The Weather Wheel

by Mimi Khalvati

  a jowl that quivered. Her eyes seemed not to see. The grass,

  though abundant and inches from her lips, held no temptation.

  Measuring her in perspective, as a painter with a pencil,

  I judged her the length of my palm, on the thin side and brown,

  a perfectly ordinary rabbit but for her stillness, her patience.

  Finally, her trance broken, she jerked her head up, came to life,

  listened, heard and bounded off with her white scut into cover.

  I couldn’t help but think of my mother – that same stillness,

  that same absence of intention, volition, as she lay dying;

  that surrendering of a life force that turns you to stone

  though the fur is fur, the hair still hair, the posture neither

  sleeping nor prone but poised on the cusp of sculpture.

  Abney Park Cemetery

  The air in the cemetery’s greener, thicker with scent.

  Paths wind and twist and, whenever I come this way,

  I wonder if I’ve lost my bearings, following tiger stripes

  of sun between the graves. But here’s the station café.

  A patient I know from the psychiatric ward waves,

  smiling his dimpled, toothless smile, rubbing his forehead.

  His voice, high-pitched, accented, carries even though

  he’s talking to a woman at his table. I’m fond of him –

  he inspires affection. The skin around his eyes, wrinkled,

  rayed, has the softness of my father’s. He asks after Tom,

  shows me the heel of his palm badly burned from the cooker.

  ‘It’s my mind that does this – God save me from accidents!’

  He knows some Iranians, Azeris, just round the corner

  at the snooker club. Whenever he goes in for a drink,

  a Coca-Cola – and here he gestures, shrugging, meaning

  it’s on the house – ‘it’s’, as Hassan says, ‘hospitable.’

  Migration

  When I see a hand first raised, then placed

  on the heart, the head tilted towards the heart,

  a greeting exchanged between a pedestrian

  and a passing bus driver; when I see a woman

  seated at a bus stop wave to a woman passenger

  sitting behind me and, picturing them still,

  look straight into trees, tears spring to my eyes

  even though we’re stopped at Elephant & Castle.

  All one way blows the wind in the trees but

  which is the way to a staging post between

  the Khalvatis now, scattered in the diaspora,

  and our very first forebears who struck camp,

  loaded their beasts, set their caravans against

  a skyline, wind whipping the horses’ manes,

  the fringes of their saddlecloths and shawls,

  and moved as a whole tribe together?

  Her Anniversary

  It might be grey, it might be cold, who knows

  what the weather’s like out there? Birds know,

  so silent in the branches, animals in their lairs.

  But I, my blinds drawn down, am blind to all

  but my heart’s November, the second anniversary

  of my mother’s death. Perhaps I can keep her in,

  in the warmth of my rooms, fug of my flat rehung

  with her paintings, her tapestried cushions strewn

  on chairs and sofas, making them gardens, rosebeds.

  I can sit there among them as she did, as we did,

  oftentimes together. But where’s the sense in that?

  Their velvet backs, rusts and fawns she kept face up

  to stop the flowers fading, are already grimed from

  propping my back, my head. I can become her instead.

  Willingly become her in every meaning of the word.

  Daughters who betray mothers are in turn betrayed.

  VI The Avenue

  Granadilla de Abona I

  Even this garden, a veritable Eden with a keyhole pool,

  a white cockatoo glimpsed behind the bars of a cage,

  a trailing orange lotus swaying shadows against a wall

  and sun beginning to cast its warmth on rattan chairs,

  is an orchard of sorts but with nothing wild about it

  or left to chance, the body without the soul of an orchard.

  An orchard’s soul should be ragged, ramshackle, dapple

  throwing honeycombs of shade on soil, weather interstitial.

  But every view’s an artwork. Trees laden with oranges

  like Christmas trees with glass baubles, paired parakeets

  as yellow and green as the orange trees, banana palms

  sculptural, fronds sheared and scored, cardones, Magritte-like

  – not cacti but as penile – black avocados in the background,

  arbours within arbours, round every path another, offer

  a series of small warm breaths: seclusion without solitude,

  arrival without homecoming, a silence that rings in the ears.

