The Claim
So many came to that portion
of the claim, the water not too deep there,
and left with tiny grains of gold,
dust really, and the freezing work
painstaking to the bone,
all that remained of Eldorado
like the land of how-to videos
we’d flocked to, so much
we’d hoped that could be fixed,
the shattered screen,
the damaged heat-pump like a heart
destroyed by years of insults
even, one mountebank insisted
the mind, split into a dozen pieces
like a priceless vase exploded
on a marble floor, slipped
from the aristocrat’s hands
(the crane in flight, the little bridge,
the homeward labourers as snow
begins to fall). In the ancient art
of the broken all could be repaired
with shining seams of precious metal,
the bird, the village and the snow,
and even made more lovely
by the gleaming scars. All you needed
was sufficient gold. All you needed
was to not be finished by the cold.
Behind Closed Doors
‘This profession requires an unruffled temper…’
Titian, d. 1556 of plague
Night in the nation’s gallery,
an avenue of over-branching canvases
walked only by security:
Andromeda in chains, Callisto
exiled to the silent universe – the gods,
their overworld, their club.
Outside, contagion’s on the streets
again, bent on self-replication. Tomorrow
they’ll let us enter one by one,
insist we keep our distance as Actaeon
might have learned who strayed too near
Diana, perfect android, immortal machine.
Not something he could have imagined,
an afternoon in the forest, his flesh
transformed, his body overtaken.
Italy to Lord
It’s dark in here and forest green: Britannica,
sixteen oak trees in a London living room,
the little girl, my mother, in the bookcase glass.
Italy, Ithaca, Izmail, Japan, each page a mainsail,
turning, HMS Discovery – none of the rivers
of southern Italy is of any great importance.
Like birds on a long-haul flight, let not seas
or deserts, cliffs or icy mountain-tops
impede you. Jews, Kabȋr, Kabul, Kaffir,
from up here all seems clear (all evil in the world’s
ascribed to Maya or illusion), then home at last
returned from all those navigable miles
to Lichen, Linnet, Logic, London, to find
a century has passed, the forest’s cleared,
the animals all bared and scorched, the gold
all brought to light. I look into the glass,
discover there myself in dense shade, deep
and shadowy as on any wooded island.
Pearl (excerpt)
Then fiercer than longing came the fear.
I didn’t stir or dare to call
to her: wide-eyed and silent as a hawk
in a great hall I waited there.
I knew that what I saw was spirit
and I feared for what might follow –
that within my sight she’d disappear
before I could come close to her.
So smooth, so small, so delicate,
this graceful innocent girl now rose
before me in her royal robes,
a precious creature set with pearls.
Now like a vision granted, showered
in pearls more fit for a princess or queen
this child as fresh as a lily-flower
stepped downward toward the stream.
The fine white linen she wore seemed woven
with light, its side-panels loose and flowing
and laced with borders of seed pearls lovelier
than any I’d ever seen before.
The sleeves of her robe fell long and low,
stitched in with double rows of pearls.
Her skirts of the same fine linen were trimmed
and seeded all over with precious gems.
The girl wore one thing more: a crown
composed entirely of ice-bright pearls
and no other stone, tipped and figured
with flowers, each petal a perfect gem.
She wore no other decoration
in her hair which in its falling framed
a face as white as ivory
and noble in its gravity.
Like hand-worked gold her fine hair shone
and flowed unbound around her shoulders,
the chalk-white pallor of her skin as pure
as all the fine-set pearls she wore.
Where her skin met the white of the linen
at her wrists, her throat and on every hem,
there were pearls, palest of all the stones.
Her whole dress shone like an icy stream
and there at the heart of it all on her breast
lay a single immaculate pearl far greater
than all the rest. To tell its true measure
or worth would test a man’s mind to the limit.
I swear no singer however inspired
could find words to describe the sight
of that pearl, so perfect, so faultless, so pale,
placed in the most precious setting of all.
I watched as this darling creature set
with jewels walked at the water’s edge
toward me: no man was happier from here
to Greece in the moment she came so near.
