A Responsibility to Awe
Page 8
Then in that town I fell in love,
First time, laying my head on the soft shoulder of hills
The wind shaking the tent like a dust cloth
All night long, and the aurora rising from a ridge
I stayed a summer, and another
Working in a room of grey metal shelving
Scanning the universe, looking for certain things.
But the second one was different. It rained
Love washed away. Friendship wasn’t good enough.
I was going down another road.
I went back to Canada, way out west
Finding myself my first house
Five of us, one on his elbow on the sofa
Smoking or chewing toothpicks, loud jazz
One plump & lazy & smart.
One slick, British, little sack of hash in a zipped up boot, shades,
One a good girl, studious & kind.
I fell in love again.
I solved equations. It rained.
We climbed mountains, and those were the best days
Coming down in the dark, looking for the shiny blaze nailed on
trees
To mark the way, exhausted, aching
Full of mountains
It rained. Love moved in and out.
No friends, just men, and me in the basement, crying and alone.
I got away, it felt like that
Selling the bike I had since I was twelve
The twelve string guitar I paid for with a case of beer
I went one way, him the other
But we kept friends. Fifteen years that was.
He was here last week.
Came back to England, autumn,
New in town, smells of coal smoke, beer.
It rained, & I took on a galaxy
A certain one, the nearest one, not to feel
Too far away, too cold.
The phone rang.
My grandmother had died.
Easter came. And Mary. And when she left
I fell in love again, and this time deep & hard
Letting go of all the handholds
All the chocks unzipping
It was ten years till I hit the ground
Though there were bumps along the way
And sometimes a catch on a thin ledge
And what a view – to convince yourself
It’s worth the fall. It was.
Meanwhile, they sent me south, to Australia
Hot nights, gum tree scented
My galaxy spinning overhead
Walking down a valley, down a dusty road
Waiting for letters from Italy.
They sent me to Baltimore, mid winter
Squirrels falling frozen out of trees
My lover a small bottle of olive oil, cloudy thick
Waiting for phone calls
Flying to Italy
Him, the other woman (me), his wife.
And no one learning much.
I thrashed it through. I wrote a thesis.
I said I didn’t care
But when the time came to receive that last degree
To move out of studenthood for good
He was there again declaring endless love
Me, the other woman, she the wife, our man.
I went away. I said goodbye. I went.
To an east coast autumn. That at least I loved.
My own apartment, all one room
And all around me, mathematics, stars.
No one to tell stories, sing songs
No one lighted by that land of life.
Another man came with darkness and fury
And I was swept away, but found
The lease on my heart wasn’t up.
I found the lumps, I fingered them
And lay awake at night.
They cut one out. I waited.
Fear, all fear, no pain, still
Though I have cut my feet on sharp stones
And crossed high bridges over black water
And been chased and bitten by sharp toothed animals.
I went back, to my England, the house,
The sisters by adoption
The garden with its head high summer poppies
And its winter rain.
I hit the ground, and landed lightly in the end
With springs of anger on my feet
Bouncing from Australia, feeling finally
Free of falling.
I went alone to the cinema on Sunday afternoons
I didn’t have to talk to anyone
I tossed out all my arms & legs the full stretch of bed.
I wrote.
And when the time was right I wrote a postcard
To a man I knew in Paris
Had known through all the falling
Would not have known without it
And we met like that in a different way
Sleeping under the stars by the embers of a bonfire.
11 May
Science is not what they say, so serious
The truth being what you imagine
Not what you see
And not something useful
Or something that pays
18 May
Like following a small thread
Out and out and out
What catches at your core
How many times you can plant
In the same earth
How many more summer nights
To wait at the window
For that warm rain
And how quick the flowers fade
How many conversations
Passing under the window
...
September [Ischia]
Lunar Eclipse
High noon on the moon:
The huge blue round of earth
Slides across the yellow sun.
