A Responsibility to Awe
Page 7
The dense body of a passing god.
...
4 September Modena
And now, September with its rare light
A night train, rain coming down warm
On the fields outside
How completely different each from all the others
We are, how one thinks of a soft space beyond
The mechanics of our current cosmos
Where things merge & mix & lose time as an
Arrow, or more a sphere, things we can almost
Remember, a space accommodating
Only the appearance of zero, minus one and one, always
Because nothing has no sense
And the other with the power of science
The childhood of knowledge, to control all
To condemn poetry, the spirit
Because curiosity, after all, is also of the spirit,
And so is the desire to control and reduce
And rebuild according to uniform law.
Is this what I do too, with all my days
Recording the arrangements of stars
And their possible destinies
But the other senses – the sound, the smells
Where are they in this world we immerse ourselves
That we should think, not feel –
Our poems should be dismantled
Leaving bare paths, and our religions –
Our religions stripped of all their skins
As if there were explanations
The god of explanation rising supreme
Gods of the smallest particles
But explanation is not understanding
And what is understanding, does it not involve
As well the souls, & is it not itself a feeling
That moment of connecting two things, or three
That pleasure, the revolutions of the soul
7 September Pescara
Cold, grey, rain coming slanting down,
Violin without a string, without a tune
Trees without leaves, earth without grass
Without care, without love, we live in our cement towers
Elbows on windowsills, looking out
Antiseptic, no muddy feet, no marching over fields
No cycling through winds, sad, empty, a bit lost
Like all of us, returning to work without adventure
And no one to sweeten our souls
I would say it comes to this:
Grandparents married fifty years today, & angry
Sharp & thin with hand raised as good as a curse
But kindness too, in a little breeze,
And after the suffering, the rain
Figs, the most sensuous of trees,
Their grey formings mocking the crevices
Of our own bodies, our thighs,
Our buttocks, the backs of knees
And beyond, ivy rising thick & purposeful
Thinking itself to have found its ruin
The brick wall three storeys high,
To be painting it in slow strokes of green and red.
I would like to be beside the river
Where I was as a child
Sun coming through the trees
A pool too deep & shadowy
And nothing to do but watch for fish
And come away from there and run
Over all the same paths of my lives
Climbing towards a sunlit meadow
Where finally I might rest.
Like the joy of listening to the wedding bells
And knowing they are yours
That clamour, all that joy, for you.
And walking in a bride’s clothes
Through a garden in a hot sun.
Here, look, the horses, wingless
For the footless angels
The earth spinning
Under the strike The Earth sent spinning
Of their feet Underneath their sinking hoofs
...
11 September
Then the sun & finally the sea and, you know
The hot sand under your feet & then your belly
And a green horizon, small waves coming in
Yesterday a sea bat, a dense black mollusc
Rippling its velvet wings just below the surface
In the shallow sea, tentacled head raised upwards
And velvet to the touch. What deep pleasure
This heat, this air, this September sun
The beach abandoned, the small fish returning
This place is no longer old
No longer with its old men sitting
No longer the faces from Roman villas, from Etruscan tombs
And all women growing to the same shape
Travelling Light
Time no longer moves
But who made light move at a certain
Speed & only that, & why that
Whose idea was that?
Even light takes time to move across a room
So that as it passes, so things change
And so, looking far away, we look into the past
Even as light perceives us as inanimate
Motionless, static in our elements of air and earth
So we see other things that move more slow than us.
And so with speed things move outside our
Window of perception, like the blades of a fan
Space contracts, in its elegant rapport with time
Things are only what they seem
And nothing more
Our perceptions squeezed into a tiny space of speed and colour
Imagining all the things we cannot see
A pale, dark sun, a star too bright to look
The sky in pieces, the way the earth, with its slow ageing
Sees the stars shoot past like meteors
We too are free to see things as we choose
With patience we could watch a flower open
A mushroom push above the earth
The stars heaving and contracting, surging & fading
We carry what comforts and sustains
Which can be space itself & time
Not things, which only weigh us down
Stepping gently over the earth
If you could move like light
How things would slow, & stop
17 September
Still on the beach, still the wind fresh off the sea
But the mountains shining with snow, and untouchable
Still the sky blue to the horizon
Meeting respectfully the other blue of the sea
A fringe of little rippling waves, then honey sand
With its display of shells & sticks & lost things
And me, still here, still present in this world.
