Beyond This Dark House Read online

Too near the place

  that signifies

  bone. Not for you:

  remembering our last

  meeting, your last words,

  eyes on the glass of wine

  in both your hands.

  I wanted you so much,

  shaken by the tenderness in me

  for you. Not for you, those songs. This.

  Ransacked

  There are no shadows

  in the dream. The sun

  is very bright. The wind

  exceeds expectation.

  Ransacked, we watch

  everything blow away

  and everything, blowing away,

  watches us recede.

  Soon, without appearing to move,

  we are far from each other,

  and I seem to have arrived

  where no one needs my love.

  The wind is done. Shadows

  slide into place, bringing stars.

  And then, in the dream, she comes,

  her hands spilling moonlight,

  to accept the sacrifice

  with the naming of her name.

  Windrise

  Agia Galini, Crete

  Two hours ago,

  moonlit with shadows,

  I walked Libby down

  to her room by the harbour.

  The village dark, sea quiet,

  slight chill and shiver

  as we said good night.

  Back up the hill alone,

  through various provinces,

  then an apparition in the street:

  gaunt, bearded, Tomas

  in a hooded robe, long-striding,

  passing me unseeing, a dream.

  Mine? His? Venus,

  after I went by, was bright

  as a wound in the eastern sky.

  The wind rising now at dawn,

  the waves white-edged.

  Edge of day, of everything,

  of absolutely everything.

  A Carpet

  Always something new.

  Above the cliff tonight

  the moon, two days from full,

  glimpsed through traceries

  of cirrus cloud,

  laid down a diffusion

  of woven light on the sea.

  On The Balcony

  I used to dream of this,

  but moonlight on the bay

  is more than I remembered.

  The cliff behind the beach still invents

  shades of colour at sunset and now

  the sea is stippled with a silvering.

  More, all of this, than memory, but also

  less, because you’re in the pattern now,

  seven thousand miles from this balcony.

  If you were here with me tonight

  the sea’s sound might shape itself

  into your name . . .

  These are words. A conceit. I have

  a mild facility that lets me turn

  such phrases. Here, though, is truth:

  I am in love with where I am

  but more in love with you.

  A Northern Man

  I CRETE

  Too much of Greece can sear the soul.

  I am a northern man. Where I come from

  the sky is wide and far away

  and March is mired in snow.

  Here, subtleties of shading on the sea,

  renderings of blue (never before seen,

  where I come from) have made

  a binding of light. Island-held,

  trammelled in grace,

  one finally awakes, knowing

  what needs to be done: six weeks

  without words. Time to go.

  II LONDON

  Where I have been the light has shape.

  Inventiveness. Wit, almost.

  A cliff beyond the bay of Agia Galini

  taught me that. Sunshine here,

  although eliciting gratitude,

  is a pale, soft, small gift.

  Where I have been all gifts

  were large: the taste of wine,

  January flowers up the valley,

  sea-sound, music at night, words

  coming in the morning. There was

  no stinting, where I have been.

  Initiation

  West Hanney, Oxfordshire

  He left his torch at home.

  Walking through winding lanes

  he feels himself ruled by the dark

  that twists with the path

  through high sudden trees.

  He knows the way

  but something tells him otherwise.

  He walks carefully back

  to the meaning of night

  through the vanished, starlit town.

  West Hanney Churchyard

  The great deceptions comfort in the end.

  Thy will be done, one stern stone cries

  Over someone’s infant son.

  No flowers. Tall weeds rise.

  Another tablet whispers, Reunited.

  John Patrick Rutherford lies here

  Beside his wife, Eileen, who followed five

  Years after, in the winter of ’twenty-four.

  Rain begins to fall from a heavy sky,

  Touching a long world done in grey

  And tones of wintered green.

  The sound of birds moving away.

  A growing hollow of silence rises and flows

  From the flowered rows, and the bare.

  Wine

  The lights of houses

  push into the village night

  a little way and fail.

  Drifting through fog

  You strain towards windows.

  Figures move behind curtains.

  Islands of sound.

  A baby cries.

  Somewhere else

  a woman laughs

  and then stops laughing.

  Wine offered and withdrawn.

  In the morning the council houses

  will be small, curtains drab,

  women harried and wan.