Down here, above the table of Capri
Dusk and a full white moon goes smoky red and dim,
Long shadows streaming into space
Snuff out the shimmer on the sea.
...
23 November
Sutton in October
‘Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver’
Going up into the forest after a snowfall
I climb away from the house
Stand still, so still the only sound
My pulse in my ears
A branch creaking in a high up wind
It comes to me that
Though I cannot recall generations in this place
And am a seed that blew here from somewhere else
Made shallow roots, & grew a bit, & moved on,
That whenever I found myself, if it looked like this,
The quiet grey poles of trees,
The snow smoothing and silencing everything
The cold in my lungs making my blood race
It would feel like home.
Opening boxes in the basement
All the little things that belong to me
30 November
Sutton in October
How families can be fragmented and together
I go down to the brook
Which is tiled now with fallen leaves
Which runs cold over the smooth stones
And think of all the brooks where I have sat
And the comfort in a brook
The way the water keeps coming
Keeps singing
I shovel away at a big pile of earth,
Duck manure & woodchips
With my father, methodical
For five years I have not been here
In this forested place
With its cold clean air
And long views
And low orange light
Always a bird flies against a window Confused by reflections
Drops, at breakfast time, neck back
One drop of blood at its beak
These small cruel things
We rake up leaves into a pile
/>
High enough for all of us
Bury ourselves in that smell
Of summer going back to earth
Two children, not mine, squealing
Running, my sister like an anchor now
Around which we swing at our moorings
Our ropes loose and long
The sheep in the warm sweet barn
Where someone has left the radio on
And an aria mixes with their sounds
...
It snows in the night
A soft, deep snow, piled along each twig & branch
Muffling the brook
Flattening our leaf pile
We watch our childhood repeating
The toys, the stories, the things they do
Not knowing that we did them once before
The same toboggan, the same books, the wooden blocks
Me beached across an ocean
My sister on another shore
A big land
A flat place crossed by a power line
The edge of town
A cold wind whistling through
The bees all Italian
Surprised to learn
That the Roman Empire still exists
Spread now to the Americas even across the Americas
Still with ruthless hierarchies
Each small province with its workers
With its guards, its rigid paving
Its foray of discovery
...
1998
1 January [Scanno]
Me, dazzled to be handling something
Precious as the stars,
Opening and opening this box of jewels
Arrows of time
Flying in all directions
We have come again to this high valley
This house by the lake
These blue winter skies
By four o’clock, the sun already gone
Behind the mountain at our back,
The ridge across golden just above Frattura
And reflecting in the water,
Almost touching our shore
A new year has begun
Tomorrow I am thirty-eight
And still striding up mountain paths
With the sun on the snow
And the cold air filling my lungs
And still prodding under my arms
My neck, my groin,
Hoping not to feel lumps
Yesterday we went to see Liborio,
Nudging along the icy road
Coming down into his valley,
To his basin of sunshine,
Found him by his barn, his huge hands and great hooked nose, lamenting a sheep lost to a wolf, remembering all over again the years in Montreal, in Beaconsfield, the French, De Gaulle, the tunnel, Expo 67 … Only this time I can understand it all, and at lunch, at a long table by the fire, I am made an honorary Abbruzzese. And I would come here too, to be old, like the women in black with their fine skin & their eternal, shining eyes. Going about the passageways & streets & squares like guardians of something secret & sublime, with a posture & a dignity as erect as mountains, clean as snow. I would be one of them. They shine like priestesses among the Roman women in their store-bought furs.
Coming down from the hills this afternoon we heard a flute across the little valley, something ancient, from some more eastern place, a handful of notes in a minor key. We saw sheep flowing along the hillside, rivulets of sheep splitting & merging & splitting again, & pooling & flowing, their bells too in minor keys coming so clear across the cold, still air.
