Voluntary

by Adam Thorpe

  outflung behind us and before. I ought

  to have been visiting your house in Maine

  but for toxic luck’s voracity; instead,

  my little pilgrimage has ended

  in this: a New York roar of indifference

  beyond the disbelief. You cherished

  one another more than any couple

  I have ever known; would

  have smiled to see me here … just like

  your novel, stopped mid-stream.

  Still struggling to imagine the rest, no

  second thoughts and the keys stuck.

  IN THE PARK AGAIN

  Nature’s judged it nicely

  with that girl on the bench, who’s spoilt it all

  with a wahoo copain

  and a languid swell of bubble-gum

  developing at her mouth like a medical illustration

  as she consults her iPhone.

  Before her, where the park’s

  small lake eructates the source even in drought,

  they found a Roman capital

  covered in vulva, like cleft peaches.

  No, more labial than peaches;

  though fashioned from marble

  with a crude chisel, they convey

  the thing itself, shaven

  as close as a classical underarm

  and repeated all round, over and over.

  It’s not on display, for the sake I suppose

  of school groups, though a teacher could imply

  it was fruit, a tree’s-worth of apricots

  or figs fissuring after a summer squall.

  Now in the depths of the pittosporum

  there are trysts that serve a variety of tastes;

  while the stone statues of the ancien régime

  reprieved by limewash and gazing

  out from their locked-in time

  of gods and nymphs and scanty chemises

  look harmless enough, standing about like men

  too old to be wrong. I find some grass at last

  that’s clear of dogs’ laxation or broken glass

  and read about the Revolution; how afraid

  foppish Robespierre was of others’ flesh.

  WRITER

  Nervily perfectionist, he cracks

  syllables and removes words

  as once he reduced daddy-long-legs

  to their vernacular of trunk

  as a secret favour to his grandmother,

  who had to flap her hands

  otherwise, reading in the deckchair

  on the summer lawn. Did she wonder,

  perhaps, why at eight years old

  her grandson was still crawling around

  with his nose so close to the ground

  on such a gorgeous day?

  HOLBEIN

  Tate Britain

  ‘Once I was alone with a Leonardo …’

  The crowd thickens, stands in rows

  three-deep, as if waiting for a train.

  This is great art’s business end:

  the traffic of eyes in our passing glances

  makes meaning manifest

  in what, you agree, would otherwise

  stay merely unique – straddling lifetimes

  with the ease of the chosen, set

  behind glass like a saint’s relic.

  Though there’s something flirtatious

  about these slow-moving rooms, hushed

  like a church, where certain faces

  become almost familiar and unlike the art

  will pass out of our lives for good:

  that willowy girl with slight vitiligo,

  the loud hipster with his lateral thoughts.

  And good’s the word; here war

  is an anomaly, greed perverse:

  the invisible brushwork is its own heaven.

  The young appraise and cannot imagine

  the world existing without themselves in it;

  while the old know, under their county

  shocks of white hair, that it will (without them)

  do quite well. They’ve got off lightly, after all,

  to be stood here still, squeaking the floorboards

  on their well-to-do heels, vituperative

  or cast in wonder while there’s time to be so.

  UNDERGROUND

  In the crypt of St Gilles du Gard

  my wife sings, with a dozen others,

  la Messe de Nostre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut.

  It is damp and cold; a candle ungathers

  its flame in a draught. The murdered papal legate

  is laid along the cloister, under a pockmarked

  slab, where even in drought

  there is always water. Bad stuff

  starts from a single point in time.

  Near the well where, in 1562,

  the priest and his choir boys were dropped

  through its webs, Gilles the hermit’s tomb

  lies rough and thick, as if shaped by a mallet.

  To touch it, the pilgrims would come in vast

  numbers, all sweat and clamour, scattering

  the mast and straw of nights on the road.

  Was it all in vain? Nothing improved,

  the age not turning over a new leaf,

  death still setting its milestones

  of war and plague. The Front National

  runs this town and her peeling, piss-smelling

  streets are sinister. Now the Kyrie

  rises in overlapping petals of full-voiced tones

  to break and shower us from the vaulted ceiling

  or dim into the distance of tombs and stone –

  the beauty and the bleakness so beguiling together,

  like faith; like the government of faith by grief.

  SECOND HOMERS

  No, not Jones’s ‘weathered mantle-rock’

  but the tussocked drystone of a terrace wall,

  unbrowbeaten by frost, mossed through centuries,

  toffee-hammered in minutes as I watched

  the backhoe digger at work next door.

  The past’s luggage lost, the new destination

  an intestinal circuit-board of pipes and wires:

  the rough surgery of the Normans’ pool.