  But in fog-weighted night

  the rush of tires

  is a rushing of waves,

  and unseen laughter

  incarnates mysteries

  and releases them.

  Northumbria

  for Dorothy Dunnett

  . . . and I saw horsemen:

  indentations in the sky

  above the heathered hills,

  running away to Scotland

  five hundred years ago.

  The hills are then, easily.

  The morning sun seems to want

  those riders as much as I,

  appearing in bright felicity

  to shine on other times,

  other worlds.

  Tintagel

  A long way off

  in every dimension I know

  the sea is still pounding

  on the causeway

  I crossed in rain.

  The waves have not yet

  broken through—

  we would have heard.

  Those foolish enough to care

  can still cross. One woman

  was slender, dark-haired,

  walked with a grace of shyness,

  lived for music, closed her eyes

  before we kissed, to lose the world.

  The ruined castle in Cornwall

  is being cut in half by the sea.

  They say Merlin was there once,

  when Arthur was begotten. The causeway

  crumbles softly, pebble by clod of earth.

  The high, white, awesome spray

  dispassionately continues.

  Re-Reading Over Sir John’s Hill

  Delerium of the sound-spun: words in riot,

  wrought from the witched womb of night

  in a boathouse room high over Laugharne

  as a mad-cap moon looked down on Wales

  and a hawk hovered at the top of the wind,

  waiting t
o kill.

  Salt of the sea in the taste of words

  and the wings and cries of birds

  heard, and the furred beasts

  dabbed with moonlight dashing to dark.

  All shining and spinning in the high,

  rising torrent of sound let loose

  as the flowered flood

  blooms in the room.

  Morning After

  Tenby, South Wales

  Walking the south beach,

  watching the tide. Listening.

  The wind. Far down

  someone walks a dog.

  A light rain falls

  on the boarded-up hotels.

  Elderly women

  lean against each other,

  bundled against the cold,

  edging past closed shops

  with bathing suits still

  in the windows. And then

  the rushing down

  of night by six o’clock.

  Beach resorts in winter

  have the derelict grace

  of a beauty queen

  the morning after

  her coronation,

  when make-up

  has been washed off,

  the lighting offers no help,

  and beauty elicits sorrow,

  being transitory.

  If I Should Fly Across The Sea Again

  for J.R.R. Tolkien

  If I should fly across the sea again

  and take the train to Oxford

  and the 23 bus to West Hanney Memorial,

  I could alight on the village green

  and walk up the curving road

  past Mrs. Shepherd’s shop and the houses

  where John Gamble lived, and Roy,

  and at the end of that road

  I’d have Lydbrook on my left

  with the barn behind it and the

  single white horse on the gate.

  I don’t think I’d stop for long.

  Papers and books

  realized that place for me

  and they aren’t there any more.

  I’d continue

  up the same road, following it

  out of the village and into the fields,

  seeing the Meads rolling north

  past fences and stiles and,

  in the distance, Lyford Grange,

  where Campion hid and was found

  and taken to London to die

  four hundred years ago. And not far

  along that path, just where it bent

  sharply north, I would find the elm

  and there I’d rest. Because, on a last

  morning under those branches, I promised

  myself that one day I would return,

  taking the train and the bus,

  and walk back to that tree and,

  unable to stop growing older,

  lie down in the shade of the leaves.

  PART

  TWO

  Taut

  Early spring sunshine.

  Women taught by swift flowers

  Maddeningly wake.

  Following

  Of you in the slowly dark I’m thinking,

  feeling the twilight as music

  marred by the chord of your absence.

  One afternoon

  you lamented the curl of your hair

  and the shape of your toes.

  I told you I couldn’t possibly love

  a freckled woman. And you

  were laughing. My finger found

  a blue vein running along

  your throat and followed it down,

  though I had said that if you ran

  I would not follow.

  And so I am entangled

  in a promise I may break,

  because I would have you want me,

  at the very least, enough to take

  these offerings for what they are:

  craftings in the hollow of a sleepless night,

  shot through with the discord

  of your being far away, and not mine.

  The Last Woman I Loved

  The last woman I loved

  was silken-smooth.

  No hard edges to

  body or disposition.

