The Weather Wheel (5 page)

The yacht lies like an elegant equation in the mind.

Last night it lay on black velvet like a glasswing butterfly,

wings folded, two tall masts. The straightness of the horizon

never ceases to be astonishing, putting one in a daze –

only a slight swell in the water to prove that we are not

in a painted vestibule, that this is not an annunciation.

And here’s the yellow ferry which reminds me of

Elizabeth Bishop’s desk; my table, metallic, sunflecked,

of Hockney’s swimming pools. Everything is always

like something else. Each makes love to the other.

You are like me, they say. Blue paint has spattered

the whitewash, speckled the flagstones – the eye jumps

from blue to blue, island to island, raisin to raisin in a cake.

Archie hated raisins in cake, peas in rice. His beard

was salt and pepper, white at the time of death. To have

one terrible disease gives you no immunity against another.

He stood up in my dream, very tall, and said: Mum,

I’ve got — Syndrome. The missing word’s a dream word,

a bottom-of-the-sea, a carried-on-the-wind word.

Being so tall, my son has eyes like fruit in a tree, glassy,

Rainier cherries very high up. One cannot reach them.

The worse the news, the further they recede on the branch.

Talking of Richard who had an epileptic fit this morning,

Giorgos, who has seen it all, with that warm faraway look

in his eyes, stands shaking his head, ‘So young…’

while his father, still spry, turns aside, shaking out nets –

but what’s the fishing like these days? No one says.

This is how the world is today. And this is how I am in it,

rising from a siesta. My granny would have brought me

grape juice, white
asgari
she had crushed and sieved herself

and I would have drunk it slowly, ruckling, then smoothing,

the green chenille at her table. This is how the world was then.

It was June and every barnacled brick of the sea wall

was drying out as we were. Had it been October,

had I been Hearn, I too would have kept a grass lark,

a Kusa-Hibari. Why? Not only because he sings,

not only because he is also called Autumn Wind,

Morning Bell, Little Bell of the Bamboo Grove,

or because he’s worth more than his weight in gold,

being half the size of a barley grain, or even because

his antennae, longer than his body, are so very fine

they can only be seen when held against the light

as they will be held since to find him, you must turn

his cage round and round to discover his whereabouts,

but because, as his guardian tells me, his tiny song,

song of love and longing, ‘is unconsciously retrospective:

he cries to the dust of the past – he calls to the silence

and the gods for the return of time’ is why I’d want him.

In the first weeks after my mother’s death,

I curled up like a foetus on the side of my heart.

My tears were like fresh water, warm and clear.

They flowed of their own accord, soundlessly,

while my body, my mouth and even my eyelids

lay as peacefully as in sleep and the more tears flowed,

the more I wanted them. World was foetal then.

But in the months that followed, tears dried up

and world took up its stick and walked blindly

through the riverbeds. Had they been floodplains,

had there been no dams to render them obsolete,

nilometers would have measured the overflow

from faraway monsoons on stairs, pillars, wells.

Too high and there’d be famine, too low, the same.

I measured distances by her. My mother my compass,

my almanac and sundial, drawing me arcs in space.

The goat, the earliest known ruminant in the world

and hence, one might say, our first poet-philosopher,

is not ruminating now but, nose against purple plastic,

is dribbling a ball among pigeons. When he rears

against the wire fencing, towering above us, he displays,

dangling on his neck, his two wattles or toggles or tassles –

a dimorphic trait maybe, caruncles with no known function.

We cannot touch the goat or feed him. But children do,

they want to feel the fearful thrill of his tongue, his lips,

they want to console, thank him for being among us.

Does he miss his mountains? The properties of spheres

in motion are no compensation for limestone gorges,

healing dittany and sage. The pigeons peck peck peck.

The old buck ruminates. And a toddler stoops to grass,

tugs at a handful she thrusts into the air above her head

and lets fall on her father’s shoes, like Newton’s apple.

Let’s fling down a cloak of gold leaf on wove paper,

let’s do the pavement like Klimt. Like his father

before him, Ernst Klimt the Elder, gold engraver,

and his brother who took up engraving later –

whose deaths in one year were the fount of his vision –

let’s do acacia in a shower of coins, engrave each face

with
The Kiss
. Semen is flowing like golden rain,

double yellow lines meander in gold metallic ink

and the streetlamps are on –
O spark of the Gods!
–

it’s snowing gold flake, sweeping mosaics along the kerb,

spandrels of gold between car wheels. Werewolves,

gorgons, are sauntering out of their lairs, trick-or-treaters

with quince-red cheeks and my beautiful girl in a tent

of yellow roses twines her corn snake round her wrist.

As a night fox trots through a gold-barred gate, trapping

gold-dust in his fleece – quick, hammer him into the frieze.

It’s not that I went in search of the animals

though occasionally one crossed my path

or stole out of Wikipedia as if it were a wood

in an English shire but looking, for example,

at a daylight moon steadfast behind drifts

of cloud I’d follow my own drift of thought

and who’s to say I wouldn’t trip up –

moon not moon at all but a platinum sun,

a frieze of haunches, heads, ears and mouths

evening out, dissolving back to cloud?

