In summer, when light’s fled, narcotic scentsare poured out from ten thousand blooms; we dozewith shut eyes but ears which only half-close,immured by sleep of a strange transparence. Soft shadows and the stars subtler, less bright;vague radiance tints that eternal hall,and the sweet pale dawn, awaiting her call,seems wandering low in the sky all night.
for Gail McConnell IHow much of what we scribble down survives –Sappho’s miraculous bits and pieces,Dialect words for kitchen utensils,See-through dresses, moonbeams – somebodyAt a busy street corner advisingWhere to shop for chickpeas and mascara. IILet blank spaces between parenthesesBe annotated thus by me and youWho loiter in the margin, Sapphic souls –Silence that has lasted a thousand yearsIs poetry of a kind, Gail, poetryLike a brain-child impatient to be born. III O suburban parthenogenesis,I eavesdrop on a holy family –Sappho would have fallen for Beth and you –Two mothers, two wives, a baby boy’sThumb-sucking bliss, glistening eyelids,Hazel-nuts safe beneath a Lesbos sky.
In the days when I loaded goods trains for a living Out of love for you, and no small concern I felt cold and tired and clean My throat pulsed slowly with the cold air’s burn Down on the silvering frost-lit rail Balanced with risk on the oiled sleeper Pushing upwards against the weight Of an electric four-ring cooker or a fridge The tracks going on till they fell off the world’s edge.
Life together began when you hooked your shirtson the rim of my bedroom mirror — I likedhaving someone mess with my neatness. We’d skirtthe notion of settling down and fly a kiteon Parliament Hill. If the walls crowded round,the smoke too thick from each cigarette we lit,we could take the bus and be Soho boundthen come together in calling it quits.I don’t know where the time went, we weretoo good at drifting off together, and waking upsomewhere new, on the way to getting there,until — it seemed so abrupt —you arrived at what you hadn’t known you wantedwhile I was still in love with being disenchanted.
Kew Gardens, March 2022 Late-winter dawns the larches start to sing their conjuring of bright green coronetslike miniature elvish party hats strung along hanging shoots in sheets of song –notating, emoji-like, clean morning notes. And then you see scarlet-and-green mitres,miracles of meticulous enamelartistry, as your mist of breathing clears –cabinet of a devout midwife’s tearsfor the exiled female pope, turned crystal- line. But your tears flow, since winter scarcely hurt for once: already spring has broughtits tragic joy, the lengthening days that slow the fierce arithmetic of life below stairs or stars, in kitchen or papal court. All beauty needs its nearby monument.
I suppose you’re right and breaking upwould be quite a good thing,but staying togetherwould be an equally good thing,so whatever we decide to doit will be all right. On balance,I lean towards doing nothing,but whatever happens we’ll go onseeing each other, won’t we? I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad,seeing other people for a change,we might even find someonewe could bear to be withfor more than half an hour,although I doubt it somehow.Experience suggests we go onfeeling the same about everythingno matter what happens. I do anyway.
Agnes B. Marshall, née Smith, of Walthamstow, practised at Parisunder Viennese chefs, had visions of snow-capped mountains,stiffly beaten peaks, set in glassy dishes. Not for her the Penny Lick.She knew life wasn’t a rehearsal and set about chipping away at Gatti’s glaciers: Norwegian ice kept frozen under London clay. (Liquid nitrogen later emerged from the mists of her imagination.)A finger in so many pies! She licked off the cream and ate the cone. At her height, she fell, the Queen of Ices thrown by a horse,never to recover. Without her, the business tripped, too: bought up by Mrs Beeton’s publisher (if you can’t, then join ’em). But why be sorry?
when an unexpected whirl of wind tosses grey veils of rainacross the Common; gobbets of roof-tile moss and mudplop on my doorstep. The parakeets, no doubt bewildered, flung among new-leafed trees, are blown to destinations never planned for. Flowers I planted yesterday fight fortheir lives in sodden borders. The sky turns dark. I switchon every light, write this... Abruptly it is over. Blue sky,calm cirrus clouds, warm spring sun and I, sitting foolishin the spotlight by my tall wide windows on a shining day, war still roaring from the TV screen.
Come, pop -ology of psych,Beam yourself into us likeHeadlights through lightheadedness. Come, nanny of nanny states,Come, hour of our hourly rates,Come, heart of our heartiness. Consolation of a prize, Soothing sight for see-sore eyes,Sooth, and say, some truthfulness. In developments a rest,In first worlds a second guest,In mishaps a happiness. And, most special of effects,See through your eyes’ haruspexOur gut feeling’s guttedness. When you’re out, we’ve no insight,Nothing of what’s left is right,Nothing is in but excess. Wash the broadsheets of our smears,Slake well-wells with welling tears,Bring to heal unhealthiness.