  Granadilla de Abona II

  We are illicit. We creep around shaded paths, spit pips

  into flowering shrubs at the root, leave wet handprints

  on poolside tiles where we crouch to rinse our fingers,

  talk in the most inaudible of murmurs. A scruffy old hen

  crows triumphantly as she lays, a great tit flits into view

  and, on being glimpsed, scares; we are here and welcome

  only if we whisper without voice, move without noise,

  leave pipettes of blossom to float by on stagnant currents.

  Even our thoughts intrude, being the wiliest of burglars.

  Sleep too is a violation or so the parrots would have you think,

  screeching warnings enough to wake the dead. Don’t breathe,

  don’t listen, walk if you can on air. Every path is a dead end.

  Under the arch, the wrought-iron gates are not only padlocked

  but so entangled with lotus – an explosion of orange fireworks –

  they seem locked in perpetuity while, passing in a street, blaring

  through loudspeakers, gospel singers belt out ‘Oh Happy Day…’

  Granadilla de Abona III

  Well, no wonder. This is the site of the Garden of the Hesperides.

  These the Islands of the Blessed, the Fortunate Isles where,

  Sertorius waxed, ‘the air was never extreme, which for rain

  had a little silver dew, which of itself and without labour,

  bore all pleasant fruit to their happy dwellers.’ Pleasant fruit

  was had in plenty – reach up and twist the golden apple

  which will drop into your hand, the banana from its own hand,

  the madroño from its cluster. Oranges will rain down like

  starlight through a telescope, a green and golden galaxy.

  Near enough to spy cobwebs between their nodes, leaves,

  drained of their sap, crack and burn at the tip – the more

  brittle they grow, the weightier grow the oranges. By their song,

  imagine the size of canaries, goldcrests, lovebirds, lorikeets,

  their invisible throats and beaks smaller than pumpkin seeds.

  The length of life remaining to be lived can feel infinitesimal

  and interminable too. Not every poet longs for immortality.

  Granadilla de Abona IV

  Periquito and I have the garden to ourselves.

  Periquito has the shade and I the rising sun,

  fierce as Periquito’s fierce. ‘Dominion’ as in

  ‘Multiply and have dominion over all the creatures

  of the earth’ has, in Hebrew, another meaning:

  ‘understanding’. But Periquito talks Canarian,

  a parrot dialect thereof which, all ears though I am,

  signifies nothing but sound and f
ury. Periquito

  has the aviary birds to chorus him. They twitter

  like background water, he on one end and I

  on the other of a diagonal across the morning.

  Released from his cage he teeters along a parapet,

  a white quiff, a waddle and limp. Nothing to say

  for himself now that he’s free. Later they’ll call,

  ‘Periquito, hola hola’ and ‘Hola’ he’ll answer

  as clearly as a boy, albino, hiding in the bushes.

  Granadilla de Abona V

  He whistles once, crosses from one citrus tree

  to another along a hammock bridge, raises his quiff,

  tests a twig with his beak, one foot held quivering.

  In a sleek white tailcoat, his dress shirt ruffled,

  he skids up a rope, waving a hand, claws curled,

  attentive as a child in a playpen to the movements

  of all and sundry. Diario de Avisos, freshly laid,

  collects his droppings. Lord of the green canopy,

  he swings below the hammock ties, perches in a cleft

  to peer towards the sound of a generator whirring,

  taps his left hand on the branch excitedly and twice

  raises two white wings, once to declare himself an angel

  and once for balance as he grows ever more excited,

  hanging by his beak alone, doing chin-ups, sipping water,

  shaking diamonds in a spray around him, at the approach

  of Señora coming and going about her daily bustlings.

  Granadilla de Abona VI

  Here they come, the insects, feasting off the money plant

  under the drago tree whose bloodsap and attendant cures

  gave the Guanches health and longevity. My mother was

  ninety-two when she died, last and oldest of three siblings.

  Her family history died with her, none of it lives in my

  or my children’s memory. We are yesterday’s people,

  provisional, adaptable, borrowing and assimilating.

  The Guanches were said to have been exiled by Trajan

  whose captains cut off their tongues, put them in ships

  laden with animals and seed and forcibly settled them

  in the Canaries. Silbo Gomero, their whistling language,

  has survived to this day along with municipal place names,

  gofio, their staple bread, and mummies – light as scrolls

  with skin thinner and softer than our best kid gloves –

  that lined their burial caves. But the Guanche themselves,

  decimated, enslaved, were erased from memory and texts.

