‘There are very few poems here that take the form of anecdote.’
It’s instructive, the way the poet sits down and writes
‘we drove out along the coast road, Bloodflowers
on the iPod’, and the way the early autumn leaves
were turning. That is, she writes: ‘the scarlet leaves,
self-glossing, were turning one by one’. You had to be
there to hear us talking about life and its metamorphosis
into art, of course, and how Giles painted the front room
as violin and square piano in ink and wash, an empty
chair solidly inhabiting its shadow. How I’ve hung on
to the picture, though the piano got pinched, the violin
mistaken for cricket bat, and the artist died. The moral
here’s the elephant, proverbial – but then we discovered
two black donkeys down a lane to the cliffs, and a third –
grey, blinkered – with instructions not to feed. There’d
also have been geese and herring up the garden path,
no doubt, if we’d not been distracted by that calf-sized
red setter that almost had your leg, full of itself as those
three pylons on the rim of a bare washed field quite
electric with connections – or so the poet writes, having
read just two days before in a centuries-old history
of the world how Queen Semyramys of Egypt crafted
several dozen fake elephants from the skins of oxen
stuffed with hay. The history was a translation, and it’s
instructive to think how that poet sat over it one day when
the hedges were a blaze of crimson foliage and out on
the coast road his neighbour’s cows were kicking up
a dustcloud dense as the smoke there’s no fire without
even as he wrote how eye-witnesses saw the naturall
oliphauntes renne sturdily upon those ymagynatyve
monsters, in a turn of phrase that simply says it all.
My Grandmother’s Mirrors
She makes two of them, one small, one medium:
green glass in embossed pewter frames round
as portholes giving on a sea that see-saws
woodenly, islands hinging in and out of sight.
Her mind is off somewhere between the trees
of its own interior. Her medium is plaster.
In a year or so she’ll discover clay: palms
extemporising the spinning third dimension.
These hard-pressed forms are interim.
Her hands cast darkly for their trefoil leaves.
Her children have long left home.
Holding the mirrors up to them, she holds
her face between her hands in the forest
she’s twice moulded as a wreath of leaves.
The world repeats in its own medium.
In a year or so she’ll discover clay.
Troy
Bridleless, and papier-mâché white
as the ridden snow – that is, grey –
one story would be how this idea
of a horse was collaged piece by piece
to something almost life-sized,
almost live, as if its maker had stopped
short only of breathing into those wide
open nostrils, cutting loose the hooves
from the rockers that hold it up, and down.
By T. Irving Pugh, out of Harrogate,
pre-war – that is, before the first war –
its almost intelligent, almost amber
eyes have reflected flames of nursery
fires and candles, the bars of grates
and window grilles and all the miles
it’s gone through imagined forests
of oak and elm whose branches white
as the petticoats of its small, bookish
rider led the way with the night light
shining errant down the years that stretch
from Yorkshire to Chipping Norton –
where the story is how we drew it home
silently over snowy roads, off-white on
white, a great sleigh rocking slightly
on its runners, and how in its shy
sidelong movement I saw that other horse,
Casablanca, early evenings outside
my grandmother’s house, shifting pale
and evanescent on the edge of what
we called the forest – until later,
in darkness, his hooves’ cobbled echo
rang solid down the avenue the length
of the bedroom where we as children lay
not quite sleeping, eyes tightly closed
to the trees between its four white walls
and on the very edge of the known.
Gone to Ground
Say unwalled and what arises is rough grey stone –
the way the carapace of a fishing-boat, upturned,
invokes all the resemblances between sky and sea:
clouds drifting across the shell of the inverted
world that’s unfamiliar, uncanny because it’s known
and not known. The mind, literal and persistent
as the roots of a nameless grey plant (honesty?)
works its passage through the debris of what once
stood as a boundary and out into the cliff’s thickets
of gorse and bracken. That is: the mind, nondescript
as the foliage of sea-pinks (thrift) or lichen,
but none of them, goes underground like the signs
of life we’ve imagined in the house we’ve yet
to enter, whose flower beds edged with granite
are home to abandoned snail shells in abundance
and there’s no telling what’s below in a garden
where the boat, righted, would make a planter
and the wall’s standing stones a perfect support
for raspberries – where the word unfallen (unspoken)
means less before, more put back together again.
This low tide
the ebb’s crepuscular and faintly
reptilian – no,
those are not the words, though
the sounds are sufficiently
scaly and very old.
The water’s edge is limpid and soft-
pawed, soft-tongued, lapping
and overlapping the sand
that’s agglomerate iridescences
and that’s a bed for amber,
sea-green and translucent
glass – lager, chardonnay and milk,
as was. The embossing’s blunt,
obliterate – but
we’ll pocket it, imagine it set in silver.
Precious, we say the sea says,
taking its shells
for ear-drops. Preciousssss.
And then – there’s this
solid x-ray
of a fish, or washed-up fish
negative: a full scale of vertebrae
that begs the body,
the muscular rope of it, that runs
up to the skull’s narrow ridgeplate
with its lights punched
into enormous holes for seeing
through as in a ruined library
we say irrelevantly
or (better) abandoned engine-house
where we sit bone-dry, looking out
at small figures
crossing our sockets under a high
thin draft of the skyline. Staggered,
they stoop occasionally,
one of them reaching through the absent
head for a rare shard of cobalt
that’s caught her eye.
The Weather in St Just
Rain and shine both walk on water
or on the rising tide of cloud that levels
with the cliff. Land here’s mostly
on
the receiving end. On my phone
the symbol for weather is only ever
wind – a scroll endlessly
wrapped up in itself – though inland
signs on its screen twin with signs
in the sky in duplicates
of sun, perfect parallax of rain.
