The Weather Wheel (3 page)

To see him at his easel,
H. Matisse par lui-même
, black hat,

tailcoat, beard, glasses, on a camp stool facing a marabout

in pen and ink is to feel a small breeze coming off the pages.

A horseman, acanthus, basket of oranges, a smoker at the window,

another, another, the medina, the portal of the Casbah mosque,

Seated Moroccan, Standing Moroccan, a calla lily and bindweed,

riffle like water through my palms while I sit surrounded,

three floors up, by the same raised, lowered, false perspectives.

But Arcadia is not something to project into deep space

but onto the surface of memory.
Ah! que le monde est grand

à la clarté des lampes! Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!

In Jemaa El Fna, the lanterns are lit. They congregate like stars,

tin palaces of fire and flame, a sultanate of miniature cities.

But at cruising altitude, above streaks of indigo and purple clouds,

a blood continent broods on black estuaries, archipelagos, reefs,

for black is the simplifying force of memory. It is a form of elegy.

‘These recumbent figures, all in the same gray nuance,

such a soothing gray, whose faces are represented by

a yellow-ocher oval, you know that they were not always

painted like that. Look! At the top, the man on the left,

he was red! The other, next to him, was blue; the other

was yellow. Their faces had lines, eyes, a mouth.

The one at the top smoked a pipe… The slippers, the pipe,

the lines of the face, the varied color of the burnooses,

why have they all melted away?’
C’est que je vais

vers mon sentiment; vers l’extase… et puis, j’y trouve le calme.

J’ai mon bol de poissons et ma fleur rose. C’est ce qui m’avait frappé!

ces grands diables qui restent des heures, contemplatifs, devant

une fleur et des poissons rouges. Eh bien! Si je les fais rouges,

ce vermillon va rendre ma fleur violette! Alors? je la veux rose,

ma fleur! autrement elle n’est plus! Au lieu que mes poissons,

ils pourraient être jaunes, cela ne me fait rien: ils seront jaunes!

The floral motif is the initial cell from which the pattern

spreads to the edges of the cloth, canvas, the material world

which is drained of meaning and hierarchy. In its place

the underlying void, aerated, animated, expands like gas

until cloth, rug, garden, agave, succulents, yukka, cacti

and sky-high bamboo forest revert to dreamlike pentimenti.

Jemaa El Fna, once a bus station, has been recognised as

a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity

but Berber water-sellers, snake-charmers, storytellers, scribes,

shoeblacks, tooth-pullers, mendicants, fortune-tellers, masseurs,

are more than oral, intangible, in a plaza where no building

should rise higher than a palm tree. Near the Koutoubia,

the booksellers’ mosque, Lalla Zohra, the children’s saint,

entombed in a castellated, icing-white cube, makes her escape

and visits us regularly. A woman by day, a dove by night,

she sits against the skyline silently, as if transfixed by chanting.

More megaphone than bird, his whole body pulsing,

the Sahari House Bunting, stringing himself along

the riad’s parapet, repeats himself ad infinitum

with a second’s pause to catch breath. In that pause,

his mate replies but with a different call, a yes, maybe,

or occasionally interrupts without disturbing his rhythm.

On his ledge, he rotates to the north, south, east, west,

calling out to the four corners of Marrakesh while she,

catching the sun in flight, fans this way and that before

flitting back to her perch. Now he’s on the corner outpost

of his sentry walk, faithfully plugging away and finally

stunned into silence as the braying starts – a most marvellous

cacophony of muezzins from Ben Youssef, Sidi Ishak,

Mouassine, Ben Salah, Koutoubia, Berrima, crowning noon

until, with a lone
Allahu Akba-a-r
, the last muezzin’s
adhan
,

melting distance into song and song into the distance, dies away.

This is the soul. In aqua and gold.

It rhymes with the body as burquas do,

as birdsong with arches, nine to a wall.

The goldfish are spoonfuls of honey,

spoonfuls that dissolve in the bowl.

Glass is the ground of contemplation,

this and a flower, the three-pronged rose.

The gold of men's calves, feet, hands

– lower limbs the body in broadcloth

set loose as it burned off in smoke –

was the first idea, as the soul is, before

the image, the afterthought was formed.

This is the last we shall see of the fathers

in grey burnooses, meadowsweet turbans,

faceless in ovals, forgetful in youth:

this ore, this residue in the alchemical bowl.

Night is a rush of noise, an Indian hilltown train

steaming up gradients through Himalayan tunnels,

morning the destination, quiet as a mountain top

after the snow has melted, celebrants have left:

a Shimla of the mind, its local aspirations – work,

money, kinship, health; a time to think things over,

let them settle in the recesses of imagination.

They'll raise their heads of their own accord, lean

out of carriages to wave. For now is the time

of watering the splendid platform displays, of

gathering at The Ridge, the Scandal Point in the mall,

fingering oak and rosewood souvenirs. In Shimla,

mashkis will be carrying goatskin bags of water,

sluicing down the tarmac while I, at the last

hill station of the year, will bring the silence in,

fold it like a three-flower Kullu shawl on my table.

And when there’s no poetry in it, the hour, the sky,

only cumulus and the first faint ossicles of rain

pattering on glass like a bone bundle thrown

for a shaman to divine, when no answer comes,

faith gives up, brain slackens, skin sloughs off

like a turtle shedding old scutes from its shell,

when the same dread incubus squats on the heart,

hiding a breathing hole on the top of his head

for all breath, desire, have long fled his mouth,

when friends disappear – and were they friends? –

and your head on its single stem weighed down

heavy as a baby pear tree not with pome or pear

but with time’s three globes, what then,

little pear tree, bletted by frost? A rootstock

has dwarfed you the better to bear but quince,

pear, whose bridal kiss will you perfume now?

