by Fleur Adcock
are his alone. Did the romance go well?
Whether he married her’s recorded somewhere
in books. The wistful strings, the determined
percussion, the English cadences, don’t tell.
Villa Isola Bella
‘You will find Isola Bella in pokerwork on my heart’
KATHERINE MANSFIELD to JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY 10 November 1920 (inscribed outside the Katherine Mansfield memorial room in Menton)
Your villa, Katherine, but not your room,
and not much of your garden. Goods trains boom
all night, a dozen metres from the bed
where tinier tremors hurtle through my head.
The ghost of your hot flat-iron burns my lung;
my throat’s all scorching lumps. I grope among
black laurels and the shadowy date-palm, made
like fans of steel, each rustling frond a blade,
across the gravel to the outside loo
whose light won’t wake my sleeping sister. You
smoked shameless Turkish all through your TB.
I drag at Silk Cut filters, duty-free,
then gargle sensibly with Oraldene
and spit pink froth. Not blood: it doesn’t mean,
like your spat scarlet, that I’ll soon be dead –
merely that pharmacists are fond of red.
I’m hardly sick at all. There’s just this fuzz
that blurs and syncopates the singing buzz
of crickets, frogs, and traffic in my ears:
a nameless fever, atavistic fears.
Disease is portable: my bare half-week
down here’s hatched no maladie exotique;
I brought my tinglings with me, just as you
brought ragged lungs and work you burned to do;
and, as its fuel, your ecstasy-prone heart.
Whatever haunts my bloodstream didn’t start
below your villa, in our genteel den
(till lately a pissoir for passing men).
But your harsh breathing and impatient face,
bright with consumption, must have left a trace
held in the air. Well, Katherine, Goodnight:
let’s try to sleep. I’m switching out the light.
Watch me through tepid darkness, wavering back
past leaves and stucco and their reverent plaque
to open what was not in fact your door
and find my narrow mattress on the floor.
Lantern Slides
1
‘You’ll have to put the little girl down.’
Is it a little girl who’s bundled
in both our coats against my shoulder,
buried among the trailing cloth?
It’s a big haul up to the quay,
my other arm heavy with luggage,
the ship lurching. Who’s my burden?
She had a man’s voice this morning.
2
Floods everywhere. Monsoon rain
syphoning down into the valley.
When it stops you see the fungus
hugely coiling out of the grass.
Really, in such a derelict lane
you wouldn’t expect so many cars,
black and square, driving jerkily.
It’s not as if we were near a village.
3
Now here’s the bridal procession:
the groom pale and slender in black
and his hair black under his hat-brim;
is that a frock-coat he’s wearing?
The bride’s as tall as his trouser pocket;
she hoists her arm to hold his hand,
and rucks her veil askew. Don’t,
for your peace of mind, look under it.
4
The ceremony will be in a cavern,
a deep deserted underground station
built like a theatre; and so it is:
ochre-painted, proscenium-arched.
The men have ribbons on their hatbands;
there they are, behind the grille,
receding with her, minute by minute,
shrivelling down the empty track.
Dreaming
‘Oblivion, that’s all. I never dream,’ he said –
proud of it, another immunity,
another removal from the standard frame which she
inhabited, dreaming beside him of a dead
woman tucked neatly into a small bed,
a cot or a child’s bunk, unexpectedly
victim of some friend or lover. ‘Comfort me,’
said the dreamer, ‘I need to be comforted.’
He did that, not bothering to comprehend,
and she returned to her story: a doctor came
to identify the placid corpse in her dream.
It was obscure; but glancing towards the end
she guessed that killer and lover and doctor were the same;
proving that things are ultimately what they seem.
Street Song
Pink Lane, Strawberry Lane, Pudding Chare:
someone is waiting, I don’t know where;
hiding among the nursery names,
he wants to play peculiar games.
In Leazes Terrace or Leazes Park
someone is loitering in the dark,
feeling the giggles rise in his throat
and fingering something under his coat.
He could be sidling along Forth Lane
to stop some girl from catching her train,
or stalking the grounds of the RVI
to see if a student nurse goes by.
