by Adam Thorpe
he’d test the blade with his thumb …
still not happy. Or not quite: not yet.
UNFINISHED
Your memoirs end, as on a little frown:
And then there was the war.
One-and-a-half pages of yellow feint-
ruled foolscap, curled in the typewriter
from the day your bed was moved downstairs.
‘I can’t get up to the study,’ you’d maintain
to my periodic urging, the fighter
in you winged. Or: ‘Too much of a chore.
Anyway, I can’t imagine anyone
could possibly be interested in my affairs!’
Well, I was. So I carried the machine down
to where all your life lay now, set up a space
among the medicines on the table …
and it made no difference. I offered
to record you, but you shook your head,
claiming tiredness: ‘I am incapable.’
Now I grope for what you said, over
the years, not even sure of which RAF base
it was in Lincolnshire so many were blown
from your life: at twenty you saw the dead
grow from friends in the nighttime canteen’s calm:
the one who’d always feared Berlin, until
the Berlin sortie came and you know the rest;
or the chaps limping in from a dicey op
who flamed up before your gaze, trying to land.
I’ve plenty of this, and I do my best,
now you’re gone; but beyond the hedge-hopped
fields and the skimmed wires I see metal,
burning: and no one’s stepping out, unharmed,
with a filled pad of foolscap in his hand.
REMEMBERING MY FATHER
Pan Am, 1947–79
New York for you was always the boss:
home of the daft telex, the cross-
eyed command filtering through
to hassles on the tarmac, those delays in fog.
You’d nip over for a day, too brief for jet lag,
complain how the baggage-handlers at JFK
were infiltrated, were in the Mafia’s pocket.
Only later would I learn not to take it
all as gospel, in the same way
you’d smile knowingly at ‘The World’s
Most Experienced Airline’, or the centrefold
daring of that ‘Clipper’ calendar for ’72
I hung in my bedroom, where I lusted
most of all for topless August
like a pilot choosing from his crew.
And now our taxi-driver, a retired
Midtown doorman recovering from (or fired
because of) a stroke and ‘too much booze’,
tells us how it’s ‘all the Mob, the food here …’
pointing out each curbside pizzeria
as we hurtle down the Boulevard through
Howard Beach – which, yes, sits right next
to the sprawling empire of jets
whose perpetual departures mimic the white egret
and creamy ibis we’ve watched each day
from our rented house in Jamaica Bay …
and I miss you again in a hush-kitted roar of regret.
FULL MOON IN SUMMER
Sight the moon through your fixed fist
and she’ll slip away,
if slower than a fish –
like the monthly list
of things to do,
too long to be done.
And she’s certainly
all glare tonight, gusted
into strobe-light by trees.
Our bedroom swarms
with her white sound,
the stars are dazed from sight.
We close our shutters but
she creeps around, ablaze with vacancy,
not letting us sleep. The night
sky’s cloudless, and she can’t
go shadowing her own face
from the light; but thinking
how months flash like cards
I reckon she might as well linger
on my life’s flicker
with her motionless scree
of impact scars: a hypothetic,
destinal sun.
TELLING YOU ABOUT KRIBI
You like the photo of me, long-haired and gauche,
reading Ted Hughes in my swimming trunks on the rocks
in Cameroon, the mangrove beyond the clean black
sands a grey blur, the odd fisherman’s pirogue
like a dropped leaf, my throne’s volcanic stack
pocked where the lava once bubbled to the ocean
that seemed to sneak its way past Fernando Po
to find this lovely bay and expressly bury
its breakers in a gentle swell at my feet, their strung
glory under a crown of spume long spent. The very
idea of it, back then: of not being young!
My bare back says it all: nothing goes slower
than life when warm air’s measuring your spine
and most of the stage is in front (if chance should smile).
I tell you that Exxon’s got its tankers there now –
the arse end of six hundred and fifty miles
(the nodding pumpjacks among Chad’s bony cows)
of forest-slicing pipeline, ruthless to the final
drop. The sacred grounds are a reek of garage,
farms interloped by oil, fish dead in the sea …
The promised schools and clinics were the usual fibs:
the money’s also leaked. We lack the agility
of the spirits; we should be dancing there in Kribi –
hammering on calabashes, masked, in a trance of rage.