  Out with the chick-peas, onions, leaks,

  the few rows of vines for the style.

  Three weeks of sunburnt mirth a year

  just where each spring we’d hear the nightingale.

  VIA

  As in a dewy meadow lit by dawn

  at least the conquered could see

  (in cobbled mortar or beaten earth)

  the threads by which Rome spun control

  and held her sway: the stout bridges tackling

  the floods’ shout on sharpened piers;

  the milestones’ clipped precision; or the inns

  of fare where grooms rubbed down the frothed

  horses, still shivering from the effort

  it took to measure even the Empire’s thumb.

  It was clear, the oppression; its dust

  settling on your tongue: that heft, that strength.

  Those wheels, those hooves, those feet. There was no secret

  to it. The central point was a pillar of stone

  in the Roman forum – about which everything

  revolved and back to which everything

  came as the suspended ball in a game

  of skittles rests from its swing: a needle of stone,

  a node, something to kick at, not the end of the road

  but the beginning, the start, the journey controlled

  as a finger alters the flight of a kite on its long,

  invisible string, twitched from afar to be turned.

  Mounted, with baggage and arms, an officer

  could make ten miles by dusk; a Brit, to get

  to Rome, would need a good six weeks

  of a nerve steadier than murrain, bandits, mud.

  Distance was u
nderstood: and how it controlled.

  Now what keeps us checked is far less clear.

  All roads lead to Riyadh, yes, but the ways

  are of air and you will never walk them,

  they won’t climb the slope in hairpin swags

  or vanish into the arch of a gate. Only

  the powerful use them, their wallets full of wars –

  undertakers pacing before the coffined future

  they have, with such infinite fuss, prepared.

  INTERIOR WITH A YOUNG MAN READING

  after the painting by Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1898

  Only pretending to be alone, of course,

  leaning wanly in the unseen window’s

  northern light: knuckles as shiny as his black shoes

  or the ebony wedge of desk ensnared

  by the chair’s back, its creamy fan of bars

  as thin as his fingers against the dark book

  whose words will not come right. His mouth’s

  got its draw-string concentrated look,

  as if there’s nobody here to impress.

  It is bright out: the broad pine boards either tick

  with heat or are chilled under snow-light

  (the season remains unclear). And Vilhelm, of course –

  insisting the shoes be polished over and over,

  the scrubbed hands be helped with lanoline

  to useful highlights – now keeps muttering,

  through the slap of brushwork, ‘No posing, no posing!

  You are quite alone!’ His brother’s the genius;

  he will be forgotten. Will the book’s

  thin wings take flight? Will the paint

  be wet forever, the unknown life

  always ahead of him and perhaps shorter

  than the oyster light might lead one to expect?

  Only the clock’s quarterly clearing of its throat

  reminds him, from time to time, to ask permission;

  to flex his limbs from cramp and take a step.

  ALCALÁ

  11/3/2004: in memoriam

  The guide book unread, it was a shock –

  opening the hotel’s curtains

  with their snared litmus of smoke

  to a dazzling installation of storks’

  whitenesses, the wings half-snuffed to black

  and spread in supernumerary arches

  among the belfry’s own, or gliding

  low over the shocks of nest

  that history’s stony strictures had left alone.

  Then the bombs flashed some four years

  further down the line. Odd, how the bells’

  tolling felt already as familiar

  as the incumbent storks that

  ‘always come back’, you said.

  As if returning was a wonder.

  VESSEL

  Saaremaa, Estonia

  This rowboat’s taken root and bloomed

  its crew: a clinker-sided, wild-flower trough

  in stonewashed blue by the corrugated shed

  on an island whose vowels are the way

  this inlet’s waters arrive through the plumed

  reeds – in a flat calm, lighter than the sky’s grey,

  on whiffs of bog-tar. The flowers are mostly red,

  with a clutch of yellow comfrey bowed

  over the sky-washed oar-bench. Was this designed,

  so perfect in its fashion (that immaculate curve

  of the gunwale up to the prow), the wreck allowed

  its resurrection? Or has it simply remained,

  untended, the rest down to the same verve

  we’ve fought to master as if it had a mind:

  the rotting hull a compost, and steerage feigned.

  SUMMING UP

  Each week he comes to the Home and entertains

  the more ‘able’ residents (on voice and guitar)

  in the so-called communal room at the far

  end of the corridor, so the popular strains

  of love’s classics (‘This being St Valentine’s,’

  the nurse laughs, hooking back the door

  I’d firmly closed) now add the proverbial straw

  to the pyre of loss. As your life grinds

  to a halt (but not yet, not quite), You Are

  the Sunshine of My Life crackles to a start.