In Belle Grove Terrace or Fountain Row
or Hunter’s Road he’s raring to go –
unless he’s the quiet shape you’ll meet
on the cobbles in Back Stowell Street.
Monk Street, Friars Street, Gallowgate
are better avoided when it’s late.
Even in Sandhill and the Side
there are shadows where a man could hide.
So don’t go lightly along Darn Crook
because the Ripper’s been brought to book.
Wear flat shoes, and be ready to run:
remember, sisters, there’s more than one.
Across the Moor
He had followed her across the moor,
taking shortcuts, light and silent
on the grass where the fair had been –
and in such weather, the clouds dazzling
in a loud warm wind, who’d hear?
He was almost up with her
at the far side, near the road,
when a man with a blotched skin
brought his ugly dogs towards them.
It could have been an interruption.
And as she closed the cattle-gate
in his face almost, he saw
that she was not the one, and let her go.
There had been something. It was
not quite clear yet, he thought.
So he loitered on the bridge,
idle now, the wind in his hair,
gazing over into the stream
of traffic; and for a moment
it seemed to him he saw it there.
Bethan and Bethany
Bethan and Bethany sleep in real linen –
avert your covetous eyes, you starers;
their counterpanes are of handmade lace:
this is a civilised country.
If it is all just one big suburb
gliding behind its freezing mist
it is a decorated one;
it is of brick, and it is tidy.
Above the court-house portico
Justice holds her scales in balance;
the seventeenth-century church is locked
but the plaque outside has been regilded.
Bethan and Bethany, twelve and eleven,
bared their eyes to the television
rose-red-neon-lit, and whispered
in their related langu
ages.
Guess now, through the frilled net curtains,
which belongs here and which doesn’t.
Each of them owns the same records;
this is an international culture.
The yobs in the street hoot like all yobs,
hawk and whistle and use no language.
Bethan and Bethany stir in their sleep.
The brindled cat walks on their stomachs.
Blue Glass
The underworld of children becomes the overworld
when Janey or Sharon shuts the attic door
on a sunny afternoon and tiptoes in sandals
that softly waffle-print the dusty floor
to the cluttered bed below the skylight,
managing not to sneeze as she lifts
newspapers, boxes, gap-stringed tennis-racquets
and a hamster’s cage to the floor, and shifts
the tasselled cover to make a clean surface
and a pillow to be tidy under her head
before she straightens, mouths the dark sentence,
and lays herself out like a mummy on the bed.
Her wrists are crossed. The pads of her fingertips
trace the cold glass emblem where it lies
like a chain of hailstones melting in the dips
above her collarbones. She needs no eyes
to see it: the blue bead necklace, of sapphire
or lapis, or of other words she knows
which might mean blueness: amethyst, azure,
chalcedony can hardly say how it glows.
She stole it. She tells herself that she found it.
It’s hers now. It owns her. She slithers among
its globular teeth, skidding on blue pellets.
Ice-beads flare and blossom on her tongue,
turn into flowers, populate the spaces
around and below her. The attic has become
her bluebell wood. Among their sappy grasses
the light-fringed gas-flames of bluebells hum.
They lift her body like a cloud of petals.
High now, floating, this is what she sees:
granular bark six inches from her eyeballs;
the wood of rafters is the wood of trees.
Her breathing moistens the branches’ undersides;
the sunlight in an interrupted shaft
warms her legs and lulls her as she rides
on air, a slender and impossible raft
of bones and flesh; and whether it is knowledge
or a limpid innocence on which she feeds
for power hasn’t mattered. She turns the necklace
kindly in her fingers, and soothes the beads.
Mary Magdalene and the Birds
1
Tricks and tumbles are my trade; I’m
all birds to all men.
I switch voices, adapt my features,
do whatever turn you fancy.
All that is constant is my hair:
plumage, darlings, beware of it.
2
Blackbird: that’s the one to watch –
or he is, with his gloss and weapon.
Not a profession for a female,
his brown shadow. Thrush is better,
cunning rehearser among the leaves,
and speckle-breasted, maculate.