And look how morning becomes evening

accidentally, heuristically, in the miracle

of language leading us up the garden path

a white rabbit crosses, a badger, our local fox

who is the last commuter padding home

apart from me, lagging behind on a crutch.

Martina – you are in the mist now, season of mists

and mellow fruitfulness and indeed the apple tree

below my window holds reddening apples up to me

and Jude's apple tree has dropped enough fruit

for another round of
apfelstrudel
. Today the weather

suits you, dear Martina – sun's glow behind the mist,

raindrops I first mistook for petals on the pavement.

And isn't this what radiance is: the elation, the promise

before sun breaks through, the laugh behind your smile,

answers to questions you withheld – not unkindly or coyly

but because radiance and the soft veiling it demands

was your natural element? The new banisters I had built

will never feel your tread. But I feel it the way I feel

the air – more scent than air. Where would you have gone

with your stick, your crutch, had you been well today?

Where does mist go? Mist clears, Martina, clears.

She lifts the hood of the pram, attaches

a Chinesey floral scarf to the rim to cover

the opening behind which a baby sleeps

as the poem sleeps behind the page.

Wind lifts one corner. There’s no heat

to speak of and the wind is only the earth

stirring as the year turns. But she covers him

as children do a table, making a house for him,

a darkened cave. What will he see but sprays,

borders thinned against the light, a chink

let in on his left? He has no left or right,

no borders, no China. Only this half-light,

the colour of his eyes, a colour bound to change.

Tomorrow is the autumn equinox, Mehregan,

a festival in honour of the Goddess Mehr

for whom my poem has been wheeled away.

Sun has propped her bike against the skyline.

She’ll write in gold today. Wear pinks and reds,

wrap up warm and enter always smiling, always

ready to be overlooked, leaning her chin on her hands,

frowning when addressed. And as for desire,

she’ll reserve it for praise, be it modest as an oculus,

a round open fenestration in a wall, set high

and facing west. Terraced, she’ll rest her fingertips

on wooden muntins, angle her glance through windows

splayed in Polebrook or Threekingham. And how

she loves lancets, three trefoil-headed lancets, stepped!

A quiet soul she is, an altar rail around her thoughts,

the silk cordon hooked back on its brass stave.

And shy. But look at what she writes! Outshines

the others, the noisy, vociferous others, any day.

I’d give anything for a glyph from the star nib of her pen.

As a mouse sniffs for cheese, so I, reading novels,

am sniffing out scintillas. Sometimes they are few

but enough to keep me going; at other times, rare

and completely enchanting, whole pages, paragraphs,

bring starlight down to earth. Over these I dither,

snuffle back and forth, inhale, raise my nose to weather,

glue it down to sniff the spark, to take the hit again.

I am on the trail of genius whose albedo is nothing short

of fallen snow’s, desert sand’s, who brings me the sky

‘dove-gray with stars’, ‘the diamond lights of Yalta’.

So what difference does it make, under such reflectivity

diffused through time and space, if I’m here at Seven Dials

where the sundial pillar boasts only six blue clock dials

since it counts itself as the seventh or here on Upper Street

where blue battery lights twine round London planes,

each trunk a princely stag, each branch a starry antler?

When I looked up, I was astonished at the muscularity

of clouds that were rearing up from a marble frieze

in high relief on a sarcophagus of blue. But whose?

Alexander’s routing the Persians? Or Abdalonymus

the gardener king’s, crowned by his very conqueror?

Now they revolved from war to peace and back again –

either way their spears were drawn, warriors, huntsmen,

lions snarling as they went, bundling up their hind legs

as if melting were a kind of leaping in slow motion.

And the cubs that littered their wake, play-fighting,

pouncing, rolling on their backs, were melting too,

panting, paws outstretched. What is to melt?

Into love, into war? Limb by limb to deliquesce,

to reaccumulate into a giant maw that swallows

a sun, a planet, like a ball in a baseball mitt,

a perfect fit, while the jaw, the hand, fragment?

For however long it was – it seemed an age – that I stood

leaning over the wall, looking down on the sward below,

edging closer, I couldn’t discern the slightest movement.

Only the wind that moved an ear like a stalk of wheat,

a jowl that quivered. Her eyes seemed not to see. The grass,

though abundant and inches from her lips, held no temptation.

Measuring her in perspective, as a painter with a pencil,

I judged her the length of my palm, on the thin side and brown,

a perfectly ordinary rabbit but for her stillness, her patience.

Finally, her trance broken, she jerked her head up, came to life,

listened, heard and bounded off with her white scut into cover.

I couldn’t help but think of my mother – that same stillness,

that same absence of intention, volition, as she lay dying;

that surrendering of a life force that turns you to stone

though the fur is fur, the hair still hair, the posture neither

sleeping nor prone but poised on the cusp of sculpture.