What next in life?
After the year I bought a house, and married, & was cured (I pray)
What next, what now?
Not to let the years go by unaccounted for, unnumbered
Not just here under the Universe
But in it, growing out of it
And you for whom the stars are not always out
For whom the daily chores eclipse the universe itself
Never to lose the poetry that runs through things
That you should sit with your Repubblica
Spread on a beach chair, the pages flipping
And curving in the breeze
On the beach where you played as a child
Only a few old men strolling along the water’s edge
And a dog, probably abandoned,
Delirious with pleasure racing up & down the sand
Into the waves, barking now & then in the hope
Of a stick to chase, with pure joy
Not knowing that winter is on its way.
...
23 October
Creation
The Universe spilt
And spreading
Like a stain
Dark Matter – I
A
bove a pond
An unseen filament
Of spider’s floss
Suspending a slowly
Spinning leaf
...
31 October
Dark Matter II
Like the thing you were about to say
The thing that pulls you to a certain room
And leaves you standing, mystified
Isaac & Eve
Before the Fall After the Fall
Of the apple Of the apple
Mutual attraction Mutual attraction
Was not fully understood Was better understood
28 November
Tomorrow is one of the days
I have left to live
1 December
Grey day
Damp wind in the fen
Left leaves
Sometimes the mornings light up with frost
Attention to detail
At the iron bridge
Its lattice sides
Each with a spider’s web
And sometimes, each strand
Beaded with dew
And sometimes ice crystals
Beading each and every strand
...
Riding to Work
1. Cemetery – puddled path, leaning stones,
Sometimes berries, sometimes birds
This film of broken ice
A bench, a person with a dog
And open iron gate
2. Grafton Centre
All the sellers showing all their things
Stop at the red letter box
Cheerful cylinder, like something for a child
And the postmen on their bicycles, like boys
3. Across the green, the common
Through the tunnel of plane trees
Slanting light, leaves papering the grass
4. Crossing the river, there the iron footbridge
There by the paved stepped bank a man
A child, feeding bread to the ducks, to swans
Maybe a mist, maybe a spiderweb in every
Lattice diamond, beaded with mist
5. St Edmund’s apples
Like small yellow lanterns
On a leafless tree
23 December [Anstruther]
Here the sea again rolling and rolling
The never silent sea, that could suddenly be split
Into stillness and silence
Sun rising late, rising all day long until it sets
Sun somewhere else and here all day the orange clouds
And us on a black topped heather mountain
Springing down a long slope, ducking our heads beneath
The ceiling clouds scudding up to mountains
Lit by snow and shining, magic totems you must hold
And blow on till they melt & fade green again
We stand above the harbour, we listen to the waves
Small shop in Falkland
Man in an armchair sketching a trophy from a postcard
White hair, earring, and all around him, violins
Two transparent ones made in 1956 by a man in Kirkcaldy
From the perspex cockpit of a Spitfire crashed in town.
...
1997
9 February 1997
Home from college, the summer before it all changed
Working two jobs, one an office
Sitting by a phone that never rang
A novel open in the top desk drawer
The other, nights, a cigarette shop
Men coming in, their cars idling outside
How young I must have looked
About to go to Europe for a year
Waiting for closing time
The sweet tobacco smell
Leafing through a Playboy
Eating smarties, one from each box
Scotland at Christmas
Sun rising all day long, rising
Till it sets
Spring down a hillside on black heather
Head ducking under clouds
And down there, snowcapped mountains
Shining totems you might hold
And blow on till they melt
...
