New and Selected Poems (31 page)

I remember going out there,

The tide far out, the North Shore ice-wind

Cutting me back

To the quick of the blood – that outer-edge nostalgia,

The good feeling. My sole memory

Of my black overcoat. Padding the wet sandspit.

I was staring at the sea, I suppose.

Trying to feel thoroughly alone,

Simply myself, with sharp edges –

Me and the sea one big tabula rasa,

As if my returning footprints

Out of that scrim of gleam, that horizon-wide wipe,

Might be a whole new start.

My shoe-sole shapes

My only sign.

My minimal but satisfying discussion

With the sea.

Putting my remarks down, for the thin tongue

Of the sea to interpret. Inaudibly.

A therapy,

Instructions too complicated for me

At the moment, but stowed in my black box for later.

Like feeding a wild deer

With potato crisps

As you do in that snapshot where you exclaim

Back towards me and my camera.

So I had no idea I had stepped

Into the telescopic sights

Of the paparazzo sniper

Nested in your brown iris.

Perhaps you had no idea either,

So far off, half a mile maybe,

Looking towards me. Watching me

Pin the sea’s edge down.

No idea

How that double image,

Your eye’s inbuilt double exposure

Which was the projection

Of your two-way heart’s diplopic error,

The body of the ghost and me the blurred see-through

Came into single focus,

Sharp-edged, stark as a target,

Set up like a decoy

Against that freezing sea

From which your dead father had just crawled.

I did not feel

How, as your lenses tightened,

He slid into me.

You were like a religious fanatic

Without a god – unable to pray.

You wanted to be a writer.

Wanted to write? What was it within you

Had to tell its tale?

The story that has to be told

Is the writer’s God, who calls

Out of sleep, inaudibly: ‘Write.’

Write what?

Your heart, mid-Sahara, raged

In its emptiness.

Your dreams were empty.

You bowed at your desk and you wept

Over the story that refused to exist,

As over a prayer

That could not be prayed

To a non-existent God. A dead God

With a terrible voice.

You were like those desert ascetics

Who fascinated you,

Parching in such a torturing

Vacuum of God

It sucked goblins out of their finger-ends,

Out of the soft motes of the sun-shaft,

Out of the blank rock face.

The gagged prayer of their sterility

Was a God.

So was your panic of emptiness – a God.

You offered him verses. First

Little phials of the emptiness

Into which your panic dropped its tears

That dried and left crystalline spectra.

Crusts of salt from your sleep.

Like the dewy sweat

On some desert stones, after dawn.

Oblations to an absence.

Little sacrifices. Soon

Your silent howl through the night

Had made itself a moon, a fiery idol

Of your God.

Your crying carried its moon

Like a woman a dead child. Like a woman

Nursing a dead child, bending to cool

Its lips with tear-drops on her finger-tip,

So I nursed you, who nursed a moon

That was human but dead, withered and

Burned you like a lump of phosphorus.

Till the child stirred. Its mouth-hole stirred.

Blood oozed at your nipple,

A drip feed of blood. Our happy moment!

The little god flew up into the Elm Tree.

In your sleep, glassy eyed,

You heard its instructions. When you woke

Your hands moved. You watched them in dismay

As they made a new sacrifice.

Two handfuls of blood, your own blood,

And in that blood gobbets of me,

Wrapped in a tissue of story that had somehow

Slipped from you. An embryo story.

You could not explain it or who

Ate at your hands.

The little god roared at night in the orchard,

His roar half a laugh.

You fed him by day, under your hair-tent,

Over your desk, in your secret

Spirit house, you whispered,

You drummed on your thumb with your fingers,

Shook Winthrop shells for their sea-voices,

And gave me an effigy – a Salvia

Pressed in a Lutheran Bible.

You could not explain it. Sleep had opened.

Darkness poured from it, like perfume.

Your dreams had burst their coffin.

