Three Poems
Page 3
Dandelions go blowsy and grey, get dandruff,
The clean brush is matted with cobwebs.
Children read the hours on dying flowers.
Some words have also lost their pairs:
Some rhymes are only painful memories,
Recycled like family sagas at Christmas, clichés.
The almost-instincts of minor poets.
Below, for example, rhyme’s artefacts:
‘All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.’
‘If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.’
3.31
What will survive of us?
Larkin thought the answer might be ‘love’,
But couldn’t prove it.
‘The drafts folder was the most interesting place.’
‘It was always you, in the end.’
‘He tried to tell you in his own way.’
Short chains of carbon in the dust,
This is the practical answer.
Old laptops, pacemakers, leg pins.
DNA fibres revealing death’s cause.
Emails we sent and drafts we didn’t send.
The things we said and those we should’ve.
Downloaded porn videos reveal
Proclivities that shock our friends:
Cotton gags, string cutting into the clefts
Of twenty-something Japanese schoolgirls.
But nothing filthy enough to interest strangers.
Old lovers cross their legs, refold the paper,
Study the afterimage in the metro window.
No one remembers everything about someone.
A quick armpit wash at 6, a fluster of perfume,
Dancing into tights, two daubs of blood.
A finger pulls vagrant hairs, snags the elastic.
Snow in the second week of December.
But how was it that you smelled afterwards,
On my hands?
3.32
Another dubious rhyming poet: Shelley.
He might, I suppose, have been speaking Platonically,
About ‘true love’ as intellectual knowledge,
But the jealous Mary thought that it was bilge.
‘The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates …
One object, and one form,’ is dull, he states.
In 1820, he was in love with a girl locked up in a convent,
Two women had killed themselves for him,
Both of his marriages had failed,
He was about to die. He was cruel. He railed:
‘True Love in this differs from gold and clay
That to divide is not to take away.’
What crap. E. M. Forster hadn’t even come out
When he used it as an epigraph: ‘fine poetry’,
Says his lame hero, grandly, brooding on sex.
‘I never was attached to that great sect …’ etc.
But later even Rickie finds the Epipsychidion
Evasive in its advocacy of free love, ‘a little inhuman’.
After all, ‘I love you both’ is easier to say than hear.
Demolition, a swung weight, it unbalances the ear.
True love yearns always for reciprocation.
So in the end we sit, desolately, at the station,
Waiting with an awkward bunch of lilies for the train,
Watching the one we love walk arm-in-arm into the rain,
Head tilted to one side, laughing as they have always done,
A hand in someone else’s hand. Yes, loving more than one …
Means multiplying detail, and then its loveliness is gone.
So it means nothing suddenly. You could be anyone.
Nor is the way he curls his feet beneath your feet,
Nor a shabby patch of brown chest hair important, discrete.
No, and the slick wet ostrich feather between your legs,
Is not important as yours, but because it connotes sex.
And the turn of his face away, a babyish hiss in orgasm,
Is not something shared, but the key turn of solipsism,
No, none of those things that meant so much survive,
Untarnished, hearing the same things multiplied.
4.1
Cyclical theories of the universe are out of fashion.
But the Big Bang gives you vertigo.
You would take thalidomide, anything!
‘Picture it as a partially inflated balloon.’
You think of something red in the Christmas tree,
How it inflates into long-bellied reindeer.
Then, overfilled, they deform, bleach.
How Santa staggers wasted to his sled.
But there is nowhere to be looking from.
The balloon is the whole universe,
So how can you be holding its neck,
Tromboning the rubber band?
And the smell of pine needles
And warmed-through rubber?
‘The smoothness and flatness of the universe
Is hard to explain with inflationary models.’
There is the problem of dark energy.
But to think of it all happening over and over,
Universe after universe, each universe flat,
Consumed by fire, then cooling slowly,
Like ice cubes on August afternoons,
Shells and pools, raw eggs whenever checked on,
Only for the freezer to be ravaged by fire
On a hidden fifth dimension
Until a new universe is born?
What, would another bubble form to pop – just so?
Would it be no-pulp OJ next time, too?
4.2
To begin with, everything was nothing
And there was nothing to speak of and no begin with.
No, there was nothing to speak of, before there was everything.
