Tristimania (23 page)

One in Five

One in five in this madness

Go and bloody do it: OD, knives or hanging.

But maybe the statistics count it wrong:

It's not one in five people

But one in five moments

One in five devastations

Will wipe you out.

One in five memories

Will explode you.

One in five stalkers

Will catch you.

Maybe everyone can stay with the living four

If they counted different:

Four hours bearable

Four friends reliable

Four hillsides runnable

Four pianos playable

Four poems writable

Not one life unwritten.

Betrayal

Our dreams betray us

To ourselves,

A fraternity of the unconscious

In the corridors of waking.

Spirals

The quixotic spirals of galaxies call me

Towards everything that shines,

Lightning electrifying the mosaic of the stars.

Night sky the first chiaroscuro,

Dazzling distance:

How light defies the dark

Even if the dark was dictated

Long ago,

Light strikes back,

Thousands of years later.

All my moons are spinning out of true

In galaxies of the human mind

Compelled to mirror the real.

With the moons of Jupiter, by Jove,

I can only see in silver and gold,

The spinning light

Where moons both wax and wane.

Wax itself can wane, Icarus,

You and I know, but not yet,

Let me stay here while

The waning earth

Waiting through winter

Wants candlewax, matches, flame,

Until it gets a spring in its step.

But the wax in my psyche is melting,

My mind can't hold itself,

Turning frantic in its circling

The dial of twelve mad hours without words

Until even Mercury knows his day will pass,

Mercredi, even this Wednesday,

And tomorrow he must play his other part, and guide

Me to a hammock of silver silk,

Psyche spun out and back to the cocoon

Of earth.

Essay

I try it once or twice.

Try it with all the scissors I've used

For the literal cut and paste

Editing thousands of paper strips,

Sharpened text on my bedroom floors

For the last twenty years,

Scissors turned happily book-blunt,

Content on the shelves,

The right kind of essays,

The forays of the human mind

Exploring mountains, Montaigne onwards.

This is a trial of a different kind.

I'm trying it out with a Stanley knife,

The wrong kind of sharp,

Implorer not explorer,

A literal essay

Best edited round

Into metaphor.

Because It Snowed on January 18th

A little bird died in the night

Instead of me.

The snowfall which cancelled my voice of reason

And put the cat's-paw in my head

Froze the treecreeper's mind

To reckless and suicidal behaviour

Dropping like a plumb line to the snow

Inviting the cat

Only too happy to accept.

I've shut the cat into the kitchen

With the still bird and the still

Fluttering knife.

Nature's easy, psyche not,

Being both its own

Predator and prey.

Blackbirds

(for Vic)

Blackbirds in London's January pouring their real songs

Into the artificial dawn,

Looking for the trees of Arden

With all their ardent hearts,

Burning from within,

Thinking if they could sing

With more heart, more song,

Then the sun will rise.

Though it is night for hours yet

They sing and burn

And burn and sing

In the false-fire neon

Until the real sun rises

And they burn out into day:

The price of streetlights

Paid in song.

Their hope is a heartbreaking faith

In fake stumps parked

Along pavements which never lead

To the forests, which know no roots

In Arden's earthed, enduring language

Where the birds trust the root-truths of trees

Where, when the real dawn breaks,

It trysts with their unbroken song.

In Reverse

It's the daylight I can't stand.

I can see the dark circles under my eyes,

Reverse moons stitched black

On to the sky of my white face.

By day my hands are purposeless,

Ambling between keyboards, piano and type,

With nothing to play for on either:

By night my fingers feel quick and light.

Hours of daytime stall cold on the floor,

Useless as broken pressure-cookers,

But the night hours are warm and fine

As suns of midsummer.

Night thoughts are lit from the inside,

Candling the living work

Of the kindest poets who revealed most truly

World-mind turned inside out.

Their work is awake, long after they've gone,

Awake and speaking in my night

When – with relief – no one else is here

To mirror to me all that I am not.

One Second

In the distant past

Ten tidy minutes ago,

Checking their watches

They started the car

Not knowing how

In prehistory

Two sad hours ago,

Had I hugged my nephews

One second longer,

I would have come punctual

To the double collision

Of geological time and now

The road punctuated by significance

The failure to read the stop sign

My mind wrecked and reckless

So when I drove across the path

Of their oncoming car

At the fatal crossroad

We were all one bare second away

From something that had already happened.

‘The Eye Begins to See'

(see Rilke, ‘In a Dark Time')

Poems depend on sight in the dark,

I can only see to write

In the literal night

When this madstruck time began

– Hallucinations enchanting my eyes –

I could see things which were not there

While, driving without looking to see,

I had no regard for what was there

Real as hard metal.

And then my real vision fogged

My left eye could not see the irreal presence

Of some protecting angel

Who measured the distance by which I missed

And made a better judgement than mine

Cast a mist

On half my sight

A spelled-out cast so I cannot judge distance

Out of the question to drive

Staying me to meanings of the righter mind

Found in soft pencil only

And only in the kindness of dark.

The Lonely Letter

I

Lonely as one letter of the alphabet

I walk beyond the snowline of Kili,

A canary for altitude sickness,

I get it violently: quicker than anyone.

My head is an ice palace of crystal pain:

In sick vision, snow is pillows and pianos.

I the inexorable solitude,

A tiny iota divided from other minds.

My idiocy is my implacable will

To go on, against wisdom, against advice.

Because the views from the summit impel me –

Everything here is ice, fire and spirit –

Because the mountains become me

And I can lose myself

Because I can see worlds

And I am unlonely

Because on the top I cannot feel

The peopled isolation of the valleys.

II

If the unlinked climber sleeps

One night on Cader Idris

They wake either mad or a poet

(Or both, poets always reply.)

But the obliterated letter losing sight

Of other eyes knows the third choice

Where the path is a hairpin turn –

Annihilation –

Striking a cliff of fall

Filed away by suicides-future

Like a grid reference:

That's a likely site.

Now is no time to risk it:

Cader is come to me: Kili in my mind.

The snowline has slipped, it

Pillows my voice to a monotone,

Freezes the fingers of friendships,

Ices the keys of the piano

To the unletterable I.

The Price of Argon

(for Iain)

I can feel words with my fingers,

Consonantal cutting rhymes of rock

Chime clean with carabiners

Connecting ropes of thought,

The cadences of vowel slides

Smooth or taut: snow elides

To hollow

While my temples – of Apollo –

Are hammered through with nails

No rhythm except pain.

Why would you climb the human mind?

Not just because it is there

But because all climbers dare the air

Where it is thinnest,

Aware its gases still include dreams.

Too little oxygen to survive,

The body stints its appetite and eats itself,

Anorexia of the heights,

Obsessing every ounce of carried weight,

I can barely drag the whiteness

Of a page to write

Of either the ethereal mind

Or the freighted body.

Climbers call it the death zone,

When they raid it for the summits

For the views – my god –

The vision.

Out on the earthstruck mountain

The head must not mind hurting itself

Skystruck how the price of argon

Has risen to what cost?

All that you possess including – possibly –

Your life.

Argon, the inert gas, is associated not only with inertia but with reverie.

The Traverse

‘Make it a short pitch,' I said:

‘More accidents happen on the way down.'

So the lead climber was just below me, holding the rope safe,

But in a sudden avalanche he had to swerve away:

The line dangled uselessly,

My mind swinging,

My descent unsecured,

His voice too far to reach me.

I had a choice on the bare rock:

The dutiful

Waiting

Or the beautiful

Traverse –

Truer –

To me –

In a night now voiced with stars.

The utterly speaking part is uttered alone,

The traverse between writer and reader,

Between pencil and page,

Between word and root,

Between language and speech,

Between silence and song,

The sweet and dangerous interval

Between voices.

Parallel Loneliness

(for Ann)

Loneliness is not a word you find in the plural

Lonelinesses would give the lie

To its bound solitude.

Loneliness is the marches,

The no-man's-land between countries:

Loneliness is the marked mind,

The invisible geography,

Territory known by others,

Who have been inwritten

By that same cartography,

Leaving us alike

In worlds alone,

Mapping edge to edge

Our parallel loneliness.

But we have a trick up our sleeve

To defy those maps of the mind:

Faster than prayer,

More certain than pills,

A side-splitting, map-tearing
joke

Told together:

Hold together, my friend,

I'm right by you.

The Fire of Love

It really would be madness now

To love you

Or you, or you, or you,

Though my heart is on fire.

Someone asked me what is it like, this madness?

Like a wildfire fanned by a hurricane,

A quickened quality of flame

Which knows no borders,

No respecter of persons or properness,

Easy to love anyone but insufficient,

For this is an ordinary fire burning extraordinary

In a world too beautiful to leave,

Where each fir needle is fire

Pure water is fire

Ire is fire

Eyes are fire

Enflamed to seeing

In a fine circle of light

These black suns of knowledge

How the pupil blazes through

To the pure circle of the sun.

It would be madness to love you or anyone

Because this love is a need-fire beyond

Burning for the universal

As transcendental as each of us,

Outsunning the sun

With fire and love and hope:

And the pupils of my eyes are learning

A language of purer flame.

Wavelengths

(for Jan)

Everyone is an exquisite device

For reception and transmission

Wired for empathy

Two-way radios alive

To the acoustics of each other

But the extra sensitivity of certain states of mind

Calibrates at a factor of ten

Each gauge read to a further order of magnitude

Picking up the tiniest signals

Or deafened by the shouts of the over-loud

So the self-obsession of a neurotic

Is an unbearable broadcast of blather

The tedium of a self-repeater

Jangles like an advert for advertising

Avoidance or ear plugs the only strategies

I'm trying to tune in to the wisest wavelengths

The voices which speak their kindness in kind

Which find their way into my mind

Because they know fine-tuning

Is an art where to speak is to listen

Even to the unspoken transmission

The catch in the throat, a way of breathing

The eloquence of silence

The voiced pause

Of the unanswered question

Because they are willing to go an extra order

In the magnitude of the heart.