Huddling under an umbrella like two old lovers

arm in arm under the pouring rain, we took up

where we had left off, catching up on the years,

their stories common knowledge now – rain

audible and visible. (Affection returned though

before we share such rain it will be years again.)

But mine at home, and only mine, is secretive,

soundless and so fine, it’s only against darker leaves

it reveals itself. Winter, it tells me, means

‘the time of water’; raindrops, it shows me,

are spheres and only tear-shaped when they fall –

though in Oaxaca the Church of Santa Teresita

had a glorious rain of roses; more instances,

it gives me, from its own backstory as in –

a r. of kisses, 1893, of calm moonbeams, 1821,

melody, 1820, frogs, 1593, of sparks, tears, 1541.

Aunt Moon, Old Glamour Moon in a haze of smoke

puffing behind your folding screen, Old Barren Moon

with your round pig belly, what lies, what lies!

I love you for the lies you’ve told! Lies with a belly

of milk, lies to call the children in, gather them

round your mirror fogged, Old Moon, with death.

No lying now, is there? No creeping round the houses,

sly Jokester Moon with your pearly teeth, implants

that went wrong, aren’t they? One look at the truth

and you vanish. O what a clear clear sky, clear as day!

But I saw you, Moon, in the doorway. Spliced in two

as the glass revolved, in purdah with your back turned.

Who were you whispering to, Aunt Moon? No one,

was there? No one ever to lisp to, bribe, stab in the back,

no one to avenge. No, the best lies are told with a bevy

of innocent stars in your eyes, not in a revolution’s doorway.

Seen in disbelief through fug in the workmen’s caff

with its canisters of snow, in the panoramic distance

of Clissold Park wearing its hood of grey wool, chef’s hat

in the snow, behind a fallen tree trunk languid as a nude,

a human hare, grey on grey, white gloves, white hind paws,

is shadowboxing while their trainer, red on grey, holds up

focus mitts for a second sparring jackrabbit, black on grey,

like the hare on the moon. Amber eyes glide down the road;

horse chestnuts waltz in whalebone, braceletted with crows;

my cappuccino breathes out smoke. Ruled on park railings,

black is a marriage of scissors and snow. But in Statham Grove,

among red pillar-box hills, gold corridor woods, we turn into

house plants, umbrella plants, gum trees, rubber leaf hands

still charged with snow, deaf to a story a young dragon tree

hears, enthralled. Dr West wears a bright red stethoscope.

Homeward bound, we leave footprints in a black leaf fall.

How secluded we are under a sun we should be out in.

Cupboarded in shadow, one foot in twilight, we tilt.

Childhood snuffs its master light, light we need to love

and be loved by, to write, to read. Else all is dusk,

dusk in the heart, in all our finer feelings. Had I

a wardrobe of my mother’s furs, mink, fox, Persian lamb,

how my heart would sink. I’d slide my fingers along the rail,

feel the carcass weight of coats, shoulders zipped in plastic,

how the metal hook of the hanger sticks, see the bridge,

German bridge, where I wore my own grey astrakhan,

a yellow patch of impetigo on my chin. A dirty disease.

From masturbation, unclean hands, some kind of lonely shit.

It has to be foetal or under three days old, a Karakul lamb,

barely able to stand on the kill floor where dozens more

are bleating, or its pelt will lose colour, curl, lustre,

and its meat is simply tossed, too meagre even to eat.

World is headless, cut off at the waist and we, bundled,

seeing snowflakes only as they pass across a face,

we earth dwellers who know heaven’s a cloud, a bank,

an upperwhere, otherwhere, whose cloud deck homes

lure our spirits with lights in the fog, paraffin stoves,

our Bethlehems, our backyards become Bethlehems,

we whose hearts race the blinder we grow, we moles,

we dirt-tossers, we mouldywarps with no eyes or ears

with a mouth at one end, anus at the other, we pipes,

we cylinders, who have stockpiled our subterranean hell,

our mole runs, underground galleries, larders for a clew

of earthworms, we labour of moles with paws like rakes –

what have we left but these hands now, we boars, we sows

with four limbs, one nose, a body plan and a taupe pelt?

World is headless and we, who have only touch and smell,

must touch and smell gas, smoke bombs, blood meal, bait.

Snow is a rubbing of sorts, a wax heelball on ground,

an impress of ribs – exoskeletons in high and low relief.

Each snowflake is witness to the cloud-womb that formed it,

how wet, how warm, the union of crystals, how powdery.

Trapped in firn, air will evidence ash from Krakatoa,

deposits from lead smelters, pollen and greenhouse gases.

Snow is adjectival. On foliage particularly, discriminates

between the feathery and lobed, the linear and pointilliste.

In itself is silent, but on contact, creaks. Acquires an air

of sanctity in repose but in action earns oaths and profanities.

Snow is a friend to children, those who have scarves, mittens,

snowboards and wooden sledges. To others, it is the devil’s own,

akin to the djinn who frequent sinkholes, wherever mud rejoices.

To the children housed in sheep sheds, chicken coops, tents,

dressed in cut-up blankets, seeing things that aren’t there in forests,

snow is the devil they know. Better him than the live bombing.