24 February
February day
The teasing yellow /colours/ of the crocuses
Scattered like Easter eggs across the lawn
The grey, the wind
The dripping of the gutters on the pavement
Underneath your window
All night, moonless night
Month too short to grow a moon
The fire sparking like magicians
What matters now is what goes on
In the reefs of your bones
In the oceans of your flesh
What whales are bellowing across your blood
Heart thrumming like an ocean liner
What small fish are pecking at the coral reef of your bones
What strange colonies are flourishing
What transparent creatures run along your nerves
Rising like bubbles from the hot vents of creation from your deep
...
28 February
Crossing
What touched me
Diving through the currents
Of your blood,
The clouds of red and pale plankton,
Coral reefs of bone,
Was not your deepest, blackest canyons,
Not the vents, the alchemy,
The strange, transparent, half-thought things,
But the thrumming of your ceaseless,
Your disturbing heart:
That untried ocean liner
On its maiden –
On its only –
Voyage
February gone now, for another year
The wind dropped, the bravest flowers unfolding
What will summer bring. Don’t ask.
If pleasure, suffering, don’t ask
So many plans & projects, so many things still to do.
...
Poem for my Father’s Seventieth Birthday
Letters from the past
Too much living in the adventures of another’s life
An ancestor, a way of trying to be there
Always in a woman’s world
Of elder sisters, wife, & daughters
Shrewish, moody, cross, demanding
Always scolded, never left to be,
To clatter, play the trombone
Like an elephant stampeding through the basement
Telling stories, gentle with the chickadeeds, [sic]
The jays, and always watching,
Measuring, the natural world:
The way a mushroom grows
The way frost heaves
A moonscape erodes
A green plant shrinks
The temperature goes up and down beneath the roof
Your daughters grow
Capturing snowflakes on the driveway
On a black velvet cloth
And keeping them, like magicians.
...
7 May
I was born in the coldest hour of the night
At four in the morning in a blizzard
At the time of the year when the earth comes closest to the sun
On the second day of the decade of free love
And walking on the moon.
There was my sister, fourteen months already in the world
My mother, a sensible age I would think it now, for children,
Having already worked & lived & been in Paris at the end of the war
And my father, a professor in a sunny study with geraniums and maps
My grandmother came from time to time
On something called a train from somewhere far away
Wearing dark dresses with cloth whose patterns I could see
long after I pressed my hands hard against my eyes.
And Daisy who taught us to curtsey & soften butter
by holding it on a knife ab
ove a steaming bowl of soup,
and once stood by my bed
in the dark on New Year’s Eve, holding a radio
to my ear, a bell striking faintly midnight, though it /wasn’t my bedtime/
wasn’t yet, & telling me it was Big Ben
(brought enormous copper pennies)
10 May
In the summer, every summer, we were gone
Out west, up north
Measuring stick, sample bag, tent
Blue hooded jackets, mosquito repellent
Smelling of canvas tents & mosquito repellent & sweet clover
Lakes in the woods, lakes in the prairies
Cotton fluff trees, poplars, pines
Mud, minnows, pebbles,
Me in a canvas tent bag jumping across a field of thistles
Winter snow, walking to school in big boots
Pushing cars out of snowdrifts
Long winter nights & Christmas skating, tobogganing, boys
Went on a trip with my mother, south
To colleges with green campuses, red leaves
To choose, to go away
Bands playing, crowds of young people
Bus rides at night
Snow falling on the quadrangle
China with small flowers, and dancing
Third year we went abroad, me & Mary
To a tiny Scottish town, cathedral ruins
Castle ruins, west sands, east sands, fishing harbour
Cold sea licking & sucking, rain, all-day sunsets.
Come Christmas we got a train to Europe, we did
Weighed down with things, cold in stations
Sleeping, waiting, everyone else at home, and us
Adventurers reading our maps, & trying to be brave
In Monte Carlo, and Florence at dawn dozing on a pew in a cold
church
Drinking coffee from tiny cups, Rome, Munich, Salzburg,
Paris, sheets of grey ice under the Eiffel Tower,
And north again.