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| ISBN-13: | 9781847778659 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 04/28/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 371 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Playing With Fire
By Grevel Lindop
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2006 Grevel LindopAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-865-9
CHAPTER 1
Lighting the First Fire of Autumn
Here they are, the quartered logs in their wicker
basket woven of what I take to be
birch and split willow plaited together,
the copse offering itself for the burning
indoors, twig against twig, tree within tree:
rough-cut block capitals of an alphabet
older than writing: poplar, beech, pine,
chainsawed joints of the wood bled and dried out
for a year, lodged in the season's calendar,
their rituals subordinate, now, to mine
as I build the pyre of oak twigs and newsprint
in the middle of the year's first cold morning.
The TV news shows tropical forests on fire,
drought in east England, and the Midlands flooded,
a crude mosaic of weather that looks like a warning.
St Columcille said he feared death and hell –
but worse, the sound of an axe in a sacred grove.
Now every grove is sacred, and still we burn
wood at times, for the fire also is sacred
and a house without it like a heart without love
when the world heads into darkness. The heat's core
will show you again lost faces and glittering forests,
mountain passes, caverns, an archetypal world
recited in the twinkling of a dark pupil.
The epic buried inside us never rests:
fire is the dark secret of the forest.
The green crowns drink sunlight until their dumb
hearts are glutted with fire. Then, decaying or burning,
give up whatever they have. A match flares
and the paper ignites. Watch, and the poems will come.
Sicilienne
Fauré pours chords across chords and under
my daughter's hands, plunged wrist-deep into the music,
the barred and mottled light of sunshot water
is shadowed into shape, the unexpected
tinge of an arpeggio rippled and glinting
as the tide harps on a rock, and hesitates
then covers it. Repetition is decisive: I'm upstairs
and the music fills the space between the floors
with its lovely tangles, like a chaotic flowering
vine, a mesh of times whose fruit in the heart
is recollected movement. The returning wave
splashing light on the roof of a sea-cave
at Fydlyn plied that tentative pattern as she waded
cautious on pebbles deep-sunk in the cold
summer rockpools, the cave-mouth arching an O
of astonishing turquoise where a seal gazed
back at us, doglike paddling among ribboned
rocks and she climbed out near to it, placing those same
wet hands decisively on the sharp and unwelcoming
stone. Yards overhead seagulls scream and thrift
stars pink on precarious grass, and she is finding
her way back through heavier, less congenial
chords. The weather is changing, August is now
the far mouth to a tunnel of dark seasons
and the stairwell is full of echoes which are the rampaging
of discords on discords back to something simple,
a recurrent time-pattern, something heard but unspoken.
The last chord tolls into distance, endstopped by the
thump of the piano-stool and bang of the door,
decisive step on the stairs, firm evidence
that it's time to go on to something else, something more.
Five Lemons
Here are five lemons from the poet's garden,
the colour of white gold and icy sunshine,
flooded with green around the pointed nipples.
My younger daughter cuts one into quarters,
careful of fingers, bites the white-furred pith out,
devours the quartz-white segments with her eyes shut,
sighing and swaying in the sharp enjoyment.
Here are four lemons from the poet's garden:
one perched on three, a perfect tetrahedron.
The poet's widow showed me where to pick them,
kindly and shrewd, helping me find the best ones,
holding the branch down while I snapped the stalks off,
the cold breeze in our faces from the mountain.
We'll halve this one and squeeze it over couscous.
Here are three lemons from the poet's garden
still in the bowl, turned in a neat triangle,
yellower now. My elder daughter chooses,
after long thought, one for her still-life painting,
the twisted leaves like green airplane-propellers
with a Cezanne pear and a Braque violin,
fractured into art-deco Cubist slices.
Here are two lemons from the poet's garden
below his tall house on the terraced hillside,
red earth black-pitted with his fallen olives
between the gnarled trunks trailing silver foliage,
beside the boulders of the dusty torrent
rainless above that sea of sparkling turquoise.
The juice is perfect for a tuna salad.
Here is a lemon from the poet's garden,
the last of them. Long is the poet gone,
silent his grave on the hilltop under the cypress,
long the shadows drawn by moon and sun
out from the low walls and high gate of the graveyard.
I press the waxy peel to my face and breathe it.
There are no words for what the fragrance tells me.
Mystery
The sun is out again, and the butterflies
elaborate their dance around the garden:
here a white one, there a speckled brown,
sometimes a red admiral or an orange-tip.
Yet for weeks it rained and we didn't see them.
Where do they hide when the globes of rain are hurtling –
shiny projectiles that could punch a hole
clean through their fans of papery silk?
A mystery; like where the word was lurking
until someone asked you for a suggestion –
eleven letters, blank blank PR blank PR –
and without pausing to think, you said 'appropriate'.
