Ragged Claws

Could I love you,
if I had no memory
of breathing skin,
of weight, or time, or matter?

(Close to counting
creases in the sheet
that covers way too much of you)

Perfect as the instinct
and the courage
of the painter’s first
and lasting stroke;

(Wide awake now,
caught by morning lust
and light, I watch)

silent as the forest,
in between the lightning
and the first few swollen drops
of rain to hit the upper leaves:

(I do not touch you, yet
I feel each particle of dust,
caught in fever flight)

Could I love you,
if I had no eyes
to feast upon your flesh,
no words to call you beautiful?

Our cells are dying faster
than we breathe.
It takes less than a decade
to replace each bit of then
with bits of some time later.

We are impermanence personified
and yet we love stability.
We feel the moments we are in
to be the moulds that keep the past
and hold the future.

We dig up pots and arrow heads
and take each artefact,
each time-worn, broken relic,
each proof that we are mostly ghost,
as evidence of matter.

A horse is a horse
the moment it’s born.
So are tulips, microbes, stones.

Only humans are not born
to what we may become;
we are not manifest or destined.

Each of us must run
a private, evolutionary course,
before we stop to be mere animated matter -

and some of us will never learn.

A horse is a horse
the moment it’s born;
its grace its destination,

while we must learn to play the part,
to navigate between the monstrous,
near neutrality of evil

and the total, shocked embrace
of empathy that tells us each
of all these teeming billions

is the centre of a universe.

“We open our eyes and stare at the coiling darkness,
And enter our dreams again.”
.                                             (Conrad Aiken)

The wooden handrail on the stairs,
first used by your great-grandparents,
shines like a mirror that accepts
but won’t reflect the lives of
those who went before and those
who’ll be here after we are gone.

The portraits on the bedroom walls,
now solemnly dressed in yellows and browns,
are like our crumpled morning sheets,
our kisses and our laughter:
A history of loss and light,
caught in the falling of leaves.

“Supper on a tray in the drawing-room
and nothing said.”
.                            (Selima Hill)

Another failed evening,
a dinner gone cold
over stale conversation

and on my way home now,
safe in the belly
of city and metro,

I think of the short time
we thought we could be
love’s fierce ambassadors -

and how we have ended,
apart but still bound
by dreams of if-only-yous.

At the back of a chain
of empty compartments,
I think that it’s true

that I never quite learnt
how to stand clear
of the closing doors.

One should blare out the despised original version
.                                                             stuck in one’s heart:
“I love being alone!
.                             I love being alone!”
And then whisper the translation:
.                                                   a defenceless “Don’t go!”
.                                                                         (Yevgeny Yevtushenko)

So, we’re walking a bit faster now
we’ve crossed Charles Bridge.
The streets on this side of the river are
almost free of tourists, cabs and vendors, and

I’m telling you about this Spanish village
I once saw: A ghost town, in the mountains,
very close to France,
where goats and crawling bushes
fought a stubborn war, amidst the ghosts
of broken plates and rusted pots and pans,
out in the yards, where the seasons’
only other crops were crumbling walls,
and broken glass, and rotted piles of wood, and

you turn around. Your hand is almost white,
against your long, dark hair.
“Did you see that poor woman?” you half whisper,
half demand to know, and

yes, I did, and that was why I tried
to take us to that Spanish town,
its gentle cast of goats and ghosts,
where there are no beggars holding children,
with arms as thin and eyes as wide
as all the hunger, all the wars
that ravished Europe, from that oldest bullish rape
to the fires that rained on Sarajevo
and the hidden graves of Bosnia, and

all that I can do is hold you till your body
has stopped shaking, and tell you that I love you,
and stroke your hair, and take your hand,
and safely lead us home again.

“The skeletons of a thousand butterflies
sleep in my enclosure.”
.                              (Federico García Lorca)

Fire thinks that Shadow dances
like a supplicant.

Fire doesn’t know that when its flames
have gone to sleep,

Shadow fills a sky,
draped with burning diamonds.

“You know, the moon is just a violin
that longs to be repaired.”
.                                      (Rachel Manley)

I close my eyes and I see lightning
running down my veins and hear
the drums of thunder gather in my wrists.

The outside world is as small
as the hand that caresses your hair
and notes the soft fall and rise of your breasts.

I close my eyes and everything but
the smell of our lust and the sound of our breath,
the whisper of flesh on fresh sheets is unmade,

like the moon is undone by the rooster’s rise
and the land and the sea are conquered in turn
by the same kind of tides that bind our flesh

and carry us out,
like one fever foam wave,
to a place that no-one can enter alone.

“I lift my hands to you. I kneel toward my heart. I have no other home.”
.                                                                                            (Leonard Cohen)

In Reims, I stood within the silence
of the gathering dusk,
inside the Notre Dame cathedral:
A speck of dust, forever caught
in fading bruises of soft light
that fell from Chagall’s
stained glass windows…

I watched the sky above the island
bleed in angry blue red streaks
and saw the palms that guard the beach
shivering like a flight of doves
that felt the shadow of the hawk,
just before the night was torn
by lightning’s hungry talons…

yet neither art nor nature can compete
with these stilled memories of you:
Your hair that moves under my breath,
while you are fast asleep;
your naked skin, so warm and soft,
yet strong enough to rise and bear
the storm of my awakened hopes and longings.

“And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.”
.                    (Ted Hughes)

Down by the river,
where we stopped
to greet the sleeping swans,

bats twinkle darkly,
on and off,
between the trees,

like hesitant and twisted
twins of stately blinking,
distant stars.

