Silent in Finisterre
Page 4
what the poet is trying to say is the progress
through the wood of the word, blindly
inching out its roots and branches. Is
what it is to be in the thick of the self’s
slow-leaved metamorphosis, its bifurcations,
the heart’s expanding and contracting rings.
To paraphrase, what the poet is trying to say
is just the material we have to work with.
In the thick of the world between the wood
and the word, what the poet is trying to say is.
Lifelines
Some say, around the headland’s the point
you’ll want to stop and look back the way
you came, see those cormorant-shouldered
rocks that mark the cove you started from
with eyes the summer visitors bring to seals:
bifocal, and endlessly willing to believe.
That, they say, is the point, though others swear
the days just come and go and any fishbone
or bladderwrack they wash up is nothing but
pieces of string too short to save. One minute
a pigeon’s self-importantly fluffed among
gulls in the harbour, the next it’s gone again.
Myself, I couldn’t tell from one wing-beat
to the next how I got here, only how flight
repeats, though I understand the small stone
towns I pass are settlements, and sometimes
in the folds of coastline my shadow smokes
like goose or angel a house shows white as
the fly-leaf of a book I found once, secondhand,
whose inscription was in writing I used to know
so well I could trace the flow of it, its characters
in the making: the enclosed spaces at their centres
integral as skeleton to fish or fish to bird’s eye
in the current towing the sea’s quick hieroglyphs.
Five-finger Exercise
Like the wind that hymns the fence’s two barbed wires,
the tide that flexes the intervals between its high
point and its low,
the tall striped lighthouse that calls time, time, time,
the painter has his idiom:
his telegraph poles, rooflines and long arm of horizon,
his small-leaved evergreens, chimney pots and tides
that come and go.
Startling, a rook blacks out the lighthouse and two dormers:
he’ll get that down tomorrow
like the unlikeness between the wires and their singing,
the chimneys with and without smoke, the lives of things
and the forms of them
which he’ll repeat as the tree in the foreground
keeps growing out of itself,
as beyond the blot of the rook the lighthouse signals on.
Still Here
(after Naomi Frears)
The way your films show it, simply
to exist isn’t simple, but a form of sight
reading, reading across, reading in –
difficult as watching two distinct
scenes at once: here a parasol neatly
triangulates itself, there a landscape
runs blindly past the emergency exit.
And was that lightning? Twice?
It wasn’t the same.
Outside in January
a frame of railings holds the tide – once,
again; inside, the film of water’s still
July in its intricacies, its dark and light.
And between’s the business of Saturday:
skateboarding, shopping, promenading
people with three hands full and dogs
whistling along to Newlyn –
cut here
or there
it all adds up to something
like balance, equivalence, taking in
what’s there to be seen. This porch light
in a storm, its shaky arrhythmia.
That stone stretch of house shot low,
sideways on, with cars passing, passing
like clock – no, like metronome against
the small human movement of the lens
and this pond dark under its open-palmed
statue and raft of leaves mirroring that other
half-remembered pond dark under moss
and rhododendron at the top of the garden
and so unutterably still the child, disquieted,
turns back to the house and doesn’t mention it.
When we say stories are worth telling,
don’t we mean the interstices?
In St Just
this morning, in fog, the world was down
to incidentals: brake light, bush, black dog
somewhere between discovery and erasure –
or erasure and discovery, different again –
as when two people leave the gallery, walking
slowly along the uncut exposure of the bay,
and one claims ‘I want to write about silence’,
and we remember this, among other things –
like fog on a roll, a film’s white noise
before the pictures come in or words
reprise how it was in the beginning –
and like a sheet of paper before a mark is made
it is – and isn’t – wholly what she meant to say.
The Pond
Undivined, a double cube of water.
A surface of solid peridots lying
out of mind in the shrubbery for years.
A thought, pre-verbal. Or, adjectival:
sinister, umbrageous, amphibian.
The pool, the missing substantive.
Memory, like earth, encapsulating
something other than itself.
That long-haired, long-legged child tumbling
unlooked-for down the hill and calling from far
outside earshot how we’d never believe –
The gravel sparking from her feet.
At the height of the garden, the mass of it.
The rhododendrons hushed and lustrous.
The convex steps down. Concrete.
What we didn’t know we had always known.
The fluted artifice of its edges, its urns.
Treehouse
New Year’s Eve, we walk the path along
the edge of things, feet at burial height,
eyes level with the rimed grasses.
Puddles are long knives, mirror shards,
each berry bezelled in a crown of thorns,
and the church is down on its haunches.
Behind, our years of pausing at this turn,
the way the sea’s a known quantity
that pulls its weight out of mind.
But today, differently, a treehouse –
or its makings: a rig of planks and batten
for lintel. A space outlined in air –
or platform to sit and look down on the ground
we look up from, imagining the view:
the fine-toothed frost-bitten fields climbing
to the treeline where rooks cluster in
off-beat musical notation. Beyond them,
the sea, still out of sight. Here, at the tree’s
foot, black-booted, we provide the human
scale: typecast figures small, convenient,
and fictional. We were never there.
The treehouse, though, is real. Its apertures,
its well-defined void and surprisingly solid floor.
Sneyd Park Sketchbook
If the place I write from is real, then I must be allegorical.
W.S. GRAHAM
I Self-Portrait with River
Suppose you lived here, what language would you choose
for the broad brush of river, the towpath and silver-
skinned estuary? For the small foreign mountains,<
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the silk skein of river, copper-beech-coloured beach,
or the grey-green floodplain and neat brick houses?
Pigeons tumble to the window. Cows graze on the knoll.
In the mirror’s Australia ebb and flow reverse:
flow and ebb again. Even the sky is tidal.
The port holds the river on the tip of its tongue.