For the girl was dearer to my heart
than aunt or niece and the love I felt
for her far deeper. Inclining her head
with all the grace of a lady she bowed,
took off her jewel-encrusted crown
and with joy in her voice she greeted me.
That I had lived to speak to her
was heaven itself. My pearl, my girl.
The Experiment
Dearests I have arrived. Some things
have already been taken: the small blue bowls
and airmail stationery, the summer tablecloth (only
slightly blue), and the darkness is now quite cleared.
All I can say is, try when you come not to think
of the dark: take the boat and do the experiment —
you will have to put every ounce of what you know
into it or it will never lift off or be carried across.
In a small country like ours you must be prepared
for no-one to think this possible, like the first pioneers
of flight those two so close all their lives, watching the wind
and birds, their dazzling feats and equilibrium.
Sleep is chalky now. Most of the underblue
has gone from beneath the bed. Only the light remains
and the roses wild and idle just as you will remember them.
Stay together whenever the times allow.
Bravo
i.m. JP
Down the middle of our street’s a table
where odds and evens might meet
and its cloth is the skirt of the night-duty nurse
or an altar prepared for a feast.
It’s midnight but it’s not that scary
when you’ve been in the woods
as often as we have, and it’s tranquil.
This is not the darkness you think it is —
see how vision deepens: dashboard dials,
rain on a kerb stone, the blurred heart
of a bird in flight, icebergs everywhere.
On the night-table, sugar in infinite detail,
sweetmeats, silver in the shape of a prayer,
something from every house in the road.
Fear nothing. It is not over yet.
Soon we will have a whole city of light.
Mike
Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place
where you stand is holy
(Joshua 5:15)
Surgeon, maybe clockmaker: as a child
they’d marvelled at his touch with butterflies
and woodlice, as if he loved the world,
its bones and feathers, better than himself.
In the diary they found photos. Him splitting
the rock with lightning, standing like a minder
on mountain tops, a paratrooper fully armed —
the sword, the secret name, the word of God.
There too his sketches for the wings:
viridian humming-bird, the mallard’s sheen,
a lawn in June, the perilous emerald sea.
Verde que te quiero verde. The book of life,
the earth. His hands which never trembled.
His burning hours. It isn’t about me.
The Longest Day
i.m. NPD
The stonework’s vault from the pull of the crypt
in the tallest cathedral in Europe,
the topmost stone in the bridge’s fan,
the waist of a diamond, a sea-eagle’s span
or you at fifteen, poised on the high board,
arms toward heaven in what might be prayer
or praise to the sun and what you can dare
before the slow-curving dive to the cold
at the foot of the cliff or pier, that day
at the height of summer, exactly half-way.
Lima
In Europe the interior has become a genre
in its own right, light from outside streaming
like silver in through the windows of merchants,
the whole world held like linen before the press.
At the workshops the telescope’s perfected
(a device to allow one to see one’s
enemies or count coins from a long way off),
the ships, the idols, the distant city of mist.
In the lens-grinder’s glass they are all one.
The map-maker’s work is also complete,
El Teatro del Todo el Mundo: the mountains,
the scourges, the large crowds out on the streets.
In the bones of the disused gasometer
the domed container would rise, telescoping up… in the evening the levels
would sink back down as the gas was used to light and heat homes
— Ed Ram: ‘Will the UK’s gas holders be missed?’ BBC 2015
A ruin’s a fine thing to swim in, as air does
in the bones of a disused gasometer,
a chance to think quietly and alone
then climb from the ribs of its municipal
sky-pool, free from your drowning clothes
and the black wet sea at your heels.
How we lived then, with the gas-dragon
caged out the back between railway
and cricket ground, its nightly reveal
of the roofline, the infirmary lights
always on like a cruise ship,
the patients pretending to sleep.
Since you’ve been gone, the pipework’s
been salvaged, reborn as a deep-toning chime
at the opera house, where each evening
I sit through the roofless old tale
of the painter, the lover-like sister, the stain
on the firing squad floor, just to hear it —
continuing life as a nightly-struck church bell,
the derelict stars pouring down
though the holes in the sail of the sky.
