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Swimming Chenango Lake

Page 11

by Charles Tomlinson


  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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