3
A wound of some kind. All that talk
of the pelican, self-wounding,
feeding his brood from an ever-bleeding
bosom turns me slightly sick.
But seriousness can light upon
the flightiest. This tingling ache,
nicer than pain, is a blade-stroke:
not my own, but I let it happen.
4
What is balsam? What is nard?
Sweetnesses from the sweet life,
obsolete, fit only for wasting.
I groom you with this essence. Wash it
down the drain with tears and water.
We are too human. Let it pass.
5
With my body I thee worship:
breast on stone lies the rockdove
cold on that bare nest, cooing
its low call, unlulled,
restless for the calling to cease.
6
Mary Magdalene sang in the garden.
It was a swansong, said the women,
for his downdrift on the river.
It sounded more of the spring curlew
or a dawn sky full of larks,
watery trillings you could drown in.
HOTSPUR
(1986)
a ballad for music by
GILLIAN WHITEHEAD
I
There is no safety
there is no shelter
the dark dream
will drag us under.
*
I married a man of metal and fire,
quick as a cat, and wild:
Harry Percy the Hotspur,
the Earl of Northumberland’s child.
He rode to battle at fourteen years.
He won his prickly name.
His talking is a halting spate,
his temper a trembling flame.
He has three castles to his use,
north of the Roman Wall:
Alnwick, Berwick, Warkworth –
and bowers for me in them all.
I may dance and carol and sing;
I may go sweetly dressed
in silks that suit the lady I am;
I may lie on his breast;
and peace may perch like a hawk on my wrist
but can never come tame to hand,
wed as I am to a warrior
in a wild warring land.
*
High is his prowess
in works of chivalry,
noble his largesse,
franchyse and courtesy.
All this wilderness
owes him loyalty;
and deathly rashness
bears him company.
II
The Earl of Douglas clattered south
with Scottish lords and men at arms.
He smudged our tall Northumberland skies
black with the smoke of burning farms.
My Hotspur hurried to halt his course;
Newcastle was their meeting-place.
Douglas camped on the Castle Leazes;
they met in combat, face to face.
It was as fair as any fight,
but Douglas drew the lucky chance:
he hurled my husband from his saddle,
stunned on the earth, and snatched his lance.
I weep to think what Harry saw
as soon as he had strength to stand:
the silken pennon of the Percies
flaunted in a foreign hand.
‘Sir, I shall bear this token off
and set it high on my castle gate.’
‘Sir, you shall not pass the bounds
of the county till you meet your fate.’
The city held against the siege;
the Scots were tired and forced to turn.
They tramped away with all their gear
to wait my lord at Otterburn.
III
I sit with my ladies in the turret-room
late in the day, and watch them sewing.
Their fingers flicker over the linen;
mine lie idle with remembering.
Last night the moon travelled through cloud
growing and shrinking minute by minute,
one day from fullness, a pewter cup
of white milk with white froth on it.
These August days are long to pass.
I have watched the berries on the rowan
creeping from green towards vermilion,
slow as my own body to ripen.
I was eight years old when we married,
a child-bride for a boy warrior.
Eight more years dr
agged past before
they thought me fit for the bridal chamber.
Now I am a woman, and proved to be so:
I carry the tender crop of our future;
while he pursues what he cannot leave,
drawn to danger by his lion’s nature.
Daylight fades in the turret-slit;
my ladies lay aside their needles.
They murmur and yawn and fold away
the fine-worked linen to dress a cradle.
And I should rest before the harvest moon
rises to dazzle me. But now
I stitch and cannot think of sleep.
What should I be sewing for tomorrow?
IV
It fell about the Lammastide –
the people put it in a song –
the famous fray at Otterburn,
fought by moonlight, hard and long.
The Percies wore the silver crescent;
the moon was a full moon overhead.
Harry and his brother were taken,
but first they’d left the Douglas dead.
Who was the victor on that field
the Scots and the English won’t agree;
but which force won as songs will tell it
matters little that I can see:
it surges on from year to year,
one more battle and still one more: