Speak into my good ear. The house is bubble-wrapped with rain. It’s late. To better hear your voice through this worn out device I lean in closer to the page. To better hear the sleep talk tangled in its sheets I lean in closer to your lips. Speak into my good ear. The crackle of dark matter on its way to this room clears at last, to better hear your dream ask, Is it you? Where have you been?
When Alfredo lets the film fly on its beam of light, I Pompieri di Viggiù comes to roost on a tenement block, rippling the hard lines of masonry. Isn’t love sleight of hand after all? You and I, in rainy Islington, among discrete coughs and rustles, spoon Sicily’s raw energy into our souls. Giant faces undulate over shutters in the hot body of night. A couple on the cliff edge of passion, lips parted, noses positioned, close in for the . . . Twenty years, and they’ve never let us see a kiss! wails an old Sicilian; the withheld moment like a slap across the wrists. How we laugh, as the priest rings his hand bell and Alfredo snips each corrupting frame. Kisses drop to the floor, shiny as snakes; alive in our minds as only the unsaid can be.
This morning I took the Coasthopper from Burnham Overy Staithe to Sheringham, boarded breathless, had to run. The driver said next time put out your hand. The ‘George Vancouver’ stops for everyone! Our buses start from Lynn. They’ve all got names, one’s called ‘Black Shuck’ after the dog who spooks the coast. ‘Fanny Billingham’ was hung in Norwich. ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner’ rented Randall’s folly on Salthouse beach. I moved closer, told her I’d met STW, but fixed on roads, she didn’t care to stretch Coasthopper lore. As usual Cley was bottlenecked. Take it easy, she meant the car blocking our path. Just reverse dear. Now we’re there!
I am standing in a whitewashed cell. I am wearing a sheet with a hole cut in the middle. I piss in a pail that is skinned with ice. The bed is a nightmare installation, twists of rusted iron and wood. A grubby blindfold keeps me warm. Pain is chucking smashed bits of stars at the high barred window with caps and crowns and fillings spat out from a broken laugh. Roofs are near now, love approximate. The moon has lost its purchase on the chimneys. Frost lays in a hoof print on the tiles.
It’s all right, the rain is falling. It’s all right, no need to worry. When was there ever a need? But you do, you do. It eats away at you – fear about infestation, damp, job, taxes, the household chores, and don’t even get onto personal relations, the vultures of failure bouncing with glee – because right now the rain is falling, dripping from the line, fences, gutter, leaves, and under its lens the trees have turned up the dial on green and yes, it’s all right, the rain is falling and it doesn’t look like stopping any time soon.
‘…he could not get rid of the tendency to reconstruct the “Ange” who was daily broken into fragments…’ — Italo Svevo, Senility As I wrap your photograph with its expensive frame back into the crêpe and then the paper deciding that I cannot go through this again the stupid vertigo at the merest sign of life the stain in the mind’s eye that tarnishes the rest the dreary barren ache of the unrequited — hoping to nip that nonsense in the bud I find nevertheless my lips pressed to the paper in the region I suppose of your heart thereby re-inventing an orthodox gesture, the kissing of the Icon which even as I wrap, and hide away (and had I the strength that I would shatter) reconstructs and.
After the painting by Theodore Robinson Two priests, on the narrow path to heaven, pass a balcony brimming with clementine. Like crows, they glance up, and see a woman with red hair, sipping a glass of Gragnano. She smiles and tells them there is more than one way to the top of the mountain. Ahead, they can see bleached plaster walls, the brilliant white light of the houses, and the Bar Alfredo, that stands, teetering on the brink like a drunk fisherman back from the catch of a lifetime. Beyond is the place where brick gives way to rock, and where shadows give way to light; the crags on the grassy slopes that we must all, one day, climb.
This one I’ll leave till last,postponing the problems – how the wallpaper will come round the corner and the principal fern in the pattern continues to meet the ceiling,the length staying true to the plumb.Then the trick of guiding it down into darkness so as not to snag and easing it out without tearing,fretting the paste holds out. Wet fingers tense on the sheersto gauge that cut at the skirtingwhich somebody’s bound to notice.Even if I shift my chair, face the opposite way during tea breaks, I can’t not think of that wall.
Because we talk we talk about the weather, its predictable mood-swings, good days, off days, days that come at any time of year as if from nowhere – stormy, or so sweet we have to go outside to feel, together, their July-in-April, March-in-May, nostalgic for a world whose atmosphere adapted us as we adapted wheat, leaving hill-top forts to thorn and heather while we cut the forest and made hay. Remembering our parents’ parents’ fear of not enough, then nothing left, to eat, we grow too much, only preparing for what we expect the weather has in store.
how Peleus won Thetis of the grey mistby clasping her to the couch, and holding onthrough her every changing shape, even the tigress.You gods on Olympus, grant me that peaceonce her shape-shifting is over, and promise meby the Styx, it be over once and for all.