At Humphrey Head
Years ago, I looked for a certain spring
on the Cumbrian coast. There were white rocks,
green creepers, bushes, and the lapping sea,
but I could find no spring. I noticed a robin
that perched on a sprig of juniper and sang
a warbling song, flitted a few feet
and sang again. The thought came: Follow the robin
and you will find the spring. The bird flew on
from branch to branch and then, suddenly, dropped,
bobbed, sipped. At the foot of the cliff
I found the spring, I drank the medicinal water.
Tintagel
Chough: say it aloud,
letting the breeze carry off
the final consonant.
That way, you hear the cry.
Black as burnt paper
they spiral over the crag,
or strut: scarlet crowfoot
and slant, indigenous eye.
Yes, they have seen it all –
the four Evangelists
staring from golden icons;
oath-taker, shape-shifter,
the king bedding the duke's wife
while the duke goes down in battle.
The fruit will be England's hero.
Now poets and chroniclers
(those carrion birds of legend)
fly up from the hecatomb
crop-full, craw-stuffed –
already digesting the vitals:
out of the strong, sweetness;
out of battle-carnage
the honey of a verse,
gnomic history.
Ash from a thousand books
blows in the quadrangle,
smudging the page as you turn it.
Can you see, on the next leaf –
rubric or marginal gloss,
between the lines, under the black letter –
splayed, windblown, indelible,
scarlet tracks of blood?
Green
Imagine the colours the eye can see as a bow:
the visible spectrum spread out so that violet
is at one tightening end, and deep red the other,
almost ready to touch ends and join in a circle.
At the centre, where an arrow might rest, is green,
the eye's natural target, the centre point
from which the other colours are fanned out:
extrapolated from green into yellow and blue,
but always green is the eye's natural home,
the ruffled green of the oak, the baize of the lawn,
splintered, fractured, sewn, hammered, reflected,
fringe of green at the kerb, rays of green on the walltop.
There's no colour that so much sings of life,
and we are married to it, green is the muscles' bride
as alien and desirable to us as perhaps the red
which is our bloody signature is loved
by the plantworld, which would heal it if it could
and will, with its roots, its kind carbon kisses,
laying our hot words and our anguish asleep
in its mother of leaves, its green gothic windows of light,
its whisper of needles and carpets. The oaktree
is our house and the rowan our protector,
the hawthorn full of advice. Inside the glass,
the brick, the plaster and the concrete, while you read,
every breath you take is the gift of green.
Renaissance
They don't have the repose of the Eastern gods,
the peachlike bloom of the wide-eyed boy Pharaohs,
the floating smile of the Buddha in meditation.
Even the flaming tar-baby Dharma-protectors,
skull-necklaced, holding cups of human blood,
stomping on corpses to clatter their ankle-bells
(deft heel and turned wrist like a Balinese dancer)
are less terrible than these indolent marble giants
whose fleshly perfection, whose blank colossal gaze
speak of a sculptor perfectly obsessed
with self-transcendence. Who, fully believing in God,
took up His creative challenge by carving this
miraculous more-than-humanity out of the stone,
melting the crystal to flesh, tensing the muscle,
sprawling the huge limbs into a massive disdain
for his own antlike, merely human labours.
The new gods are here, at the Fountain of the Four Rivers,
strenuously frozen, their energy poised
on the brink of explosion. What did Bernini intend?
Clearly he would have thought his work well done
if that marble fist had finally uncurled
to wrench chisel and mallet out of his grasp
and fling him onto the heap of marble chippings,
turning to shake its stone siblings awake
and start the revolution. Nearby, at the Trevi
Fountain, the Titans have broken loose from their moorings,
Neptune (but this is not the Roman Neptune)
driving insane white chariot-horses ahead
and almost trampling his own army of tritons
who blow their conches free of the raging water
as the huge shells hurtle forward. 'Get out of the way,
or be crushed by a force already bigger than yours
and constantly gaining momentum,' their gestures say.
Those stone minds already dream of the computer,
the hydrogen bomb, the human genome project,
the assault on the moon. They're not for our contemplation,
but contemplate us. 'Give us time,' they seem to say.
'It will take a few centuries, but what of that?
We will put out God's eyes, pull heaven down on your heads.
A life-sentence means nothing to Titans,
whose lifespan is endless. To think it began with fire!
Enjoy the flames. Prometheus knew what he did.'
Cards from Paris
There's no calendar for the seasons of a life.
Spring may as easily come on the last day
as midway, or at the start of the year.