  A hesitant way

  of lifting her face

  into a kiss,

  surprised by herself.

  She wrote a letter,

  neatly-written pages,

  about one of my

  poems, what it meant to her.

  You burnt the only poem

  I ever gave you.

  The last woman I loved

  would never have understood

  what it is in you that arrows

  like light across a lake

  to the target I’ve become

  beside night waters.

  Specifically

  Beyond a certain point

  distance is a fact and not a measure.

  It hardly matters whether I am

  five or seven thousand miles away

  or whether it is five o’clock

  or six where you are.

  In any case, I do know,

  and the above is abstraction,

  a way to begin a poem

  which is not about time zones

  or distance, but a memory.

  Specifically,

  the morning you flew to Toronto

  and knocked without

  warning at my door.

  Specifically,

  the moment I saw,

  going downstairs,

  who wanted to come in.

  Specifically,

  the look in your eyes

  as I came down:

  apprehension and desire,

  remembered into now

  because I knew then,

  on the stairs,

  that it was a mirror.

  A Narrow Escape

  Because he was such as could spend

  a whole night, centuries from sleep,

  crafting a poem to reclaim the afternoon

  when they first met, she fell in love with him.

  But when he actually did so,

  and, piling sin upon sin,

  showed her the result,

  in a pure rage of possessiveness

  she burst into angry tears, crying:

  ‘How could I not have seen

  how destructive you are?’

  Out of love with him, she will

  congratulate herself on a narrow escape,

  and for her it will have been. She could

  never have lain secure in a love

  that allows him to leave her bed

  in deep night for a hard desk

  where, half-asleep, he scribbles fiercely

  in a shaming infidelity, searching

  for a word to give her eyes, a voice

  for her voice, while she wakes

  alone, and calls him to her, and

  he does not come.

  In His Arms

  In his arms

  you may come to know

  the peace I never gave you.

  We never had

  any kind of gentleness.

  Every union

  made a cauldron

  of the night.

  In his arms

  you may be healed.

  I scalded you.

  You burnt

  the lines I gave your name.

  How could we

  hold together? In his arms

  you may be cooled

  into love. I can

  wish that for you,

  tracing, at this distance,

  the place on my shoulder

  where your nails

  marked me one night.

  On his arms

  are there such scars

  as this one,

  along which

  my finger follows

  the branding,

  ash years ago, of yours?

  Another Country

  All the leaves
that are going to fall

  have fallen. Midwinter snows

  cover us. At night the cold

  is intransigent and absolute.

  We dream, in beds too far apart

  for the assuaging of desire.

  My dream is of the world as whole,

  made so by you, spaces closed,

  like my eyes, by your hands.

  We will make love, sleep

  in each other’s arms,

  wake, live, sleep

  at the heart of things.

  The small gestures we have made

  foretell the ones we will bestow.

  I give you what is in me

  to offer, you give me everything.

  Avalon

  ‘But we both knew this long ago.’

  We did. The blood has ways.

  Veins and arteries

  communicate beneath the skin

  (though I have been so careful

  not to touch, you not to touch).

  Still, following your eyes

  away into the grass,

  the question in our hesitation

  is like a needle

  in this downtown park,

  or like sorrow

  threaded (like a needle)

  through desire:

  what begins with us?

  Among the babies and the derelicts,

  mid-afternoon, a Wednesday,

  caught in the rush of things,

  leaves racing each other

  to be green, you are

  with me in a stillness,

  arms around your legs,

  chin on your knees,

  but eyes on me again

  and knowing, long ago,

  what I knew long ago.

  The young sun slants

  from behind me,

  finds your hair.

  I watch you make shadows

  with your hands: cool traceries,

  places to hide, promises.

  In this light we lay claim

  to each other. You will be

  here beside me on the grass

  until the sun goes down in Avalon.

  Too Far

  Summer haze, radios

  beside the swimming pool

  sing desire, announce far wars.

  Drifting in a white noon light

  I am aware of your body

  beside me, imprinted

  on the screen of my eyelids.

  When I open them

  it is to see you actually

  here, the heat-shimmered trees

  behind you, beyond the pool,

  green as desire.

  Too far, the distance

  we’d have to cross.

  For summer, for this life.