Blinded I struck a light

And woke upside down in your spirit-house

Moving limbs that were not my limbs,

And telling, in a voice not my voice,

A story of which I knew nothing,

Giddy

With the smoke of the fire you tended

Flames I had lit unwitting

That whitened in the oxygen jet

Of your incantatory whisper.

You fed the flames with the myrrh of your mother

The frankincense of your father

And your own amber and the tongues

Of fire told their tale. And suddenly

Everybody knew everything.

Your God snuffed up the fatty reek.

His roar was like a basement furnace

In your ears, thunder in the foundations.

Then you wrote in a fury, weeping,

Your joy a trance-dancer

In the smoke in the flames.

‘God is speaking through me,’ you told me.

‘Don’t say that,’ I cried, ‘Don’t say that.

That is horribly unlucky!’

As I sat there with blistering eyes

Watching everything go up

In the flames of your sacrifice

That finally caught you too till you

Vanished, exploding

Into the flames

Of the story of your God

Who embraced you

And your mummy and your daddy –

Your Aztec, Black Forest

God of the euphemism Grief.

She had too much so with a smile you took some.

Of everything she had you had

Absolutely nothing, so you took some.

At first, just a little.

Still she had so much she made you feel

Your vacuum, which nature abhorred,

So you took your fill, for nature’s sake.

Because her great luck made you feel unlucky

You had redressed the balance, which meant

Now you had some too, for yourself.

As seemed only fair. Still her ambition

Claimed the natural right to screw you up

Like a crossed-out page, tossed into a basket.

Somebody, on behalf of the gods,

Had to correct that hubris.

A little touch of hatred steadied the nerves.

Everything she had won, the happiness of it,

You collected

As your compensation

For having lost. Which left her absolutely

Nothing. Even her life was

Trapped in the heap you took. She had nothing.

Too late you saw what had happened.

It made no difference that she was dead.

Now that you had all she had ever had

You had much too much.

                                              Only you

Saw her smile, as she took some.

At first, just a little.

Sleeping and waking in the Song of Songs

You were half-blissful. But on occasion

Casually as a yawn, you’d open

Your death and contemplate it.

Your death

Was so utterly within your power

It was as if you had trapped it. Maybe by somehow

Giving it some part of you, for its food.

Now it was your curio pet,

Your familiar. But who else would have nursed it

In a locket between her breasts!

Smiling, you’d hold it up.

You’d swing it on its chain, to tease life.

It lent you uncanny power. A secret, blueish,

Demonic flash

When you smiled and gently bit the locket.

I have read how a fiery cross

Can grow and brighten in the dreams of a spinster.

But a crooked key turned in your locket.

It had sealed your door in Berlin

With the brand of the burnt. You knew exactly

How your death looked. It was a long-cold oven

Locked with a swastika.

The locket kept splitting open.

I would close it. You would smile.

Its lips kept coming apart – just a slit.

The clasp seemed to be faulty.

Who could have guessed what it was trying to say?

Your beauty, a folktale wager,

Was a quarter century posthumous.

While I juggled our futures, it kept up its whisper

To my deafened ear:
fait
accompli.

Your German

Found its royal licence in the English

Your mother had bought (peering into the future)

By mail order, from Fortnum and Mason. Your Hebrew

Survived on bats and spiders

In the guerrilla priest-hole

Under your tongue. Nevertheless,

At the long-weekend Berkshire county table,

In a dizzy silence, your cheekbones

(From the Black Sea, where the roses bloom thrice)

Flushed sootier –

Stared at by English hounds

Whose tails had stopped wagging. When the lips lifted,

The trade-routes of the Altai

Tangled in your panic, tripped you. It was

The frontier glare of customs.

The gun-barrels

Of the imperious noses

Pointed at something pinioned. Then a drawl:

‘Lick of the tar-brush?’

There you saw it,

Your lonely Tartar death,

Surrounded and ‘dumb like the bound

Wolf on Tolstoy’s horse’.