Collected Poems, page 28
Music
Do you think they cried, the children
who followed the Piper, when the rock
closed behind them forever; or cried never,
happy to dance to his tune, lost
in the music?
And the lame boy,
pressing his ear to locked stone
to carry an echo home in his head,
did he weep, alone, the melody gone? Tell me
who hasn’t tossed a coin in a hat
for the busker on blues harmonica, heartbreak
in the rain;
or stood in the square
by the students there, cheap violins
gleaming under their chins, the Bach Double
clapped by pigeons;
or smiled at the ragged choir
rattling their tins? What’s music
the food of? Send over a beer
to the bow-tied piano man to play it again . . .
a child’s hands
on the keys, opening a scale
like a toy of sound . . .
and who hasn’t lifted the lid
to pick at a tune with a fingertip –
Perfect Day, Danny Boy, Für Elise –
recalling a name, or a kiss;
the breath our lips shared,
unsung song?
When the light’s gone,
it’s what the dying choose,
the music we use at funerals –
psalms listed in roman numerals;
solo soprano singing to a grave;
sometimes the pipes, a harp.
Do you think music hath charms?
Do you think it hears and heals our hearts?
Orta St Giulio
My beautiful daughter stands by the lake
at Orta St Giulio; the evening arriving, dressed
in its milky, turquoise silks, her fortune foretold;
assonant mountains and clouds all around;
an aptness of bells from here, there, there, there. Ella.
I watch her film the little fish
which flop, slap, leap in the water, hear
her hiss yes, yes, as she zooms on fresh verbs
and my heart makes its own small flip.
I slip behind her into the future; memory.
A bat swoops, the lake a silence of dark light;
how it will be, must be.
The Dead
They’re very close to us, the dead;
us in our taxis, them in their hearses,
waiting for the lights to change.
We give them precedence.
So close to us, unknown on television;
dead from hunger, earthquake, war,
suicide bomber, tsunami.
We count the numbers.
The famous dead – a double glamour –
we buy their music, movies, memoirs.
O! Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra
in glorious technicolor.
In Venice, we glimpse the dead
drift to the island cemetery across the lagoon.
We float our gondolas along the green canals
and do not die.
Sung
Now only words in a song,
no more than a name
on a stone,
and that well overgrown –
MAR– –ORIS– –;
and wind though a ruined croft,
the door an appalled mouth,
the window’s eye put out;
hours and wishes and trysts
less than shadows of bees on grass,
ghosts that did dance, did kiss . . .
those who would gladly die for love long dead –
a skull for a bonnie head –
and love a simile, a rose, red, red.
At Ballynahinch
I lay on the bank at Ballynahinch
and saw the light hurl down
like hammers flung by the sun
to light-stun me, batter
the water to pewter,
everything dream or myth,
my own death further upstream;
the sleeping breath now – by my side
in our wounded sprawl – of the one
who did not love me at all,
who had never loved me, no,
who would never love me, I knew,
down by the star-thrashed river at Ballynahinch,
at Ballynahinch, at Ballynahinch.
New Vows
From this day forth to unhold,
to see the nothing in ringed gold,
uncare for you when you are old.
New vows you make me swear to keep –
not ever wake with you,
or sleep, or your body, with mine, worship;
this empty hand slipped from your glove,
these lips sip never from our loving cup,
I may not cherish, kiss; unhave, unlove . . .
And all my worldly goods to unendow . . .
And who here present upon whom I call . . .
Leda
Obsessed by faithfulness,
I went to the river
where the swans swam in their pairs and saw how a heart
formed in the air as they touched, partnered forever.
Under the weeping trees a lone swan swam apart.
I knelt like a bride as bees hymned in the clover
and he rose, huge, an angel, out of the water,
to cover me, my billed, feathered, webbed, winged lover;
a chaos of passion beating the fair day whiter.
My hands, frantic to hold him, felt flight, force, friction,
his weird beautiful form rising and falling above –
the waxy, intimate creak –
as though he might fly,
turn all my unborn children into fiction.
I knew their names that instant, pierced by love
and by the song the swans sing as they die.
Valentine’s
Pain past bearing, poetry’s price,
to know which of the harms and hurts
dealt to you, to the day, was fatal;
a kick to the heart by the ghost of a mule
you thought to ride to your wedding-feast.