There's no time but the present, whenever that
may be. So I sit in the Boulevard St Denis,
drinking coffee among the talkers and the shoppers,
while Paris undergoes its oppressive summer;
brought here by a good friend, a love for The White
Goddess, a conference on Robert Graves,
resurgence of a buried fondness for France
and other things too nebulous to mention.
Today I visited the rue de l'Échiquier,
but the Mayol, my adolescent temple, was gone,
the rhinestone-spangled G-strings of the dancers
and the blue ostrich-feathers untraceable,
indelible in memory like wall-paintings
in a pyramid, nude dancers flowing to music,
still watched by someone who is no longer there.
And somewhere on the Butte de Montmartre
under the mushroom-cluster of Sacré Coeur
must be the shop where the old lady sold me,
kind and smiling, that pack of novelty cards:
an incarnation of Madame Sosostris,
dealing me the hand – cards on the table –
which would govern my life. The naked strawberry blonde,
the redhead with small breasts, the brunette
with suspenders and black stockings. Then they were dreams
but I would meet them all later, make love to some,
merely desire others, get bored with a few, marry
the one most beautiful to look at and most
delectable to touch. But so little would change
inside. I am still fourteen and a half,
my exact age the night I sat in the Mayol.
And probably always will be, though they bulldoze
the theatre to build a Monoprix,
though Paris is mostly towerblocks and flyovers.
There are patterns in us like watermarks in paper,
and some don't change. Despite the heavy traffic,
my fellow tourists and the pneumatic drill,
I shall order another coffee and see it through.
The Cypress Trees
Waking at night, in darkness, I stepped out of bed,
knowing perfectly well where I was:
bare wall at an angle, door at the end,
tall shuttered window. And outside
the long garden with the cypress trees –
the moon-shadows, the gentle Italian night.
All wholly familiar; only my hand
struck a wall where no wall should have been.
I felt along it. The door was missing too.
Perplexed, not frightened, I still knew the place –
polished wood floor of the passage outside,
white plaster wall. Yet the door wasn't there,
the wall was in the wrong place. Then I remembered:
I was at home, in England, no longer in Rome,
where I'd slept last night. But far stranger than that,
though I touched my English wall, this room my mind
insisted I stood in was not in the Roman hotel –
the mirrors, the yellowy light from the via Margutta –
not at all. This was some unknown Italian room,
yet intimately familiar. I was lost –
laughed, almost, at the metaphysical comedy
of touching a room I was quite unable to picture
whilst mentally standing in one at a different angle,
in another country, unidentified
yet thoroughly known. At last, groping my way
to the actual door, I grasped a knob. And then
my room came clear in my head, as if a light
were suddenly switched on. Where had I been? –
awake, alert, amused, and somewhere else.
I'm patient enough. Perhaps I shall get back there.
Will it be with fear? Glad recognition?
Elusive, troubling sense of déja vu?
Enough that I remembered; or that the place,
for its own peculiar reasons, remembered me –
the slant wall, the high, shuttered window,
the unseen blue moonlight. The cypress trees.
Hen Felin
There is a white house sunk in the long grass
and a spring rises, no one knows from where
and there is nothing, nothing and again nothing.
The nothings talk together in the house.
The beach breathes when the tide hisses along it,
each pebble bald as a moon; and the moon rises,
and the rocks melt and wrinkle the bright sea.
Part of me has been living here for years
among the nothings and the silences
which are not nothing and are never silent.
And stranded under the long grass and the weeds
a wooden boat, her timbers sprung by time
the white wood mildewed, SWALLOW on the bow:
a white moon drowning in a green sea.
The knitwork tapestry of furballed goosegrass,
pink spikes of willowherb have run her through
but still the unstaunched spring whispers and sings
and will not let her rest and turn to earth
but long past hope still sets the empty heart
echoing to the perpetual music of water.
How Long Is the Coast of Britain?
It could be a year ago
and I am treading on stones
weedcapped and bedded in sand,
water oozing between my toes
as I look up to trace
my children running, shouting
but shrunk almost to points
on the shining flats, drawing a line
in front of the restless cold blaze
of a far-out tide. Nothing has changed;
at that distance they seem no larger
and though they are still running
no distance seems covered. As the gull flies
we're not so far from New Brighton
where I did the same thing at the same age,
if I had an age. The memory
carries no mark of time, cannot be placed. I remember
slippery rocks, the girders of the pier
shaggy with an ogreish velvet
of emerald weed, and dragging a spade on its edge
as I ran, to draw a minuscule furrow miles long,
as it seemed, as it seems. The scale must be wrong. How far
is it now? You could walk
from here to there, I suppose, taking in bays
and headlands, Caernarvon, the Great Orme, the Wirral,
the distance lengthening
far beyond the road's approximate windings
as you paced the furrows of sand, the stone quays,
barnacle-blistered rocks and the crackling stringy
wreckage of the tide-line, lost shoes and plastic bottles.