2 January
My thirty-eighth birthday. A disorganised day, waking up late, grey & cold. A walk up high, a coffee in Scanno. Saw a pig drawn up by its hind legs under a stout tree at the edge of town, head soaked in blood, a dozen men around sliding out its entrails, carving it up. Packed, drove back to Pescara, a simple supper, bath. Tired now. A few small lumps. Praying & praying that they’ll stay away & let me get on with my life.
3 January
Brilliant warm sunshine, almost hot, pooling here against a whitewashed wall. Impossible to imagine Cambridge dark & cold & grey. These days I would travel a long way for a few rays of sun.
It’s a numbing kind of place, the constant stream of cars & people & food. The hours spent at the table, eating, talking, eating.
At Liborio’s it seemed to me there is still a foreignness in the world. Still the possibility of difference. And how we might have crossed before Expo 67, the Italian pavilion with its reinforced concrete and its carabinieri. And now in the mountains, each abandoned house.
This mountain valley
Everywhere traces of the people who have left
These houses with their stone walls bulging here
And toppling there, still a vine climbing the back
And the small stony plots of earth
You wonder which pizzerias in America
Are run by the grandsons of the people who lived here
Which antique families became immigrants
The ladies of Scanno with their long black skirts
The long lines of children, almost holy.
Have intoxicated [sic] with too much food & wine, I sleep
The brain sleeps, circles like a water bug
Without diving
Looking through bags of old photos
Children on beaches, dancing, stylish women
In piazzas, we pass like photos, click, click
And we’re gone. To some, children. To some, none.
...
14 February [San Valentino]
Today has been like May
We remember how it is to feel warm,
How we too open like buds
How fast this winter went
(‘We’ll pay for this at Easter’)
‘Nothing good comes free’
I don’t believe that
Coming home over Grantchester meadows
The sky pink,
The willows still naked along the river
The wind almost warm
But these times can’t last.
In California, the rains have not passed.
What speaks to you most now?
Last month I was in Germany,
It was so grey, so cold, for three days
I didn’t leave the manor
Where the taxi left me,
Where my room was three floors up
Its windows almost curtained by the dark cedars
Looking down across the lawns
To the far road, a cyclist passing, a walker, a car
(Cathy lived in this town, before her father died)
I rode here in a train, all along the grey Rhine,
The rain slanting,
The flat boats going up & down
In my compartment was a priest,
Though you’d never know
19 February
After a lecture on superstring theory
How language & sculpture interact in the mind
Dimensions curl up
Is there anything special about a string?
So that illuminating it
From another angle
You see projected on the wall a fox
And then a tree
And then a bird
And you know it’s all one thing
But you don’t know it’s a hand
And has four fingers & a thumb
And knuckles that bend
All particles are waves in the field
We are only seeing things from different points of view
In certain limits a theory metamorphoses
Into another, and another
Space curving in on itself
What is a field?
...
5 May
Life à la carte, and why not, order it up
Not really understanding anything
Just skimping across the surface
Like going upstream on stepping stones
/>
You don’t really know the meaning of river.
Cold wet feet, a current against you
You might get there, but you haven’t understood.
So many stones
Building a cairn on a mountain top
Where few will go
I lift & place my few stones
And the wind & snow might knock them down
My sureness falters
...
30 August
Desire Lines
Blood thinned, the air holding tight
Oxygen is responsible for our thoughts
The molecular structures of our ideas
The clear liquids dropping into my veins
Not seeming to think too much
About the value of my life
Not consumed with questions of whether
Because staying alive is hard enough
And staying happy is even harder
So if you can do it, or help someone else
A little bit, to stay alive, or happy
Then that’s enough
So why are we made to question
The value of our lives
La vita é un pelo perso sotto il letto
These small cells
Lighting their fires
In the Aladdins caves
Of your bones
Sown in the red earth of marrow
To swell and bring life
Could our bones be like that
The big thigh bones
The heart
The cavern
The dance in a bear skin
Thin air, this blood
Still asking personal questions
Still prying into the private life of stars
The when & where & which encounters
What was transformed
What torn out and lost
6 September
Post, a day of hard rain,