,
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And every afternoon concluded with
That secular and urban miracle
When the lights come on, not one by one,
But all at once, and the idea and actuality
Of the place imprinted themselves on dusk,
Opening spaces undeclared by day.
All the recurrences of that constellation
Never reunited us by that river.
Yet, time finding us once more together
On English soil, has set us talking,
So let me renew my unrequited question
From twenty years ago: ‘Do you, Octavio,
Work when you are walking…?’
Blaubeuren
And now the season climbs in conflagration
Up to the summits. The thick leaves
Glow on either side of the descent
A fire-ride carves between the trees –
A blue, unsoundable abyss. The sun
Is pushing upwards, firing into incandescence
Lingering vapours. The tufted pinetips
Begin to define the hilltop where a cross –
Too blatant to beckon a heart towards it –
Stands stolid and ghostly, a dogmatic
Concrete post hardening out of mist,
And, grey to gold, touch by touch,
The wood mass – beams breaking in –
Visibly looms above the town. Below
Floats back a climbing bell-chime
Out of the theological centuries: that, too,
Caught up into the burning vibrancy,
Seems yet another surface for refraction,
Fragmenting into audible tips of flame.
The beacon of the day – the mist has burned away now –
Blazes towards the death and resurrection
Of the year. To be outlived by this,
By the recurrences and the generations, as today
Has lived beyond the century of Dürer –
His rocks stand jutting from the foliage here –
Is to say: I have lived
Between the red blaze and the white,
I have taken the sacrament of the leaf
That spells my death, and I have asked to be,
Breathing it in at every pore of sense,
Servant to all I see riding this wave
Of fire and air – the circling hawk,
The leaves… no, they are butterflies
That love the ash like leaves and then
Come dancing down from it, all lightness
And away. Lord, make us light enough
To bear the message of this fine flame
Rising off rooted things, and render it
Back to the earth beneath them, turning earth
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