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From my ward bed I can only guess
how carelessly Spring is opening itself.
We are facing down the failure of my op,
but you are told more.
Late April’s blossom-pandemic
strews the pavements, wind vortexing petals
like it really has nothing better to do;
you are upstairs on a lonely bus bearing
your pain in some general direction of home,
deporting you elsewhere – there’s nothing to see
except fat pigeons with heartless eyes,
their stupid hearts beating. It hurts to look
at all the oblivious others – nothing to see
but impersonal lives, outside of me,
outside of you; not us. Suddenly, nearly home,
from the top deck, you’re struck by the glassy turquoise
of the dusk: held by a heart-slowing spell
of starlings doing their sheer, one-entity dance
like aerobatic smoke, ravelling then performing
enchanted, giant dénouements in their sky.
Tomorrow, together, we choose to try to beat
tough odds, surfing precarity beat by beat.
On my grandfather’s knee I was when he told the police
my parents’ whereabouts – he gave their lives up
to save mine. The choice they gave him unbearably simple …
Astronomy consoled him that such things may be meant,
that stars must die so others can be born,
a sacred cycle I’d understand in time.
He becomes my parents. Next thing I’m
in his lean shadow learning how to gawp
via smoked glass at a transit of Venus,
dragging its infinitesimal self across the sun –
a flaw in an egg-yolk – tiny, faint,
its bright spark turned now into a freckle;
and the nights so clear the cosmos seemed touchable.
Now I make my living searching space
with a hundred-inch reflecting telescope,
my nostalgia-for-the-light instrument,
raking the dark like a sniper taking aim:
whatever’s secret there I’ll make my own.
I only wish I could point the focus down,
x-ray the deep killing-fields for bones of a parent:
every day I’d go hunting, hope against hope
I’d stumble on some fragment of my loss,
a detached foot maybe, still in the wool
of his burgundy sock. I’d bag it up, go home,
lock the door behind me. In the living room
I’d take it out. I wouldn’t be able to stop
myself. Handling the bone I’d see his face.
I think I’d live from moment to moment,
taking this furtive, intimate communion,
knowing the calcium formed in a star is in his ankle.
Dress-codes brighten these pages –
colours rule the Middle Ages:
yesterday-fresh, a thirteenth century
Paradise advertises its holiday brochure,
otherworld gold – the saints in orbital rapture
shoal in their sumptuous photosphere.
This every pilgrim soul believes,
whether the devout, heaven-on-earth rich
in silken, slack and waist-wide sleeves
bursting with August, every stitch;
or, in robes dowdy and dull as fallen leaves,
the grey friar, who is the bishop’s bitch.
You think you know what you’re going to see:
more sated cardinals, scarlet-starry,
wondering at what’s above, where swim
with their aspergers expressions, the seraphim.
You know there’ll be token villagers on the edge tiny sketches of lacklustre peasants in ditchwater clothes bare-legged supposed to be always looking where they’re going looking down as they harrow the margins but something’s up because the young excruciatingly bored apprentice monks have stained the sacred goatskin with unruly beauty e.g. the usual skinny plowman is ignoring his stony furlong to be spellbound by a skylark (check out his face!) and who’s mischievously poached the rainbow for his loud green shoes and luminous crimson hose which seems relatably cartoonish like when I was six or seven I was abducted by a talent for crayons and got briefly gaudily good.
So to the exit, and the visitors’ book:
Beautiful! and Thank you! are sincerely viral,
with one Truly Inspiring! and two Wows!
the New World being awesomed by the Old.
I’ve just missed the comp’s year tens
who’ve spurned the tethered biro
in favour of their own felt-tips:
their Brills riot all over the paper,
and there’s a proud, azure BORING!!!
signed Fred Flintstone
who’s pilgrimaged here from Sad Street.
It’s the final page that makes you hear them
acting the goat, high on not playing the game;
hear their colourful words, their a cappella
heckling of this wake
which deserves to get the bird.
You imagine the alpha teen, his armpit-farts
roistering the great, hygienic silence,
exhaling an inch from the frigid glass coffin
to trace a cock and balls in his breath-cloud.