But now you can snip that shadow
from your heels for mourning-dress
or go to hell in a handcart, along
with the rest of our helpless world;
and, O, if you could, you would,
where lovers walked, sell off the trees
and not give a flying fuck for
the muted mausoleums of the bees.
The Human Bee
I became a human bee at twelve,
when they gave me my small wand,
my flask of pollen,
and I walked with the other bees
out to the orchards.
I worked first in apples,
climbed the ladder
into the childless arms of a tree
and busied myself, dipping and tickling,
duping and tackling, tracing
the petal’s guidelines
down to the stigma.
Human, humming,
I knew my lessons by heart:
the ovary would become the fruit,
the ovule the seed,
fertilized by my golden touch,
my Midas dust.
I moved to lemons,
head and shoulders
lost in blossom; dawn till dusk,
my delicate blessing.
All must be docile, kind, unfraught
for one fruit –
pomegranate, lychee,
nectarine, peach, the rhymeless orange.
And if an opening bud
was out of range,
I’d jump from my ladder onto a branch
and reach.
So that was my working life as a bee,
till my eyesight blurred,
my hand was a trembling bird
in the leaves,
the bones of my fingers thinner than wands.
And when they retired me,
I had my wine from the silent vines,
and I’d known love,
and I’d saved some money –
but I could not fly and I made no honey.
Drone
An upward rush on stairs of air
to the bliss of nowhere, higher,
a living jewel, warm amber, her,
to be the one who would die there.
Gesture
Did you know your hands could catch that dark hour
like a ball, throw it away into long grass
and when you looked again at your palm, there
was your life-line, shining?
Or when death came,
with its vicious, biting bark, at a babe,
your whole body was brave;
or came with its boiling burns,
your arms reached out, love’s gesture.
Did you know
when cancer draped its shroud on your back,
you’d make it a flag;
or ignorance smashed its stones through glass,
light, you’d see, in shards;
paralysed, walk; traumatised, talk?
Did you know
at the edge of your ordinary, human days
the gold of legend blazed,
where you kneeled by a wounded man,
or healed a woman?
Know –
your hand is a star.
Your blood is famous in your heart.
Passing-Bells
That moment when the soldier’s soul
slipped through his wounds, seeped
through the staunching fingers of his friend
then, like a shadow, slid across a field
to vanish, vanish, into textless air . . .
there would have been a bell in Perth,
Llandudno, Bradford, Winchester,
rung by a landlord in a sweating, singing pub
or by an altar-boy at Mass – in Stoke-on-Trent,
Leicester, Plymouth, Crewe, in Leeds, Stockport, Littleworth – an ice-cream van jingling in a park;
a door pushed open to a jeweller’s shop;
a songbird fluttering from a tinkling cat – in Ludlow,
Wolverhampton, Taunton, Hull – a parish church
chiming out the hour; the ringing end of school –
in Wigan, Caythorpe, Peterborough, Ipswich,
Aberdeen, King’s Lynn, Malvern, Poole –
a deskbell in a quiet, dark hotel; bellringers’ practice
heard by Sunday cricketers; the first of midnight’s bells
at Hogmanay – in Huddersfield, Motherwell, Rhyl –
there would have been a bell in Chester,
Fife, Bridgend, Wells, Birkenhead, Newcastle,
in city and in town and countryside –
the crowded late night bus; a child’s bicycle;
the old, familiar, clanking cow-bells of the cattle.
Premonitions
We first met when your last breath
cooled in my palm like an egg;
you dead, and a thrush outside
sang it was morning.
I backed out of the room, feeling
the flowers freshen and shine in my arms.
The night before, we met again, to unsay
unbearable farewells, to see
our eyes brighten with re-strung tears.
O I had my sudden wish –
though I barely knew you –
to stand at the door of your house,
feeling my heartbeat calm,
as they carried you in, home, home and healing.
Then slow weeks, removing the wheelchair, the drugs,
the oxygen mask and tank, the commode,
the appointment cards,
until it was summer again
and I saw you open the doors to the grace of your garden.
Strange and beautiful to see
the flowers close to their own premonitions,
the grass sweeten and cool and green
where a bee swooned backwards out of a rose.
There you were,
a glass of lemony wine in each hand,
walking towards me always, your magnolia tree
marrying itself to the May air.
How you talked! And how I listened,
spellbound, humbled, daughterly,
to your tall tales, your wise words,
the joy of your accent, unenglish, dancey, humorous;
watching your ash hair flare and redden,
the loving litany of who we had been
making me place my hands in your warm hands,
younger than mine are now.
