Still Life
‘Sit like an apple’, the Master grumps, and holds her
with an eye like God. She settles
in the green glade of her flesh. Gives up all thought
of her wet boots, or of hot drinks or handsprings, the animal
heat of her rain-damp skirt.
Considers herself anew as one of the crisp Calvados apples she can smell
in their dish on the dresser shelf. Lets the light-rimmed sunlit
roundness take her weight
and contain her. An isolate small
planet. Remote, green. Belonging neither
to the orchard bough it sprang from, the blossom it was,
nor to autumn or any other season. Simply
there in its ample still-life self-containment like an apple in a blue
dish on a dresser shelf in a room high up in
the twelfth arrondissement, under the eye
of the Lord God who will one day perhaps make an honest woman
of her. Not quite meaning to snatch his soul,
but making herself
in her stilled, eternal presence, real as an apple
to him, as his hand
moves through the quickened air towards our common
and garden-green beginnings. The taut round
of a belly. The swelling soft round of a thigh.
The Deluge
When roads become mirrors, who knows
where they lead? Destinations lie
on the far side of clouds and keep moving.
Turmoiclass="underline" a universe
turned upside down and backwards, below
above, above and far-off under
foot. Waders, thigh-deep
in cirrus, practise a new mode of flying.
Slower. Without wings.
Begrimed, soaked, dripping,
angels take on
a second job as porters: two
with a sofa, one, arms raised, bears on his head a rare
four-legged domestic beast, a bentwood
side table; another, an old lady in a nightgown but not
perhaps in her perfect mind, who, rough-handled
with tough love, giggles to find herself
airborne and on the move — without weight and with the sky,
which is also moving, and fast,
beneath her — through a lightscape of the fallen,
or risen or still rising.
An antique
scene brought close. Inverted. Antipodean.
A world in panic flight
but casual. Half-comic. Out of whack.
Downhome and classic.
Unreal.
Abstract
First paint me daylight
crystals of air
out of which an iceberg
builds. Add
in touches the arctic blue
of an eye, the fixed stare
of the ice-sheet across which
five trained snow-bound explorers
stagger, then the precise
degree of nothingness
where each one comes
to a standstill and drops.
You call this abstract?
What of the hand,
its blood-warmth as it grasps
the concept ‘absolute cold’?
What of the mind
that shapes what is still
air but on a snowflake’s
lacy geometry raises
a cliff tall as a sky
— scraper? What of the fear
— lessness of making Nothing
so actual that white
on white as we approach it,
our hearts are stopped
mid-sentence to marble?
At a stroke, on a breath.
Seven Faces of the Die
I
That nothing is mere or only.
That not even white, seen
rightly, is without
its heat zones, gradations
of red, yellow, green,
or snow without its blue
occasions when birds fly
over, or skies change their thoughts,
to say nothing
of mind, its happy knack
of changing as it changes things
or warms to the matter.
Finding in breath
and sound-stuff much
that is more, not mere, and many,
not only. As a stretch
of fallow under ice has overtones
of clover and poppy,
and the sound for, the colour
of these, makes of the still earth’s airy
stillness a slow dance; and of
its silence, as the rustling
of silk in a darkened room makes the deepest dark
chromatic, a blind man’s music.
II
Not a leaf, not a stitch
of our own. How stark we are,
how needy.
But a pencil line
on a blank page will conjure
space, volume, prospective
horizons to make for.
Kids’ stuff but a beginning.
Between our fingers
and the stars all the room
in the world. And needy
is good, and bafflement.
On all fours then upright
— unsteady we set out.
What we meet
on the way, before
we get there, is the story.
And we never do
get there. Needless to say.
III
for Jaya Savige
At hazard, whether or not
we know it and wherever
we go. Without it no
surprise, no enchantment.
There is law enough all about us
in almanack and season, anniversary
days come round, the round earth’s carnivale
of chimes and recessionals.
Good to be included
there. Good also what is not
fixed or sure even,
the second breath of being
here when the May-bush
snows in mid-September, as giddy
happenstance leads us
this way into
a lost one’s arms, or that way
deeper into the maze.
IV
This side and the other
of silence: white
noise. The snowy
infinite beyond
Happens and Becomes where nothing is
to be counted on,
and nothing
is accounted as loss.
V
That this is our element:
a world of nine-day
wonders and other gaudies;
of road-show
rowdies in passage
from Here to Nowhere; a cortège
of all that is of flesh
and air permitted its fol-
derol and brief grandezza.
To swank, prance, cartwheel
and flare before our eyes
a moment, before it dies.
VI
The Wager
In the air a flipped
coin (and so many
breaths suspended on it)
that never comes down.
VII
for Andrea Stretton (1952–2007)
Sprigs, outbreaks of bloom, the everywhere
greenness of grass,
as the dead come to air again
under fencewire that holds nothing
in.
On slopes in sunlight
cow-parsley, lad’s love,
speedwell, baby’s breath, weeds
of a planet that is all
abundance and consummate
waste and replenishment.
The riot and sweet rot
of what’s to come.
The life beyond corruption.
A Touch of the Sun
Earlier than the sun
and stronger, our need
for comfort in the dark.
Always on cue
with its doodle-do and smallgrass recitativo
we take the sun
as given, its shadow-play
of slats on a bed-sheet
(a hot thought
in a hot shade) semaphore
to the blood that knows nothing
of distinctions, dawn
from dusk, May from December.
Or in a deck-chair within sight of