From the garden of love I fled by sea
Came ashore on a drying day to see
Sheets hung out like a mass surrender
Swallowing sea water I’m four sheets to the wind
Washing is seldom unblemished by returning swallows
To be a pilgrim is a grim pill to swallow
I hear willow on leather – balls flee to the boundary rope
Europe looks as if it rhymes with hope
I stare at the team in their pure whites
I learn to say sorrysorrysorry on the teeming streets
and in opening doors and joining a queue
After you no after you
I wolf down free Mars bars but it’s so cold
so wet – the Syrian came down like the wolf on the fold
Lugging our poor languages to the ports and coasts
where you look at us like you’re seeing ghosts
I pick up facetious pieces of your lingo
Overhearing my Farsi you call me Pingu
My children drowned in transit please translate
and please what is that worth? I have of late
but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth
I owned a loving garden in Raqqah
before it became benighted I follow Allah
I follow Manchester United
I wear the black tee shirt sloganed with Arabic
totally wicked it is totally sick
In Calais I coax my violin for pity
I sing sea shanties in a shanty city
Shantih shantih shantih – Peace be with you
Red and yellow and pink and green orange and purple and blue
A fortnight after the selfie on the rocks
as dawn breaks dung drops through the letterbox
I elect or have to draw my veil I
would like please very much to come to school
The English I offer you sounds wrong
I will be less than nought unless on the tongue
I speak it trippingly I’ll become a lunar astronaut
hide my face in my wide space helmet
you can only see what I see through my visor’s
lonely golden mirror this is no moon for losers
it’s opium-white unblemished flawless
I couldn’t have wished for a purer place
Knowing by heart satellite transits is a passion
of mine for instance the International Space Station
in virginal night an infinitesimal jewel
passing over is my punctual angel.
The world’s oldest woman, she claimed she was,
Astrid Himmel is autumned out – because
through deathbed’s window she observes
fieldfares returning – their swerves
and songs cloud our Novembers – truculent beauty –
well, nothing doesn’t seem kinda cute
yet anyway gets on one’s nerves
when you’re deathbed-bored…
plinking their squabble on her harpsichord
she scores it for the fiddle
in her mind.
Weird how the world’s life and Astrid’s seemed intertwined,
viz: as the doomed meteor, possessing the combined
width of Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire,
has our planet’s number. Yet, once, by learning on a Strad at Leiden,
the exquisite chamber music of Josef Haydn
spares her from the chamber
as her numbered bow arm shook
some human memory inside Ravensbrück.
She was a born
survivor…
born prematurely on The Titanic,
rocked in yiddish prayer; her mother’s panic
lulled by those waves of infinite regret
finessed by that string quartet
of never-sweeter virtuosi, who slowed
the tempo as hopeful lifeboats were lowered.
Strings may distract her yet
from extinction by asteroid,
by ordained iceberg, by breaths of carbon monoxide:
displacing the now
and here.
It was a palace – not that I’d ever seen a palace
but what else could it be? Whatever, it must be
where gods lived.
Father is the new footman, and me
in the grates, bucketing up the silky ash
and harsh cinders,
just like Mother showed me, before she had to
go. I don’t really remember her
all that well.
I get scorned a lot: for marks on my face,
for smuttying my apron with my fingers;
oh, and my cough.
How old are you, girl? (the Master’s son).
Sir, I don’t know. I feel like crying.
Old enough… he says.
We had to be like shadows when they dined
and spoke, and smoked. We mustn’t speak.
Their words are different
in the evening, fineried up, but in the morning,
sometimes they speak like us, like the Master’s son.
I don’t like it.
But maybe I did, sometimes. Or I thought so.
I tell Daddy what happened; he cries. Then they sack him
as a thief.
He’s not. Not like the Master’s son
who takes everything because he’s a god, and me
a shadow.
And so we left Highclere, us two;
and soon, we become three. But now,
again we’re two.
Nothing matters because an asteroid the size of Wales
with the world’s name on it is due –
on May bank holiday! – all night I’m composing my quartet
for strings – weird how everything’s nearly the same:
the sun still doling out sunshine – this is the cello part
– shafting through copious treetops
like the mother-ship searching with golden arms –
arpeggios for the starlings, and their midnight rainbow plumage
shrapneling out from their great gossipy tree, prophecy-like –
I’ve eleven minutes to finish their plucky violins
or the time the Civil Guards were coming to line up
our sons, and afterwards to parade our daughters
who were the wrong village or the wrong blood…
meantime, my little Maria
practises her ballet in the tottering mirror, raising one leg
almost as slow as a flower – it adds to the culture –
as the guns crawl closer – her headband of snowflake lace,
her first tutu which I soaked in rosewater –
now she’s up on point – how imperiously
innocence flaunts at six years –
or like the cameo-cutter of Pompeii who, while
the earth tears and lava boils and ash
obliviates the day, displaces his panic
at the cauldron’s mouth, carving his final plaque