Then (when?) all speed of light and speed of forever, balls of gas,
Bright stars falling into the suck of black holes, radiant plates,
The outward transfer of angular momentum,
Then gas accreting into galaxies, becoming a little more clustered,
Becoming worlds, becoming worlds on which something so comical,
So precise, so utterly different from the world, so lovely
As that language of ours, these words, could arise in one of them.
To speak of when and then and moments is a figure of language,
It is language addressing itself to what is not, and to what it is itself not.
Language with its simple action words, verbs:
Ich mag es nicht, vas-y toi, non sum qualis eram,
Language with its ‘past’ and ‘future’ and ‘present’,
Pointing to what it doesn’t know, I love you, now, babbling of unicorns.
4.3
Tears and liver spots on the back of the hand,
The comfort again and again of writing something fictional down.
All cancers were once benign,
Then the DNA forgets its prosody
And cells divide interminably:
The raddled beauty of doggerel.
Stained under a microscope,
An ovary is Venice at sunset,
‘Too beautiful to be painted’ said Monet.
Midas-touched sperm, bulging and fanning.
4.4
July 16, 1945: lightning zigzags, delays.
It is minus twenty minutes, minus nineteen,
It is the world’s first countdown.
And if only time could dilate
If only time could dilate or speed up
It would be never or it would be game over.
‘I never realised seconds could be so long.’
Men push their cheeks together on the lino,
Clench back sneezes. Black boots pinch corns.
And now it is NOW and his knuckles blanch on the post.
/>
T = 0 = 5:29:45 a.m.
It is very important that the thunder comes.
But there is so much light, light, heat on the neck.
Feynman discards the welder’s glass,
His eye socket ground blind.
The rest see a scatter of antelope arrows,
And a mile-wide aniseed ball, air-sucked orange.
And let there be mountains in the desert.
A half-drawn cartoon bubble waits for the joke,
A red-hot elephant dances on its trunk.
Whose is this wig that blazes from behind?
Light is a scalpel excavating retinas,
A needle caught on an LP, boring into bodies.
And then light turns into sound, into ordinary thunder.
The sound catches up with the light, and the desert howls.
Now nothing will ever be the same again.
And everything will be as it always was.
He ought to say that the Atomic Age has begun.
He feels like a boy who has aced a math test,
The placid pleasure of being specially intelligent,
But to come to the front of the stage, like prize day?
His ribs itch with eczema, sweat in loose tweeds.
Historic moments are as tiresome as first nights,
All lines to fluff, after being cooped up,
The meaning eroded by gabbling in rehearsal.
He is remembering snow in Harvard Yard,
The death of light early and grit-stained slush.
‘Afterwards, I remember, the boatman called to us.’
(The words won’t come, he fumbles for them.)
Later, ‘I am become Shiva, death, the shatterer of worlds.’
Out loud he says, ‘It worked.’ No glitches.
The Director takes hot thumbs from his belt loops,
And struts across the room. Blood in bruised ears.
‘Now we’re all motherfucking sons of bitches.’
[And repeat.]
THE SANDPIT AFTER RAIN
Think of a hospital ward at night:
The phone squirming on someone’s bedside table,
The doctors descending like robbers on the bed,
The youngest running from a dream he had just begun …
1. Stuffing a Chicken
At the start of the journey, before boarding even begins,
Whortleberry tears, brighter than the eyes of swallows,
Smoother than the eggs of moorhens …
Things happened in the wrong order, out of nature.
There was that larval froth in the morning in the garden,
Bubbles of spit on the black rosemary sticks,
And in the afternoon the forelocks of a crocus.
At night I took long baths in the penumbra of the streetlight.
And when we saw the foetus on the screen he did not dive,
He was no longer dangling on his cord,
His mouth was no longer snapping like Pac-Man’s.
He had filled his womb. Only one baleful eye
Opened in the gloom, closed in the ebbing waters.
This was a week past due. Nothing was favourable.
The neck of the womb was hard and closed.
The midwife couldn’t reach to strip the waters.
Try pineapple. Try reflexology in Kilburn.
Or (scanning my notes, I am 35, it might be IVF)
‘Try what got you that way, why don’t you?’
I try reflexology in Kilburn, acupuncture in Fulham,
Swimming, acupressure, a whole pineapple from Ghana,
More acupuncture. Acupuncture with electric needles,
I get a discount on the final session,
‘It wasn’t going to work, as I said …’
The date must be wrong, miscalculated.