  Granadilla de Abona VII

  On three dry pumpkins, some little white pebbles,

  timples, a very small drago tambourine, a blonde flute

  with a hollow reed and four pipes with green stems

  and knobbly joints of barley, how sweetly they played

  endechas: ‘What does it matter if they take and bring

  milk, water and bread, if Agarfa will not look at me?’

  And while they played and sang songs of love and death,

  the old Gomera people, bearers of wisdom and knowledge,

  who kept their mysteries to themselves and never divulged

  the sacred site of their necropolis, the mysterious words

  pronounced when sowing seed or how their ancestors,

  the indigenous people of these islands, came to be here,

  saying only that a higher being had brought them, left them,

  then wiped them from memory, while the old native songs

  played on, the elders wept and rocked, leaning on their sticks

  with the same, same veined hands as the mummy of Madrid’s.

  Plaza de los Remedios

  It’s the childlike geometry of the square –

  the octagonal bandstand in the centre, the ring

  of café tables and chairs around it, the outer ring

  of bifurcating trunks, their packed suitcases of leaves,

  benches, balconies, windows that ask to be counted –

  that calls to mind set squares, rulers, compasses

  and a head bent over a see-through protractor,

  an angle of time arrested in the impalpable air.

  The scene is as mild as a nativity and beyond this

  simple geometry, immense, immeasurable mountains,

  a stormy Atlantic you can hear at night, snoring

  like a sleeping leviathan. I would like a small life.

  I would like a son who takes both my hands in his

  and, walking backwards, inches me towards the end

  of a cobbled street where a door opens and a daughter,

  taking my hands from his, helps me over the doorstep.

  The Wheelhouse

  Sun sinks behind the massif before it blazes, fires off

  shadow through the balustrade. The square is a great ship

  floating, rising and sinking on sun and shadow, a ship

  in harbour. We stroll the decks, let wind rest in our sails.

  But I know nothing of ships, wanting my feet on earth.

  My mother’s ashes under the cherry trees, her house

  occupied by someone else. I never go there, just as she

  will never sit in a café, holding her handbag close on her lap,

  her scarf, her hair in place. Memory would fill her smile

  as she swayed her head from side to side and breathed

  sweet exhalations of regret. Peremptorily, she’d ask

  for an ashtray, offer me cake. I loved forever being a child

  at my mother’s side, the captain of my ship whose railings

  I peered over. All her absences are final now. Like wind

  they’ve run in together. Now they form a wake; a house

  I am more than welcome in, a wheel I must learn to steer.

  Finca El Tejado

  The juniper glistens with rain. Plumes, shadowed on the urn,

  waver indistinctly. The fountain gushes, gushes, wind moans

  and tugs at the palm fronds – join me, join me. Raindrops

  hang two by two from railings. Everything has the shine

  of black on it. Marina turns the music on and the room fills

  with candlelight and yearning. Lamps throw umbrellas of light

  against the walls, the red check tablecloth, a bottle of wine,

  its candleglints, wait for company and we must stay with them,

  listening to the fountain, gutters and the plucking of guitars

  before the song begins. I have slung a quilt with violet roses

  over the curtain rail to keep out the light in the morning.

  Now I long for it, to see the sky, the golden stars of hamlets

  high in the hills. I long to see the rain in massive drifts

  open its fan, lay fan upon fan above the road to Buenavista

  so that even the petrol station’s blinded. Rose/leaf/rose/leaf

  and through the open door a closed door, a shining lock and key.

  The Avenue

  I always knew my mother’s funeral would be unseemly.

  I never had the wherewithal. To have the wherewithal

  is to inhabit a frame of mind that will stand one in stead.

  In my dream a long avenue, pale with spindly poplars,

  descended from the mountain – a peak like El Teide –

  and along it walked on hind legs, but as naturally as men,

  polar bears and among them my mother walked towards me.

  Then I knew that all the separations I had suffered, all

  the anguish they had caused me were but one separation,

  one ball of anguish. And when I woke, I still could see

  the avenue stretching to the mountains in mountain light,

  the polar bears in file, solemn and steadily walking,

  at intervals the silvery poplars on either s
ide of the road

  and in the middle my mother drawing slowly ever nearer

  as if the avenue were a travelator moving in both directions,

  carrying me forward towards her, carrying her forward towards me.

  Ghazal: In Silence

  Let them be, the battles you fought in silence.

  Bury your shame, the worst you thought in silence.