Read The Weather Wheel Online

Authors: Mimi Khalvati

The Weather Wheel

BOOK: The Weather Wheel
2.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

MIMI KHALVATI

The Weather Wheel

Grateful thanks are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems, or earlier versions of them, have appeared:

 

Acumen, Ariadne’s Thread, Artemis, Cimarron Review
(USA),
Genius Floored: Alphabet of Days
(Soaring Penguin Press, 2012),
Genius Floored: Uncurtained Window
(Soaring Penguin Press, 2013),
Her Wings of Glass
(Second Light Publications, 2014),
London Magazine, Magma, New Humanist, Not Only the Dark
(Categorical Books, 2011),
PN Review, POEM, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art
(
www.taosjournalofpoetry.com
),
The Book of Love and Loss
(Belgrave Press, Bath, 2014),
The Critical Muslim, The Editor: An Anthology for Patricia Oxley
(Rockingham Press, 2011),
The Forward Book of Poetry 2013, The Long Poem Magazine, The North, The Rialto, Tokens for the Foundlings
(Seren, 2012),
Urthona
.

 

‘Model for a Timeless Garden’ was commissioned by the Southbank Centre and written in response to Olafur Eliasson’s eponymous light installation exhibited at the
Light Show
, Hayward Gallery, 2013.

 

‘Ghazal: In Silence’ appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ website, Poem-a-Day.

 

Warm thanks to Peter and Ann Sansom for publishing
Earthshine
(Smith/Doorstop Books, 2013), a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. All the pamphlet poems are reproduced here.

 

I would also like to thank Martin Parker at Silbercow for designing the cover image, Alfred Corn, Jane Duran, Marilyn Hacker and Aamer Hussein for their generosity in reading and responding to the manuscript, and, in particular, Michael Schmidt and Helen Tookey for their invaluable editing.

Contents
  1. Title Page
  2. Acknowledgements
  3. I Earthshine
  4. House Mouse
  5. Madame Berthe’s Mouse Lemur
  6. Sun Sparrow
  7. Knifefish
  8. Snail
  9. Sciurus Carolinensis
  10. The Conservatory
  11. The Little Gloster
  12. Microchiroptera
  13. The Landing Stage
  14. Earthshine
  15. Prunus Avium
  16. II Under the Vine
  17. Under the Vine
  18. Starlight
  19. Angels
  20. Orchard
  21. What it Was
  22. Marrakesh I
  23. Marrakesh II
  24. Marrakesh III
  25. Marrakesh IV
  26. Marrakesh V
  27. Marrakesh VI
  28. Le Café Marocain
  29. III The Soul Travels on Horseback
  30. New Year’s Eve
  31. The Pear Tree
  32. Rain Stories
  33. Aunt Moon
  34. Statham Grove Surgery
  35. The Wardrobe
  36. Fog
  37. Snow is
  38. The Blanket
  39. The Swarm
  40. Model for a Timeless Garden
  41. The Soul Travels on Horseback
  42. IV Tears
  43. The Overmind
  44. Reading the Saturday Guardian
  45. Midsummer Solstice
  46. Picking Raspberries with Mowgli
  47. Sniff
  48. Drawing Bea
  49. Nocturne
  50. The Waves
  51. Similes
  52. Cherries and Grapes
  53. Kusa-Hibari
  54. Tears
  55. V Her Anniversary
  56. The Goat
  57. On the Occasion of his 150th Anniversary
  58. In Search of the Animals
  59. Martina’s Radiance
  60. Mehregan
  61. Sun in the Window
  62. Bringing Down the Stars
  63. The Cloud Sarcophagus
  64. The Doe
  65. Abney Park Cemetery
  66. Migration
  67. Her Anniversary
  68. VI The Avenue
  69. Granadilla de Abona I
  70. Granadilla de Abona II
  71. Granadilla de Abona III
  72. Granadilla de Abona IV
  73. Granadilla de Abona V
  74. Granadilla de Abona VI
  75. Granadilla de Abona VII
  76. Plaza de los Remedios
  77. The Wheelhouse
  78. Finca El Tejado
  79. The Avenue
  80. Ghazal: In Silence
  81. Notes
  82. About the Author
  83. Also by Mimi Khalvati from Carcanet Press
  84. Copyright

Even the mist was daffodil yellow in the morning sun,

a slant of April sun that glowed on my banana skin.

And in the shadow of my arm a mouse lay, white belly up

like a lemur sunbathing. Begging she was, paws curled,

miniature paws like nail clippings, hind legs crossed

in a rather elegant fashion, tail a lollipop stick.

Pricked on her shadow, her ear and fur stood sharp as grass

but her real ear was soft, thin, pliable, faint as a sweetpea petal

and her shut eye a tiny arc like the hilum of a broad bean.

Yesterday she was plump. Today she’s thin. Sit her up, she’ll sit.

You can see how Lennie would have ‘broke’ his, petting it –

mine weighs no more than a hairball, nestling in my palm

as though it were wood pulp, crawlspace, a ‘wee-bit housie’

and she, the pup, the living thing. The baby look’s still on her.

And the depth of her sleep. I tuck her into the finger

of my banana skin – a ferryboat to carry her over the Styx.