It was the largest mass of wood I sawStacked on a siding, clambered on by weeds,Parts drooling pitch or tarmac long beforeSomeone had laid them there like water reeds Cut for a roof; and as for rafters, theseWere sawn too short, and far too chunky, piledUp like an ancient pyre and laid to pleaseAn ancient god… but then the only wild Things dancing round it were the weeds, a ringAs nature formed a tortured dance and mournedThe wonder of this pile of wood, the thingMade more for fire-lit dancers, capped and horned.
and I’m dead set on a fire:the year’s first. Barely cold, but I wantto ball paper, lay kindling, strike a match, smell autumn.The same as a boy: the sleepovers, bike rides, fishing trips –always the next thing, always tomorrow.I’ve got good at this – wielding an axe. Wood splits:a hollow ring. Soon now, I’ll sitand watch today go up in smoke.
The old upright shopping bicyclehas the wrong saddle, a racing one,more like an iron bar than a saddle. I perch on one side or the other,carrier bags swinging from the handlebarsfull of provisions for the weekend. It’s hard work pedalling uphill in the rain,but after a while I don’t seem to mind.Nothing seems to matter anymore. As if from long custom, I hand overthe groceries at the kitchen window,take off my shoes and go upstairs to change. As I draw the bedroom curtains I see youhurrying down the path with an umbrellaon your way to fetch a salad for dinner.
won’t be deterred, though her coughclinks and rattles like a bottle delivery. The porch covers her; rain and shine shesits cross-legged on the doorstep, not watching while the street happens,coughing to punctuate life’s sentence. Somebody should tell her the fifties areover, that no one’s going to photograph her for Picture Post, that she should quitsmoking. This morning she sits behind a scaffold as though it wasn’t there.Two men crab-walk the roof above.
When I get there, my friend is fast asleepwith nail clippings scattered on his kneein the dayroom’s baffled light. I wake him gently.‘I don’t know where I am.’ ‘You’ve been asleep.’ Homes Under the Hammer is on the BBC.We manage, once we find his stick, a turnaround the block. He mithers about his hat,all shifting sand, in peril on the sea. I take his arm, point out cherry blossom(petals on a black taxi) as if springcould blow his mind. But how can he withstand the rising sea: the broken home, his darlingpottery collection auctioned off to no onehe could know, lovers lost with all hands?
Perhaps there is more than one way of loving the world, Miss Agar.Perhaps you are right.I am booting lonely stones on Perranporth Beach as I struggle with this letterlate this morning by the hunting sea. I apologise again for that silliness with the shark.My memory has fixed a photograph of yousmearing blood from above your cut lipinadvertently down and over your mouth. So a tiny red haze of cloud blurs above the pad as I sketch,drawing from the touch of things and from memory.I am working on a half-landscape of plates which are sunsand the flanks of hills too, quartered. Near my fingertips this morningwere the cups and bottles on my kitchen table.
How many nights now and my desire is a bronze hare — as heavy in me and as light — molten creature cast on the point of flight, elements holding their form for two thousand years and more — although the patina is changing, reflections change under different lights. Every day this spring, walking in the fields, I have heard skylarks and seen a hare crouch as still as this bronze hare in the grass, watching me — our astonished looking a concord between us — and bird song and mammal stillness seemed strung together on a taut wire — and when the hare sprang at last, how wild alive, how fast it flew!
Can you hear me singing?I have a high, clear voicelike that of Percy Sledge.I’m a soul singer from somewhere like Macon, Georgia. I perform mostlycountry soul numbersin the Music Shoals style –Percy’s ‘Out of Left Field’,‘You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up’ by James Carr. I’m not a demonstrative singer.I don’t believe in going down on one kneelike Arthur Alexander,or asking members of the audienceto come up on stage with me. I stand still most of the timeand let the words do the talking.‘Sugar-plum dancing on my mind,every day you whip meseems like Valentine...’ I might throw out an arm if the mood takes me,or place one hand on my heart.
Her tree still sheds its leaves, their fallmakes grief and grieving tangible,and where a cast-iron drainpipe sleevesrainwater poured from rotted eavesan old grief, making water sing,dies in the broken guttering,and where her dormer window mistsshe ghostwrites with her fingertipsor doodles breath as scrims of rainbring gusts and squalls, stir up againleaves falling through unfallen leavesand this is how the greengage grieves.
Here they once tended the camellias;Now all the camellias are deceased,Choked by the fresh flora that flourishesIn this broken purposed infirmaryFor tender flowers consumed by the years.The red, remembered as a period piece,The white, no longer abed, still waitingFor the nurseryman’s nurturing hand.Now never beheld through the shivered panes,Les dames were offered no kindly mercy.Today, the house is enclosed by natureBefore it too will return to the earth,Reconciled with its red and white patients.
won’t budge. Tiredof her name,tired of traveland the southernblue, she sinksinto the patchof land she’sfound, and spreadsher windsurf wingsonly to feelthe sun. Shewon’t meet hermate of thirtyyears again – somuch water underthe bridge. She’lldie here, andnothing and noone will care.And that’s fine.