Soon it will be the year of the sheep.
And what was I thinking, moving house?
These things are no good in pregnancy:
Wind, scissors in the bed, moving furniture in vacant spaces,
All these superstitions …
Funerals, sitting with a corpse …
Eating crab, touching the bride at a wedding …
On the front page of the paper,
‘C-section surge in China as zodiac sign moves’.
Only one sheep in ten has a chance at happiness.
I lurch along the street
On slippered size 9 piano feet,
The woman who has done everything
She shouldn’t do,
Everything unmotherly and queer,
Taboo,
Frantically googling:
taboo pregnancy what not to do
+ dietary restrictions
+ death
+ new year 2015 date
The ice is now abundant
And should be brought into the ice-houses.
The sacrificial victim is prized for its kidneys;
The magpie begins to build.
Hens hatch.
The sun has been through all his mansions.
The last month of winter is time’s fullness.
Let me mummify.
Now I wish I had done prenatal yoga and opened my hips.
In San Francisco, I did yoga: it was the month of the breath.
But I never wanted to dedicate my practice to Ganesh,
Or join in the Sanskrit chanting, or be made manifest,
Or only as a size 4 with toned legs.
Om Sahana.
Om Shanti.
What faith did I have in the wisdom of the east?
In hypnobirthing?
I remembered the itchy feeling of lying on a futon,
Masked, while a man who had eaten garlic prawns
Wafted tuning forks, occasionally checking his phone,
Unblocking each stagnant meridian of my soul.
I knew the sob through the plywood wall.
I was afraid of the sadness of energy workers.
I was afraid of meditating,
The damp slug trail, the dangling bit of cotton
Hanging from the shirt, the movements of mouths:
Om …
The engineer glossy with concentration
Composing his lips like a bridesmaid in a hotel bathroom,
Om, he blots, the stripes of Revlon Cherry Snow.
The girl who corks her mouth like yesterday’s prosecco,
The girl with a neck like a trombone,
Om …
The teacher rustling the elaborate sinews of her arms,
But swift and modest as a nun at weekday Eucharist
As she slips a tongue beneath the sound and the sound
Dissolves on the tongue and the stop is gone, Om …
And there is only this tinny singing,
This wavering Om on the stave.
Remember the wedding on Cape Cod, and the sand flies,
And the lobster rolls with mayonnaise made with egg yolks,
Remember the pink champagne and the welts of horseflies?
Atone.
Remember the bad feng shui of the house you sold.
The cross street that fell straight out of the front door,
Past the juice shop with its bags of fibrous pulp
(Clean turmeric, rainbow chard, lace-eaten kale)
Up to the Eichler homes banked with six o’clock fog,
The pert mid-century rooflines?
Atone.
Remember the dated features the stager ripped out,
The blue jay your neighbour said was her mother,
And the levity in the eyes of men who had known death
Everywhere, but found themselves still living,
Putting on weight, joining Facebook,
Picking through the buggies in Noe Valley,
Buying cut lilies and plumcots at the market.
Remember the pink Edwardian chandelier,
And shifting boxes in the cellar of an untenanted house.
Remember the pregnancy you wronged.
Atone for Dolores Street.
Remember the way your nails felt on the doctor’s shoulder,
The hissing threat to litigate,
The ill luck you cast into the brown pool of his eye,
In the room with the water cooler and solitaire,
The room for grief, with Country Life magazine
And beige mugs scurrilous with rings from half-drunk tea.
Atone with what you have.
And the day comes when it is time to visit the living,
When the garden was long with gooseberries
And lightning cracked the teacup of the sky.
I remember a honeycomb fence, and thunder,
And running in because we had heard about nuclear rain,
I remember a sofa with ribbed velveteen buttons,
And a blue Burmese kitten charmed down from the fence.
And snow on the telly – that static sound …
And standing at the door, waiting for the parquet floor
To tessellate itself, to be whirled weightless.
I remember when time was a ship’s container, with luggage
And wine and bananas lashed down to the emptiness.
I remember my father stuffing a chicken for lunch.
2. Hospital Windowsills
why
he lay with his hands like that
not looking at the video clip
or listening to the slop of your heartbeat,
or seeing the embryo’s unfinished limbs,