Suppose you lived here, how would you name
the shipyards, the cars on the motorway, the wind
spooled through the wind-farm? In view of the river’s
double-tongued tongue-twist, how would you explain
the scales tipping between is and said-so or the balance
of life your reflection gives you for your own?
II Self-Portrait with Cows and Mirror
All this went unnoticed for centuries:
the river’s casual tiding to and fro,
the sea’s fingerhold, the naive cows
grazing this or that side of the knoll
the river’s ups and downs
the river making its bed
the cows au naturel in beige and brown
when someone built a house for the view
and between its glazing bars the self-
divided cows walked in twos and threes
and the sun set through the beeches
where the river lay low, the river
flooded like silver nitrate
preparing the ground for later when
someone sold the plot for estate,
fly-over and rugby pitch, for wind
turbines keeping time and time again,
though the fog still obliterates the river
the river rises through the fog
the periodic cows come and go
and in the turret of the sub-divided
house a tri-partite mirror shows
how the middle ground recedes, the cows
quite naturally multiply and the Avon
doubles up on itself, running its course
so long, so long between Severn and Severn,
between the sky and its ink-dark carbon,
here you couldn’t only once think of home.
III Self-Portrait as Lady of Shalott
She knows the edges are important.
There’s no picture without a frame.
The river’s movement is vertical (in or out).
The wind lifts the skylight again and again.
Off beyond the headland a single turbine
ticks over and over, marking time.
Off beyond the headland, the Severn,
Cardiff. Her flat is in suspension
between bridge and bridge – that is,
between the sea, the river and its clearly
transparent name. The waves are backing
and re-backing, the wind is spooled
and stored, like twine. On the towpath
a small figure in red shoulders its whole
belonging as it makes for the coast
that’s the vanishing point between sea and sky.
Or so she says, reading between the lines.
IV Self-Portrait from Memory
It’s hard to say what this is, exactly.
Suppose a woman receding. The habitual arc of the street.
Suppose you have seen this before. Suppose a woman reading.
In Sneyd Park, a carved bird balanced on a painted cage.
In Stockbridge, a white bird. A collaged page.
Through the bars, the sky’s tissue torn by beech trees.
Through the bird, the sea. Listen, the leaves are turning.
Listen, this is the truth of the matter: at least six things
at a time. The other sound you’re hearing’s that small
grey cat, slipper on the stairs at the back of the mind.
V Self-Portrait from Life
Behind the poem, the poem.
The mind, cat-like, nosing the gap between the words
and the thing it speaks of.
Behind the life, the life.
The cat (smoky, mackerel-backed) off about its business,
as beyond the Severn, Wales,
as between here and there the sea
there’s no getting across, though swifts through the glass
come close to reflecting on it: migrant, tined
tails facing both ways, and audibly comparing notes.
The word is, things might have been different –
as at dusk, when all the riding lights of Newport
come out, behind the world’s a world
where rivers run uphill and that moonshine crescent
in the Avon’s a boat homing on the wind
which, in other words, I’ve whistled up for you.
An Unwritten Novel
There would be children, three of them.
Long-grassed gardens spilling to the river.
A piano playing the next door down but one.
There would be children, three of them –
Orfee, Ichys, Perdita, or Ellie, James, and John –
their voices in the orchard crying Styx for Avon
while urban foxes make recycling their own.
The parents are distracted. They take a lodger
whose window, nights, lights up like a quotation.
The woman opposite keeps a ledger of every
time the children call her witch for neighbour,
and how Montpelier, nights, is walking streets
of shadows. She knows the man who left so late
was not the lodger, how the child that’s missing
came from south of the river, where windows,
nights, frame lives like eye-rhymes for our own.
They say that nothing we’ve begun is irreversible.
There’d be children, two of them, and a woman
writing how the lost child’s hand lay in mine
lightly as a bird and with a bird’s fine bones.
And distantly, across the water, that piano tune.
Still Life
Artless on the table, three narcissi.
The gap between one petal
and the next, unfurling.
Light’s lip on the rim of a jug.
The time it took to get there.
The time it took to lay it on.
The weight of what’s brought to bear.
No sun.
Behind the glass, a sudden
movement of doves passing.
Doves?
Their breasts salmon, their fanned
tails copper verdigris.
The canvas, as before.
Snapshot of a Marriage
Returning late, he sees her silhouetted
in the landing window, an awkward
pietà with duvet that fills the frame.
By day she knows the measure of the boards
she treads; by night she dreams new storeys,
stairs that rise to meet her.
At his fold-out desk he draws the house
turreted. She can see herself in it, knows
he’d lift her across the threshold
if she’d only trust as a sleepwalker does
the candle she cups blindly, caught
light-fingered in its living flame.
Instead of a Mirror
It was never a good mirror, if a good mirror
gives a good likeness: in its green shade faces
came and went hazily as if underwater, rippling
through a corner of sky, a branch and jackdaw.
It was never a good mirror, but for twenty years
or more it held and even when last night its several
stone weight came down in darkness with just a trail
of gold and plastered horsehair, a quarter inch dent
in the floor as witness of its final double somersault
the glass lay intact and still showing that same square
of blue as if there were no unbreakabl
e chain of cause
and effect, or as if the wind had changed when it fell.
And because it was not a good mirror the wall
looks much the same now under its replacement
print where half-reflected faces flit against the tall
white façade of a house in Kingsdown, its purple
door inviting your glance casually to explore a hall
whose chessboard diagonals anchor the interior
volumes of stairwell and landing that lead round
to a balcony where the framed view’s familiar
as the room you’ve slept in for decades now or
the bed’s iron railings firm in your grasp under
the plane tree and that bird in its angular patch
of sky indeterminately homing or taking flight.
Domestic Science
When they moved to the high-rise, the children came quickly –