New and Selected Poems (32 page)

Snow falling. Snowflakes clung and melted

In the sparkly black fox fur of your hat.

Soft chandeliers, ghostly wreckage

Of the Moscow Opera. Flakes perching and

Losing their hold on the heather tips. An unending

Walk down the cobbled hill into the oven

Of empty fire. Among the falling

Heavens. A short walk

That could never end was

Never ending. Down, on down

Under the thick, loose flocculence

Of a life

Burning out in the air. Between char-black buildings

Converted to closed cafés and Brontë gift-shops.

Beyond them, the constellations falling

Through the Judaean thorns, into the fleeces

Of the Pennine sheep. Deepening

Over the faces of your school-friends,

Beside their snowed-under tanks, locked into the Steppe

Where the mud had frozen again

While they drank their coffee. You escaped

Deeper into the falling flakes. They were clinging

To the charcoal crimped black ponyskin

Coat you wore. Words seemed warm. They

Melted in our mouths

Whatever was trying to cling.

                                                 Leaning snow

Folded you under its cloak and ushered you away

Down the hill. Back to where you came from.

I watched you. Feeling the snow’s touch.

Already, it was burying your footprints,

Drawing its white sheet over everything,

Closing the air behind you.

He did not know she had risen out of cinders.

She knew he had nothing.

So they ransacked each other. What he wanted

Was the gold, black-lettered pelt

Of the leopard of Ein-Gedi.

She wanted only the runaway slave.

What he wanted was Turgenev’s antimacassar.

She wanted escape without a passport.

What he wanted was Bach’s aerobatic

Gutturals in Arabic.

She wanted the enemy without his gun.

He wanted the seven treasures of Asia –

Skin, eyes, lips, blood, hair knotted roughly

In seven different flags.

She wanted the silent heraldry

Of the purple beech by the noble wall.

He wanted Cabala the ghetto demon

With its polythene bag full of ashes.

She wanted only shade from the noon’s

Broken-armed Catherine Wheel

Under an island leaf. She wanted

A love-knot Eden-cool as two lob-worms

And a child of acorn.

He wanted a mother of halva.

She wanted the hill-stream’s tabula rasa.

He wanted the thread-end of himself.

So they ransacked each other for everything

That could not be found. And their fingers met

And were wrestling, like flames

In the crackling thorns

Of everything they lacked –

                                                as midnight struck.

Opus 131 in C Sharp Minor

Opened the great door

In the air, and through it

Flooded horror. The door in the hotel room

And the curtain at the window and even

The plain homely daylight blocking the window

Were in the wrong dimension

To shut it out. The counterpoint pinned back

The flaps of the body. Naked, faceless,

The heart panted there, like a foetus.

Where was the lifeline music? What had happened

To consolation, prayer, transcendence –

To the selective disconnecting

Of the pain centre? Dark insects

Fought with their instruments

Scampering through your open body

As if you had already left it. Beethoven

Had broken down. You strained listening

Maybe for divorce to be resolved

In the arithmetic of vibration

To pure zero, for the wave-particles

To pronounce on the unimportance

Of the menopause. Beethoven

Was trying to repair

The huge constellations of his silence

That flickered and glinted in the wind.

But the notes, with their sharp faces,

Were already carrying you off,

Each with a different bit, into the corners

Of the Universe.

You had to strip off Germany

The crisp shirt with its crossed lightnings

And go underground.

You were forced to strip off Israel

The bodice woven of the hairs of the cactus

To be bullet-proof, and go deeper.

You had to strip off Russia

With those ear-rings worn in honour

Of Eugene Onegin. And go deeper.

You had to strip off British Columbia

And the fish-skin mock-up waterproof

From the cannery, with its erotic motif

Of porcupine quills, that pierced you

And came with you, working deeper

As you moved deeper.

Finally you had to strip off England

With your wedding rings

And go deeper.

                             Then suddenly you were abandoned

By the gem-stones, rubies, emeralds, all you had hoarded

In a fold of paper

At the back of a drawer – you had thought

These would protect you in the end,

Urim and Thummim. Cowardly

They scattered in the splinters of weeping

As your own hands, stronger than your choked outcry,

Took your daughter from you. She was stripped from you,

The last raiment

Clinging round your neck, the sole remnant

Between you and the bed

In the underworld

                                  Where Inanna

Has to lie naked, between strata

That can never be opened, except as a book.

When her grave opened its ugly mouth

Why didn’t you just fly,

Wrap yourself in your hair and make yourself scarce,

Why did you kneel down at the grave’s edge

To be identified

Accused and convicted

By all who held in their hands

Pieces of the gravestone grey granite

Proof of their innocence?

You must have misheard a sentence.

You were always mishearing

Into Hebrew or German

What was muttered in English.

Her grave mouthed its riddle right enough.

But maybe you heard in the air somewhere

An answer to one of your own

Unspoken enigmas. Misheard,

Mistook, and kneeled meekly.

Maybe they wouldn’t stone you

If you became a nun

And selflessly incinerated yourself

In the shrine of her death.

Because that is what you did. From that moment

Shops, jobs, baby daughter, the German au pair

Had to become mere shapes

In the offered-up flames, a kind of writhing

That enfolded you and devoured

Your whole life.

I watched you feeding the flames.

Why didn’t you wrap yourself in a carpet

Get to a hospital

Drop the whole mistake – simply call it

An error in translation?

Instead you fed those flames

Six full calendar years –

Every tarred and brimstone

Day torn carefully off,

One at a time, not one wasted, patient

As if you were feeding a child.

You were not feeding a child.

All you were doing was being strong,

Waiting for your ashes

To be complete and to cool.

Finally they made a small cairn.

Did music help him? Indeed it helped him.

His crude music, instruments

Imitated uncannily but weirdly

Restored the order of music

Within the terror of the Camp.

They could have been baboons

In some demented phase of tribal breakdown

During a famine, or under the effects

Of a poisonous dust from space.

Yet his music, for its few moments

Ushered them into a formation

Where the Camp did not exist

Where their sorrowful bodies did not exist.

So the scabies on his belly the sores and

Inflammations which made Elias

That ferocious clown crow

And ridiculed him, ripping down his trousers

Fighting with him in the mud

They did not touch his music

Did not adhere to any note of it

Or disturb his performance

Through which his fellow-prisoners escaped

Their rags, their last few horrible hours, their next few

Frightful possibly fatal days, sooner

Or later nearly certainly fatal days

Standing aside from them, stepping a little

Out of the time corridor, standing in a group

Just outside it, where the air was still,

In the solidarity of souls, where music uttered

The dumbness of naked bodies

As if it were the inside of the earth

And everything else –

The hours where their soft surfaces

Tore against the hard –

Were merely rags

It happened to wear, and could ignore.

Music poured out of nowhere

Strange food

And made them for those moments unaware

Of their starvation and indifferent

To their humanity

While the guards too, shedding and

Escaping their humanity

Lowered themselves into the sound

As into a communal bath

Where all were anonymous new-born

Innocent all equally

Innocent equally defenceless

The guards indeed more defenceless

More terribly naked needing

The music more