We forecast by the flight-paths
of leggy little planes
that motor in from offshore, by how
night is a wrap or night is the stars
of ships out at sea
flowing seamlessly into the lesser sea
of lights that is the town. Either way,
the wind’s insomniac
talking over us in elemental
animadversions
fretting the knot in
the sting of the riddle
of its own tail
liminal
worrier
of thresholds
it sings
to the ear
unfurl
to the heart
open
to the mind
just how far have you come?
Listen. What was the question?
To the mind
at the core of its small granite house
there is
no question
but responses repeating
the unrepeatable
present
continuous
The Nightships
pass in twos and threes, intently heading north
in a concatenation of portholes, lightboxes
of their cargo on hold, or as single stars reflected
in the arc of the sky that encompasses them
whose look-outs looking out indirectly sight
land as an invasion of nightlights, an information –
as in mist lightships sound a bullish refrain
and shapes that pass are constellations in name alone
(the great seal and the lesser, the whale and moon-
calf in spindrift round each engine house whose
pilots are swayed by the sea’s incantation
and the tide’s turned tables, so all souls aboard
wake to a port and starboard indifferently the same
and themselves in cabins invisibly heading south again).
At Sea
As if they were barometers we check each morning
and say ‘the Scillies are out’, or not, taking note
in which of their many formations: a swell in
the contour-line where sea meets sky or peaks
of thundercloud just tipping the horizon.
Some days a pure idea of island, others
with a fine white band that must be beaches
where at night the coupled lighthouses reliably
two-time, two-time.
Last night I dreamed
we were linked by transepts: windblown ruins
arching westwards, the sun patched through,
and in the cove a cluster of rowing boats just
setting out, my dead husband steady in the bows
of the last of them, stretching me his hand –
Last night I woke to a moonpath, liquid light,
and all the gables down the hill in white-out.
My brother brought home photographs, said
the gardens were beautiful, but for all that
communication and the planes that belly in
on the hour with their engine noise on tow
I wouldn’t go there, wouldn’t want to know
that they inhabit their bodies just as we do
and looking daily at the view of sky ebbing
uninterrupted into tide say indifferently
‘the coast is out’, or ‘lost’, and run through
their fingers their imaginary beaches’ mica.
Thesaurus
(for Jeffrey)
Idle as a painted ship. Upon a painted ocean.
S.T. COLERIDGE
As you say, idle isn’t lazy, but still
as the sea, those dog days round the equator
when a ship is not a sail.
It’s the senses lapped like shipboard,
the ship lapping the void that is itself,
all at sea: which is to say, groundless.
And it’s the sailors, not engaged in work,
but light-headed, out of their minds, or delirious.
It’s the albatross, out of circulation.
Think of the word as medium – a blue-
green transparency leading down and down
to no solid result. Of the mind in its quick
brown study probing the depths
like a painter’s brush or the fox that jumps
out of the blue from quay to shipboard.
A fox? you ask. Where did that spring from?
Oh, I say, it was there in the beginning.
As idle is the ocean it is hair of the dog.
Anonymous
is the poet behind the lines of the western wind
whose lampblack blots the veined vellum margins
in hands and characters that are not her own.
Is the wind that loops its long cursive through the grass,
and the artist who types on a paper-white screen
I hid, sometimes in plain sight, a dozen silver ladders.
Is the ladder grafted in the fork of an apple
or – at a loose end – propping the garden wall:
a fantasia on initial H whose cornucopia of fruit,
roses and songbirds extends the length of the gutter.
Is the sea the heavier by a pocket-sized ladder,
the drop in the ocean that’s the small weight of the rain.
Like the borrowed tongue (Christ that my love –)
and the artist’s manifesto posted in plain sight
(it wasn’t important to me they should be seen),
it’s what’s at hand. That is: like the ladder’s missing
third dimension, like the wind and its entail riffing
the field in those serial doppelgängers – cc, pp, ff –
that are blown through, and blowing away. Like this.
Riddle
(for Ian)
I’m princely support on a bad hair day,
a riff on an angelic scale. A way
of putting two and two and four together
like the shaft of the apple cart,
preposterous, that comes before the horse.
A shaky platform for lightbulb jokes
and direct line to the gods: what comes
and goes around in the clammy palms
of a stagehand. A working definition
of recalcitrance, the outer limit of paint –
or, in extended use, a sign of aspiration.
I’m also a cinch, a black cat’s temptation,
a business-like substitute for the serpent
and all-too-human ribcage without the heart
though I’ll frame for you a series of stills
of your world in descending order: spills
of wood splintering from a fascia board, an apple
laddered green on red, that black cat with tail
plumed high measuring its retreat. For as long
as you hold me I’m what keeps you looking
in from outside. And I’m a tippling probe
for the sky, an awkward extension of the globe
where you stand grounded and angling – for what,
you ask: Is it this? Perhaps not quite, not yet.
Losing It
Like anaphora, the figure of a stream
and a man who stands, one leg either
side of the water, holding a jar.
Like the jar he passes smoothly from shore
to shore, its belly full of standing water:
a jar with two handles, like a door.
Like china that just comes apart
in your hand, splitting the blue and white
figures that pause as they cross the water.
Like the broken man still gripping
the disjointed handles and the smooth-
bellied body of water that flows between –
Write it down, he says, so I can grasp
the word for the thing I’ve lost, which is
like – something. Amphora. Carrying across.
What the poet is trying to say is
not paraphrase. There’s the word, the wood,
the world and the sun’s irregular interstices
between the trees ablaze like the white wall
of a house marking the path as ink makes
signs for door and window and for the terms
we attach to them: threshold, hope, or loss.
As for arrival and departure, they’re a given:
that’s just life, as anyone can tell. Conversely,
Silent in Finisterre Page 3