Then time only the moon. And the balm of dusk.
And you my mother.
A Rare Bee
I heard tell of a tale of a rare bee,
kept in a hive in a forest’s soul
by a hermit – hairshirt, heart long hurt –
and that this bee made honey so pure,
when pressed to the pout of a poet
it made her profound; or if smeared
on the smile of a singer it sweetened his sound;
or when eased on the eyes of an artist,
Pablo Picasso lived and breathed;
so I saddled my steed.
No birds sang in the branches over my head,
though I saw the wreaths of empty nests
on the ground as I rode – girl, poet, knight –
deeper into the trees, where the white hart
was less than a ghost or a thought, was light
as the written word; legend. But what wasn’t going, gone,
I mused, from the land, or the sky, or the sea?
I dismounted my bony horse to walk;
out of the silence, I fancied I heard
the bronze buzz of a bee.
So I came to kneel at the hermit’s hive –
a little church, a tiny mosque – in a mute glade
where the loner mouthed and prayed, blind
as the sun, and saw with my own eyes
one bee dance alone on the air.
I uttered my prayer: Give me your honey,
bless my tongue with rhyme, poetry, song.
It flew at my mouth and stung.
Then the terrible tune of the hermit’s grief.
Then a gesturing, dying bee
on the bier of a leaf.
Chaucer’s Valentine
for Nia
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne . . .
but be my valentine
and I’ll one candle burn,
love’s light a fluent tongue,
old habit young, the door ajar
to where our bed awaits,
not in a room
but in a wood, all thrilled with birds,
the flight of early English words to verse,
there as sweetness evermore now is,
this human kiss,
love’s written bliss in every age . . .
hold the front page.
At Jerez
Who wouldn’t feel favoured,
at the end of a week’s labour,
to receive as part-wages
a pale wine
that puts the mouth in mind of the sea . . .
and not gladly be kissed
by gentle William Shakespeare’s lips,
the dark, raisiny taste of his song;
bequeathed to his thousand daughters and sons,
the stolen wines of the Spanish sun . . .
then walk the cool bodegas’ aisles –
where flor and oxygen
grow talented in fragrances and flavours –
to sniff, sip, spit, swallow, savour . . .
The Pendle Witches
One voice for ten dragged this way once
by superstition, ignorance.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
Witch: female, cunning, manless, old,
daughter of such, of evil faith;
in the murk of Pendle Hill, a crone.
Here, heavy storm-clouds, ill-will brewed,
over fields, fells, farms, blighted woods.
On the wind’s breath, curse of crow and rook.
From poverty, no poetry
but weird spells, half-prayer, half-threat;
sharp pins in little dolls of death.
At daylight’s gate, the things we fear
darken and form. That tree, that rock,
a slattern’s shape ropes the devil’s dog.
Something upholds us in its palm –
landscape, history, sudden time –
and, above, the gormless witness moon
below which Demdike, Chattox, shrieked,
like hags, unloved, an underclass,
eyes red, gobs gummed, unwell, unfed.
But that was then – when difference
made ghouls of neighbours; children begged,
foul, feral, filthy, in their cowls.
Grim skies, the grey remorse of rain;
cloudbreak, sunset’s shame; four seasons,
turning centuries, in Lancashire,
away from Castle, Jury, Judge,
huge crowd, rough rope, short drop, no grave;
only future tourists who might grieve.
Liverpool
The Cathedral bell, tolled, could never tell;
nor the Liver Birds, mute in their stone spell;
or the Mersey, though seagulls wailed, cursed, overhead,
in no language for the slandered dead . . .
not the raw, red throat of the Kop, keening,
or the cops’ words, censored of meaning;
not the clock, slow handclapping the coroner’s deadline,
or the memo to Thatcher, or the tabloid headline . . .
but fathers told of their daughters; the names of sons
on the lips of their mothers were prayers; lost ones
honoured for bitter years by orphan, cousin, wife –
not a matter of football, but of life.
Over this great city, light after long dark;
and truth, the sweet silver song of a lark.
Birmingham
for Tariq Jahan
After the evening prayers at the mosque,
came the looters in masks,
and you three stood,
beloved in your neighbourhood,
brave, bright, brothers,
to be who you were –
a hafiz is one who has memorised
the entire Koran;