Hard to believe the mirror:those sags you thought were cheekbones.Your size is no longer your size and the next one up buries you. Flimsy panels and the clothes hook swivels on a single screw. The curtain that won’t draw to: who might burst in, who’ll step out.
Listen, here they come, the easy rhyme wordsof the English language, flying into settle on the branches of the treeoutside my window, families of soundthat perch together, calling their own absurdsuggestions through the comprehensive dinof common use and plain vocabulary,far-fetched, serendipitous, profound,and why not, we all want to be remembereddon’t we? There’s no wrong way to begin,just this twittering polyphonythat lifts and scatters, slowly circles roundand lands again to chorus in my ear,vowel by vowel, not easy to not hear.
His habit is watching sceneryChanging at the bend,The view lying back encirclingIts dishevelment with an arm. Or watching a waterfallSilently on film, jumped shotsLeaving him unsplashed.It is visiting a Sussex castle Where he pictures the skirmishingOf frightened soldiery.It is any crowd he seesIn profile, fathers and sons anonymous As collectors’ coins. He observesThe cheerful blindness of flowersThat seem to know him but go onNodding when he has passed. His habit Is standing outside and seeingHis cupped gaze in the glass,A seafarer photographedAgainst the adventure of the sky. Out over the noisy seaSignals intermittently winkGreen or red, suggestingSomeone prepared to wait,But in the darkness eventually go out.
in a racy world of competitive types, because, you know, two brains are generally better than one. Like the puttering hybrid – who’s the engine and who the battery? Like the panting pantomime horse, who has which end? Tirelessly, observers try to subvert the scheme, an affront to their own marital dynamic. Some days they attack the head, pulling until the soft felting under the muddling belly is strained. Others, they make a rush on the tail: that inevitable provocation.
On 9 June 1865, Charles Dickens was involved in a railway accident on a viaduct at Staplehurst, Kent, while returning from France with his mistress Ellen Ternan. Ten people died and forty were injured. Dickens himself died five years to the day after the crash. I stopped mid-sentence – a broken train of thought. On my lap was an episode of Our Mutual Friend. That day, we’d swept through Kent like ink across a page, the carriages jostling like words looking for meaning. My eyes rested on hers, while starlings stitched the sky. Through a field, across a meadow – and then: the viaduct. It was a jolt like waking from sleep; a plunge from day into night. Carriages splintered like books twisted apart at the spine.
It’s been a while. Let me get used to it.I knew about the widows, of course, but hadn’t quite expected the crutches, the walking-frames, or that poor agitated soul endlessly pacing at the front. On the other hand, the baby chirruping during the one minute’s silence could hardly have given any offence. It’s been a late, cold spring; last year’s was also cold and late, but it happened.Normal operations are being resumed.Someone has died, at nearly a hundred, of natural causes. Weep, but not too much.That white shower was not snow, but petals.
Two houses up, old Eddie died last week and a man I’ve never seen before is throwing things into the garden from the back door: a cardboard box, black plastic bags, a broken kitchen chair. The garden isn’t much, but Eddie had laid a path, hollowed a goldfish pond, sown a rockery with alpine flowers, and, down the garden’s end, curved a white concrete arch balanced on red brick piles, a sort of giant cartoon magnet that only town foxes step through from the nettle patch that Eddie left ‘for luck, for butterflies’.
You are not churchy, I feel certain of it.You do not demand a particular hat or coatOr a room filled with a particular scent.You do not only like hymnsAnd if someone laughs you don’t mind.There is no special kind of poem for youOr single word to wrap your meanings inNor can any category contain you fully.There is not a box you will not slip out of Or knot you cannot easily untie,And that, in a way, is the whole trouble –There is nothing, hard or soft,That can restrain youAlthough, my goodness, I’ve tried.
Goddard prints his footsteps in the gloom and, from the transepts, Breathes an air swaying with a pleasant doom, not quite his own. He marks the candles, too, stacked and swelling for another age, And, for the thousandth time, repeats their sigh, repeats their sigh. Still the organ keys lie waiting for him, like the ships that sailed for Troy. At his command, the prows descend, the sails fill, the sea gives way; And burly chords claim marble caverns for their own, Where baffled statues tremble under sticky coats of dust. Implausible glory fills Goddard’s lungs and clouds his eyes.
through the French windows we see Vanessabarefoot on the misty suburban lawndoing an arabesque on the wet grassas we troop down to the breakfast tableher stepfather behind his black moustachesatisfied to have woken us at dawnwith a shout come on, get up!