(I look at you.
You smile - and all
that I can think is,

Marry me.
My love,
please marry me:

My doubts, my fears
and all those years
I lived without you.

Marry me.
My love,
please marry me:

My fierce and lonely pride,
the places where I used to hide
before I knew you.)

The swans and trees still sleep,
the bats move like those trembling flecks
on an old movie screen,

where lovers kiss on a deserted bridge
and hold on to each other,
while the credits roll.

“Our tribe’s renewing faith and pride:
Love overgrows a rock as blood outbreeds it.”
.                                                                       (Eric Roach)

This is the song
our fathers taught us.
These are the skin and bones
our mothers carried as a tune:

Raise your hand
and you can block the light
that has been travelling so far,
to come and join us.

They came and burnt our maize
and left us blackened stones
we gathered from the fields,
to seed our graveyards:

Raise your hand
and you can block the light
that has been travelling
for all these years to cover us.

“Leave to dogs and the angels
the music that lies beyond hearing.”
.                                                   (Jane Hirshfield)

‘Stella by Starlight’
Chet Baker live in Tokyo.

So strange to listen here,
alone, to something

once recorded live, so
long ago and far away,

while I write to you,
and while I wait

for the kettle to boil,
and for my thoughts

to gather and to settle
on this page –

thinking of you
and knowing that

you’re real: Real
but also far away,

as far as that trumpet,
recorded in long dead time.

‘Stella by Starlight’
Still live in Tokyo.

“This haunted heart that doesn’t fit
My language or the clothes I wear”
.                                                  (Léon Laleau)

I’d never noticed the dark rust rattle
of our island bus. How alien also,
now we were leaving, its dark
metallic cough, the black tar smoke.

Before, it was the dusky smell of goats
and restless chickens, the raw
perfume of hand-rolled cigarettes,
the cloying scent of jack fruit and ground cloves.

The short ride to the harbour, though
familiar, now became as ominous
as dreams that promise strange new
shadows, chasing half-remembered fears.

On board, I watched you lean into the night,
like smoke that lingers for a while,
after the fire has shed its last few
curled up leaves of broken colours -

and after all these years I still don’t know
why, in that isolating moment of dull grief,
I then could somehow, almost see
those bright, long ribboned rows of joyful pilgrims

move deep into the forest, where
the old and weathered, lichened stone
of temple Gods was waiting for frail
human hands to cover it with flowers.

“Those you planted as children, ah, those trees
are long since too heavy for you to bear.”
.                                                             (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Softly, slowly leaking time:

Soft as rain – these
memories are soft as rain,
now falling on old statues
in a long abandoned park.

Here’s a general and there
a king of some old country
no-one really knows
what happened to.

Memories – of summer evenings,
walking past young mothers and
their prams, the barking dogs and
children running after ice-cream vans.

Soft as rain: These shadows
falling on old stone and, like
the ragged edges of the ocean
swallow up the shore, now

softly, slowly eating time.

“Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
.                                                                  (T.S. Eliot)

In love and worship the mundane
becomes possessed by symbol.
The fruits of wheat and vine
translate into the flesh and blood
of Saviours -

as this small bit of cloth you left
beside your plate,
stained with chicken juice
and traces of your lipstick,
now becomes a holy relic;

something held and touched by you,
by love: A shred of dream,
lost to the fabric of the night,
that I can see and smell and taste,
while I remember.

“I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
.                                                                                 (Pablo Neruda)

Is it a kindness that I still
can hear your voice;
your whispers drawing maps
our flesh must follow?

That I, eyes closed,
can see your fingers tightening,
your back now sharply rising
like a victory arch?

That I, so far away,
can smell the salty,
swollen, opening furnace
where my tongue must seek your core?

That I, alone again for now,
can taste your breath,
your sweat and come,
as if these lines could fasten us to our desire?

“God, or someone, had parted the sea, and who were we
to say we weren’t going to walk through it?”
.                                                                   (Moniza Alvi)

I have no words for this:

The way we climbed this stack of stone -
how sun and shadow chased each other
and the old tar road that had carried us
from the city to your cottage and now here
lay far below us: Black and sluggish,
like the carelessly abandoned skin
of a long dead snake.

I have no words for this:

How silent it was – how sharply
we could see the few surrounding villages,
the meadows and the woods,
the soft and subtle rise and fall
of all the hills around us: And
how unimportant everything
beyond the distance of your touch.

I have no words for this, my love.

“You go your way
I’ll go your way too”
.                               (Leonard Cohen)

I watch you take the scissors
to the browning ends of the leaves
on the old potted plant
that hangs from the ceiling.

You bring a perfect sense of concentration
to all the things you do:

From pouring out the tea
into your grandmother’s old cups,
to spreading honey on your toast
and making love to me.

I love that frown of concentration,
strangely softening your face,

as much as that half shy,
half firework, sudden smile,
each time you catch me
watching you again.

“In the long willow branches, the dark cypress,
my own ghost hides, stares out at me,”
.                                                               (Moniza Alvi)

It’s a long fall,

in the darkness, leaking from
the time between each
ringing of the bells,

to where the eyes seek out
the worlds beyond the cracked map,
painted on the ceiling:

A long way back to you, my love.

“I have not become the heron,
leaving my body on the shore,”
.                                                (Leonard Cohen)

The herbs are doing well,
on my small balcony.

It’s raining now,
after a week of sun,

when I had to water them,
each day.

I don’t know why I’m
writing this to you -

maybe I am homesick.
Maybe, like those herbs,

I long for rain.