THE GIFT
for Anastasia
Like Paddington, this little bear
propped on the old beam up to your
now mostly empty bedroom, has a pedigree,
remember? We were all playing
‘Give Us a Wave’ in the dunes of Sweden
(the bright clapboard houses so straight-laced
among the birch and aspen), when a gull,
circling overhead, dropped the catch
it had plucked from the waves: fur-naked
(bar a scarf of ribbon) and waxlike
from salt, its tiny surprise still filled
your hand, back then, when you were five.
POSY
in memoriam A-C
We buy the flowers together, my daughter and I.
‘Who are they for, mademoiselle?’
For a girl killed at dawn on Armistice Day,
leaving a club with a drunk at the wheel.
Magnesium-bright, ensoleillée
in her white wellingtons, the future
was hers, breath after breath to that infinitude
an eighteen-year-old assumes is her right.
The Mini Cooper demolished a wall.
My daughter bears the posy home
by the same route they’d walk from school,
the two of them: Anne-Charlotte,
she’s written on the tag, after the printed
MADEMOISELLE. She says, once home, how weird
it was; the flowers grew heavier and heavier, until
‘I felt I was carrying her, instead.’
FLAUBERT’S DRAFTS
Second thoughts, third thoughts, fourth thoughts,
the underbrush of lost causes, the barred ideas,
the hanging-about in the margins, the rejects
that never found their place, areas like frowns
or ploughed-up fieldwork on slants
where only the in-between scraps survived:
if only our lives offered such remedies –
the aching climb to the summit of perfection
able to go back upon itself, keeping the peak
in view, the nibbled vane of the quill
>
swerving and dipping over its own landscape
that alters according to the climber’s will.
Instead we’re left with regret, solid as hewn
wood, and the well-intentioned cleft we tread
from the blank plain: our one, uncorrectable line.
NEIGHBOUR
i.m. Claude M.
You have to tiptoe over a slope
of terracotta tiles; act the ballerina.
A dead weight when he fell,
and no EU-ordered rope,
only that broken marker-string
(on what is termed the ‘verge’),
he caught his foot in. No one,
of course, heard a thing.
Discovered in the foetal position
like a warrior in his stone-lined cist,
the only grave goods were the brick
walls beside him, all but finished: his mission
before retirement, with room for his dad.
That long dream of living there
he’d described to me once (stood together
on the brute concrete foundation pad)
as more precious than gold. A kind of birth.
Now it’s all done – wired, painted –
it’s hired to the hunters, who feast and laugh.
Hard to know what a house is worth.
DRY STONE WALLING
You know that sudden need: to repair, to make
amends. Restoration where the hard white sky
has bitten chunks out, where a lone sag of barbed wire
serves as sentinel – its miniature scalps taken
off would-be escapees. You watch your fingers
like hawks, for stones can roll: a knuckle no match
for their unaccustomed weight, that strange mineral flash
of life, the will that spars with your wedding ring
through the heavy glove: granite, leather, gold.
Your knees in mud. This time for definite, for good,
solid from the bottom, stayed by a heaviness of head
and poise. Though nothing stays where you want it, soldered
only by calculation; its sheer weight.
Wobble and tilt – those bids for freedom. The weather
runs at everything: you’re trying again where your father
clicked and clacked like a clock all the way to the gate.
SUBTRACTION
Cap Bon, Tunisia, 2003
El Haouaria, where they hollowed out
Carthage, is now a vaulted omega of absence,
its caves striated by slaves whose daylight bout
was a dim, powder-fashioned shaft,
who lived, breathed and doubtless died sandstone,
its colossal blocks floated up the coast on rafts
to count as bits of Punic monuments
that were swept away by a Roman broom
(by order of the Senate), with salt spread
for good measure, so not even scrog could bloom.
Beneath the silence you can hear the moans.
To think this might have been us, instead
of our own life’s latitude! El Haouaria,
a honeycomb of vowels we get wrong
like most visitors (preferring ‘that quarry
on Cap Bon’), is where it all belongs:
the temples, the arenas, the entire city.
Like Lego, it will not go back into the box,
but here is its negative: each axe-chip fits
its equivalent bump, the subterranean dark locks
onto its reverse, heliotropic and built
high – the Manhattan of its day. One moment it’s there:
the next it’s gone. Like us, I whisper … it being unfair
to say this in front of the kids, who’re yet to be filled.
IN YORK MINSTER
The glass in York Minster is 90% naturally coloured, without added colourants.
Tempered to this miracle from forest ash
(‘and yet nys glas nat lyk asshen of fern’),
they must have cleared whole coombs
and cols of their bracken, its stubborn
rust scraped off for the fiery womb:
the quantity of potassium needed was vast.