We should have been lemurs, lowering our metabolism

to suit, going into torpor in the cool dry winter months

to save on water and energy. We too should have sailed

on a raft of matted leaves out of poor Africa, out to Madagascar

into a forest of mangrove and thorn scrub, feeding off gum,

honeydew larvae, bedding down in tree holes
en famille.

The very smallest of us, the veriest Tom Thumb, the most

minute pygmy,
tsitsidy, mausmaki
, itsy bitsy portmanteau,

little living furry torch, eyes two headlamp luminaries, front

a bib of chamois, tip to tail – and mostly tail – barely as long

as the line I write in, despite illegal logging, slash and burn,

would survive longer than many folk, especially in captivity.

Only the barn owl, goshawk, to watch for in the dark – raptors

with their own big beauty. But Madame Berthe's Mouse Lemur

is caught in the act – a chameleon clasped in her hands,

a geisha lowering her fan: the smallest primate on our planet.

Sun, like a sparrow in the house, seeks dustgrounds

small as a handkerchief to play in. Sun sparrow, house sparrow,

I give you landing strips of dust on wood, runways

between photo frames, wood grain and wood knot roses,

nests of cane and cloth for you to steal, netherlands I never clean

for you to bathe in. Here’s a dust bath, look, under the bed,

large enough for you and all your family. Why, even

the numbered hairs of my head, fallen, have lined a nest,

innumerable nests and silver they are, the better for you

to shine in. Come, sun, roost. And here is my skin. Warm it.

Sun sparrow, didn’t Sappho herself have sparrows,

fair fleet sparrows, draw Aphrodite’s chariot to wing her plea?

I ask no such thing. But I see you land, on wood, on wall,

take flight again and you who have your own warmth,

who need no streetlight, neon sign to roost in – why flee?

Be sociable, stay awhile on my flaking sill, hop right in.

Lit, lit, lit, lit are the estates at dawn:

honeycomb stairwells, corridors, landing lights,

flare paths for passengers flying home.

Three jets like electric fish streak the sky with rose.

Black ghost, ghost knifefish, how many days

since you went abroad, lurking in your murky pools,

locating dawn by sonar, by electric fields alone?

To image your world in darkness – driftwood

casting distortion shadows – no matter how weak

your receptor organ, faint its discharge, barely a volt,

through tail-bend, waveform, you fire, you feel,

sensing lightning, earthquake, your own kind

turning their dimmer switch up and down,

for this is how you talk. Old Aba Aba, grandpa,

with your one room lit at a time, feeling for walls,

navigating as surely as in the brightest, highest dawn!

Close the trapdoor. Let no light in. No,

not the luminous apricot cloud or whale cloud,

fat peach cloud or the isthmus of blue,

the sky lanes in between. Close the chink.

Sea slug, land snail, one head and one foot,

draw the one foot in. You are all head now,

helmet, foetus and dome, oceans under,

trapdoor sealed. Safe, safe, safe.

Snail-deep, slug-dark, shu-shu-shush.

Waves roll in. But here you are landed,

relic on the sand. The moon has carried you

on his back but what do you know of love?

Its arrow, smear of silk. And of hatred?

Salt, drawing your love juice into its grains,

giving you age, old age and its snail-slow shrivelling.

Be lazy, snail, be slow. Savour every inch.

Sun rivers on glass, threatens to mount, blaze

into my eyeline so that, heat-struck, I headlong

down to hump squirrelled in the shade below, leaves

moving as I move, as grass moves with the snake.

I am the grey. Born helpless, blind and deaf.

My mother lays me across her forepaws, fetches me

out of a cave, weans me once my teeth appear.

Sciurus
names only my
skia
, shadow,
oura
, tail.

I displace the red. Acorn-bred, carrier of the pox,

I infect it with lesions, ulcers, scabs, weeping crusts,

it shivers, shivers,
skia
,
oura
, and then it’s dead.

I mean no harm. I’m no image seared on your brain

only seen side on, tail up, ears tufted like conifer spurs;

no nutkin on a branch, jug on a wall, graphic loop,

no ampersand between presentiment and trace.

Skia
,
oura
, I flicker on the walls of the cave.

If you keep two blinds down and one blind up

and sit under the one that’s up under the skylight

and the Sunday morning rain, you create –

at absolutely no expense – the kind of conservatory

you’ve always wanted but without the wicker

and kelims, the view onto the dripping garden

and the cat, all soaking, hidden under a hedge.

You are elevated instead. You are a bird in a nest.

Rick as a small boy sold birds for pocket money.

He made his own trap out of a wire washing basket,

a stick, some fishing line, some bread, catching

sparrows, dunnocks and, if he was lucky, a finch,

before progressing to proper trap cages with a call bird

that would sing and attract more birds he’d extricate,

sell, then start over again. Now he’s a mouse-catcher

with no pension. ‘You’re not illegible’, he said they said.

BOOK: The Weather Wheel
2.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Mystic Hearts by Cait Jarrod
El único testigo by Jude Watson
Consent by Lasseter, Eric
I Married a Communist by Philip Roth
Limitations by Scott Turow
The Substitute by Denise Grover Swank
Never Another You by LeeAnn Whitaker