And that would tell you nothing
of the true distance. Follow a sand-hopper
or a small spider, those arcs and anxious scuttlings
deviating round boulder and sand-heap, mountaineering
over pebble after pebble, zigzagging
round the root-fingers of the marram-grass:
the line becomes an endless filigree,
yet still cutting corners, for the pebble
is a fissured pavement of disjunct crystals, the sandgrain
a fishnet labyrinth of molecular silicates. Every measure
has other measures inside it, and inside those. The ragged
path from here to childhood might be like that:
a contour traced by simplification across
crevasses, a spider's thread thrown over
the honeycombed surface
of memory, each cell
an involute of other cells, moments
and perceptions within moments, and memories
within perceptions. Here
the cliffs are stratified
like layers of paper-ash, a hecatomb
of burnt books; and there are fossils
in the carboniferous pages, though I can't find them.
Better the Dorset cliffs, where the rain brought down
curlicue ammonites cast in fools' gold,
spiral nuggets to be kept in a box
and fingered, the metal helix
of the shell a trace of that lifetime's growth
like the unicorn shells and pink-fluked convex fans
picked up yesterday on the hard
brown ribs of sand to be prized and forgotten,
crushed on the carpet, found in a pocket
or a dream years later. Time
is a line as elusive as the fractal curve
of any coastline – the seasons since we were here
have lifetimes in them,
churned mud and snow on the lawn,
my son flying a Chinese
bird-kite of brilliant paper in the humming wind
at Formby, where the oilslick
has fouled the dunes now; or the quarry in Wales
where my daughter found her first fossil,
a minute fan-shell
etched pristine on a gunmetal flake of shale,
and stood there yelling, three years
with twenty million in her hand. I can feel the sun
still on the blinding dust of the quarry-tip,
and the dust on the fingerprint ridges
of my fingers. Nothing gets lost or ends. Yesterday
he carried a small jellyfish to the sea
in his bucket: it was beautiful,
he said; he wanted to save it
from stranding on the beach. Wrong-side up
at first, it righted itself, a pulsating
crystal saucer, and huffed itself away
into the tide. Now he's hunting crabs
as he did just here a year ago, winding
his way towards me down the gleaming
bars where the shallows flood irregularly
with the incoming water. I can't get back
to the last time I walked here, let alone
to being his age. The more I can recall
the more there is to be recalled, how I got here
from that small boy is inconceivable, the curve
of time folds in and complicates
when you would look at it. I walk to meet him
along the current of a stream
that runs continually, fresh water into salt,
meeting the tide, setting up a balance
whose limits can't be found or mapped.
A crest spills over
shrinking the sand behind the girls. A lifted stone
reveals an olive shield that vacillates
then pounces for the centre of the pool. He scoops it out
and holds it up, delighted. Here and now
everything's clear; but it's the boundaries
that give us room to live. Nothing's emptied,
however long we look. 'Coastline length
turns out to be an elusive notion', we're told;
attempts at measurement tending to show
the typical coastline's length as 'very large
and so ill-determined
that it is best considered infinite'.
And as for what we are, calculating that's
a journey like travelling in and in
among the seahorse tails and spumebursts
of the Mandelbrot set, or watching the lace and eddy
of the tide lipping the rocks, washing and interpreting them again,
lost and renewed like memory, elaborating a line
infinite and bounded like the life of a man.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Playing With Fire by Grevel Lindop. Copyright © 2006 Grevel Lindop. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
I,
Lighting the First Fire of Autumn,
Sicilienne,
Five Lemons,
Mystery,
At Humphrey Head,
Tintagel,
Green,
Renaissance,
Cards from Paris,
The Cypress Trees,
Hen Felin,
How Long Is the Coast of Britain?,
Taking Down Cavafy,
II,
To Circe,
The Snowball,
Maison de Jouir,
Perfume,
Myth,
Nights When You Wake,
Pearls,
Closure,
Glossolalia,
A Dozen Red Roses,
That Month,
The Mirror,
To Ekazati,
III,
Ars Poetica,
Table Dance,
The Net,
Afterwards,
Brazilian,
Watching,
The New Girl,
Shoes,
Remembering the Griffin,
The Cat in the Axe,
The Cave of the Nymphs,
Private Dance,
IV,
Scattering the Ashes,
Amanita Muscaria,
The Blue Room,
From the Hexagon: Yndooroopilly, NSW,
Toward Michaelmas,
Total Eclipse,
The Peacock,
After Christmas,
Genius Loci,
A Fortuitous Event,
Untitled,
A Dog at the Threshold,
Night,
About the Author,
Also by Grevel Lindop,
Copyright,