Two hundred kilos of wood per one of glass!
For colourlessness, coppiced beech
on lime-rich soil; for green panes, beech on clay.
Between the leads they fused what we cannot reach
from entire forests, it seems, to field the play
of sunlight – as did the trees over their floors of mast.
THE SWIMMING POOL
Kinshasa, 1968
Our gardener would rake its gloom
like a patch of ground, stirring it
to a distressed, even darker core
of the almost-living and the nearly drowned:
scooped with a net for the rusty bucket,
he’d pour them out in the no-man’s-land
before the proper bush: each night’s haul
a sprawl of drunken guests, bristling
with feelers and sodden legs, still
in a rush to be free: capsized hulls with oars,
tiny nests of torment. Frogs swooped
between the slippery hair of the concrete sides
and the blind, sedimented depths
they’d jack-knife into. This was the door
out of the air’s stickiness, the scratch of lawn:
our clumsy paradise. We’d swim with care
among the fresh spoil steeped at eye-level,
become huge and forlorn: thorax still beating
and beating on a simple heart; mouth-parts
searching for air like a man’s last words;
a moth’s hopeless wingspread. Where
could I start? I handed out names to faces;
buried the drowned like birds.
HALF CENTURY
The years are always something we think of
as vaguely surprising, guests that come and go
who might have been expected to hang around,
entertaining our disappointments, letting us forget.
We count them every so often like marks against us,
or a row of sacks bulging with what we can’t
yet throw away and wonder (after a certain age)
how we’ll ever manage without them.
The truth is, they don’t stay. Fifty
seems too much, you say, but remember
they have gone: what’s left is not to be weighed
but savoured, like love. We want
to keep them back for some unfocussed good,
one minute worrying about being too young,
guessing what the rules, invented
in our absence, demand of us; and then we see
that all along the game was being cooked up
at every instant to give us that impression
when really no one’s in charge and there’s nothing
but a vague skein like silk or torchlight
connecting this to that – the present spiced only because
the past’s no longer suffused, the future not yet
seasoned. So we’ll drink to us, not to time’s tribunal,
and braid each year with hugs like an old friend.
ON A PHOTO OF A WAINWRIGHT’S SHOP
On the day of its sale, before being dismantled and the site redeveloped: Hungerford, 1951
This was where they made
each thill of dung cart, or jackwain’s tailboard;
where what turnips knocked from their sacks
got shaved, the bolts locking the top rave,
the summers joined to the shutlocks to hold hops;
or where the strouters first firmed the wagon’s side
as the unmacadamed roads made of the nave
every labourer’s shuddering fulcrum – until in for the kill
came the oiled pistons, the heedless Ford,
and all this was obliterated as so many facts
are in history, and one by one the wainwrights died
along with those they called the liners, who travelled
like the sawyers from shop to shop, their only canvas
the naked, chamfered wood of spoke and board,
turning that practical good into something
no one needed: Berkshire the yellow of a chanterelle,
Wiltshire a harebell’s blue to the iron tyre.
Here is where the old world got upgraded
and our nescience unfolded, that day
the doors closed on the dark and the sign said SOLD.
REPRIEVE
Driving down from the Alps we were reassured:
a late, hard frost, its hoar taking its keen scalpel
to the forests; the birch bled to the last bud,
the spruce and firs flayed, twinkling yet scrupulous;
even on the lower slopes, starched to a pause,
the pines stood, formal and glazed as footmen.
Flick anything here and it would ping (I joked)
like crystal: thankfully normal, a sign that all
is on seasonal course in our broken weather glass;
that age can be reversed; that whoever’s top
of the table has suddenly turned to the servant
and said: ‘Send my man down to them. It’s
time we had a miracle. More wine, Faust?’
And God never does facetious (or so that vicar said).
IN BED
I’ve heard it maintained that a roadless country lacks conviction,
like a life without a sense of direction, a plan.
But surely a single life can spread like a fan,
be an entire Mongolian plain, not a waste of dereliction?
Maybe that is a little confusing, given we travel
in one basic direction, from A to wherever we’re led
to in the alphabet: which is always the sleep of Z.
Yet must we, like Holland, be mapped – or else unravel?
Sheep-tracks served on St Kilda. Winds would lock
them in for weeks. No roads, no wars. The land
in perfect fusion; for roads mean right hand, left hand,
verge and division. The island’s only way was rock
and grass, every edge of it opening onto ocean.
Let us say it was like your body, over which