  He has a portable amp and a bigger heart,

  does it all for free. I was hoping for

  some last-words summing-up, a clap of thunder,

  not songs that beat my finger against your palm:

  the choric sorrows usurped by Andy’s charm,

  the cygnet’s lament transfigured to Stevie Wonder.

  CLEARING YOUR STUDY

  1

  Private realm of accounts, typed letters;

  a book of unused Green Shield stamps;

  meticulous inventories of minor expense;

  bills and photos I pause under the lamp

  to study, though (like a thief) I am short of time.

  I am only doing this at your behest, of course –

  the house must be cleared before it’s sold –

  but as I keep vigil in the nursing home

  I feel I’m untying what keeps you fettered

  or dismantling something that has grown too old,

  foraging backwards as you weaken, get worse,

  to the earliest generation of your Pan Am pens.

  2

  Or finishing you, perhaps. In the sleepless nights

  I hold your hand and wish to be forgiven,

  your breathing the moan of wind in sedge,

  coming and going. (The Home murmurs

  as nocturnal woods do, bustling with rumours.)

  The muddle kept at bay, avoiding the edge,

  your entire life has been tightly guyed

  by the kind of order I envy, driven

  as I am by the wisps of marsh-lights –

  the filial verse you always read, loyal

  to the end. Is this some obscure revenge –

  working through your filing system, your desk

  and cabinets, in some ultimate anarchist binge,

  filling the bin-bags with paper in a clownish burlesque?

  3

  Any time now, they say. You’ve no idea

  what I’m doing, though I’ve whispered it to you

  between pointing out the pheasant by the wood

  through your room’s plate-glassed view –

  the opening to your after-life, I think, in a russet

  English perfection … though to step outside

  is to find Basingstoke down in the valley, to hear

  the laboured moan of traffic, and my anthropic dread

  descends as the tyres scrunch the gravel

  and I head back to attack the rest, unravelling

  the years, the decades. I’m forced to bust

  the lock on your old briefcase, like parenticide,

  4

  with a hammered spanner. It has to be done,

  or others will do it and I’ll never see again

  your lifetime’s grace, the honey in its cells.

  I pillage, make flash decisions on what to keep

  (gardening catalogues and suchlike ephemeral data)

  or chuck (once-vital statements from banks), then sleep

  in a welter of paper. Even the junk mail’s

  prized: a health-insurance offer with Think About

  This scribbled on the top; ten years later

  I wonder if you did. Your bouts of gout

  aside, you were mostly fit until my mother died.

  Then the grief dragged like weights and you began to slide.

  5

  I reach into the bowels of your oldest files:

  what are lives but the illusion that all this

  matters? So easily scattered, it slides

  into the third bin-bag, already obese,

  in a landslip of receipts (mostly shillings
)

  from long-dead stores, more recently-accumulated miles

  never used, the special offers milling

  with ancient reminders marked, in biro, Replied

  to. I feel like stopping, but continue like a hacker

  drunk on power. It has to be done! As a boy

  I revered this realm, tiptoeing in from my toy

  universe to gaze in wonder at what I now attack

  6

  with barbarian ease, as though it’s the only

  way to release you from an empire of pain.

  Back in the Home, it’s the early hours again,

  and nothing bothers you but the fight to breathe.

  Your study is almost done. There’s something lonely

  about you, now: I’ve stacked the pictures, I’ve stripped

  the drawers to the proverbial final paper clip

  and now you’re on your own, the warmth of my palm

  a faint clue, perhaps, to what you were. Bequeathed

  only by my beseeching, your page-and-a-half of memoir

  is still in the typewriter, stopped at the war,

  curled like a buried scroll in its strange calm.

  EXTREME UNCTION

  I ask for the priest and an hour later

  the local vicar bounds in,

  tracksuit-togged, no dog-collar.

  I mumble something about extreme

  unction: prayers, oils. ‘That’s not

  our thing,’ he chuckles. ‘Now,

  what would you like me to do?’

  I confess my father had served in church –

  that he was a man of faith, that faith

  had helped him cope with loss –

  while the man in trainers briskly nods.

  He leans his tall frame over the bed

  beside the cotton swabs, the cold tea,

  the untouched biscuits on the plate,

  and booms out undeterminedly, finishes off

  with a concession to ritual in the Lord’s Prayer,

  intoned as if it’s old hat, a plough horse,

  too holy for his gleamingly blunt world.

  A pained expression creeps over

  my unconscious father’s face –

  exactly as it did when, sharpening

  the carver over the Sunday roast’s

  tucked-in tibial succulence,

  head cocked as if listening out

  for something like a reed-pipe, way off,