The Weather Wheel (2 page)

With such icy winds, facing the rising sun in the garden

makes no difference so I take shelter on the terrace,

comforted by two black sheepskins, one under me,

one over, kindly provided by the establishment.

Seagulls, seen from below, their red feet neatly stowed,

beaks and eyes painted like wooden toys, hang

immobile long enough to be scrutinised in flight

before they swerve away. Propped against a fence,

a reindeer is spotted with fairy lights you expect to see

vanish like daylight stars and everything that loomed

last night on a smuggler’s night black with storm

– the distillation tower’s disembodied four red eyes –

retreats into its rightful place. Young waiters, chefs,

preparing for the fair, are lining up white deckchairs

close enough to the seafront to feel spray. Sandwiched

in these sheepskins, I am half man, half sheep, myself.

Only human noises populate the night. No owl, pheasant,

wailing fox, only stars that have buried their heads in cloud.

Listening becomes a momentous task. The eye as always

fights for supremacy and the ear, fazed as a bat in rain,

imagining it hears a rush of water, hears ‘all things hushed’.

O
chauve-souris
, flying mouse, leather mouse, flittermouse,

jealous naked microbat, winged seed of sycamore,

umbrella man, acrobat hanging in your own skin parachute,

flying patagium carpet, O bat-being in fairy wings,

string purse, anus face, where are your echoes now

– dry flutter of a mothwing, rustle of a centipede –

where is your pulsing cry, your lovesong in the dark?

In the vast homelessness of a country night – dear country,

left behind – we come back into our moral being, back

into the animal ground of our being under the absent stars.

Under their roofs and rafters, we navigate that ground.

How slippery the path just at the end where the indigo stutters

of dragonflies rain against glass water! Where everything is flower –

the air, its scent, cabbage whites, single, paired; pines, cedars,

carpet dew; where old age flowers in its slow walk to the water;

where the left brain flowers and the right, the lawnmower

sprays grass fountains; where sadness settles for the pine cones,

not knowing if they are really pine cones at this distance;

where Anne flowers in an orange shawl and our lungs

are grey wildflowers, minds a mindless garden; where,

in the event of fire, we are to collect at the bottom of the lawn.

We are to collect our belongings, blankets, iPads, medicines.

We are to collect sunlight silvering on our shoulders.

Our shoulders are thin. We collect our thinness, our boniness,

in a huddle of silver water down by the river. Be careful!

they warn me, those who are, going down to the landing stage

raised high enough to dangle younger legs over the water.

Under the giant planes beside the gate where we said goodbye,

the one bare trunk where squirrels flatten themselves on bark

side by side with a voluminous plane whose ivy outraces branch,

under the two great planes where we stood vaguely looking round

since it was a clear night, the street empty and we, small gaggle,

newly intimate but standing a yard apart, keeping our voices low

though they carried bright as bells as we counted the evening out,

gestured towards the cars, deciding who would go with whom

and gradually splitting off, under the planes with the squirrel dreys

hidden in all that ivy, but hanging low directly above the station,

there, where we looked pointing, like an Oriental illustration

of Arabian Nights, lay the old moon in the new moon’s arms:

earthshine on the moon’s night side, on the moon’s dark limb,

earthlight, our light, our gift to the moon reflected back to us.

And the duty we owe our elders as the Romans owed their gods

– duties they called pietàs, we call pity – shone in the moon’s pietà.

We buried my mother’s ashes in the holes, the four

we dug to plant four cherry trees for her,
Prunus avium
:

wild cherry, sweet cherry, bird cherry, gean or mazzard,

each name carrying something of
Prunus avium
on the wind,

the wind that blew drifts of ash like bonemeal across clay.

In three years they’ll be grown; in twenty, diamond woodland.

But we’ll recognise our trees, set back where the path ends.

Surrounding them will be native oak, beech, alder, hazel.

One cherry tree from each of us: Tara, Bea, Kai and myself.

And on Tom’s behalf, we invoked the name of Yax Tum Bak,

Mayan God of Planting, there in a desolate, bitterly windy field

in Buckinghamshire. Clay stuck to our boots in grassy clumps

and as Tara heaved her spade, worms, lustrous as white mulberries,

fled, upturned. Later, in the Garden Centre – ‘Oh, how beautiful!’

my mother would have gasped on entering – I bought Tara

a peach tree for Valentine’s Day,
Prunus persica
, from Persia.

Yes, I should be living under the vine,

dapple at my feet and the bare dry dust

singing of drought, of heat. Look at the pile

of rubble round the roots, curled dried leaves,

mound of ant homes I can’t see. Look at

the flower fallen in the dirt, flake yellow,

listen to the wasps, the bees. And the vine

above me, the vine that smells of nothing,

yields nothing but the music of its name,

the memory of some long-forgotten terrace.

Yes, under a flock of swallows that repeat

– because we have to believe it – the end,

the end, nearly the end of a summer

so long it knows neither month nor week.

Yes, I should keep my happiness hidden,

under the vine, from those who envy it.

Only the brightest stars were out with a half moon

centred in the sky: a ceiling to learn the names of stars by.

And in the gaps between the stars, milkcarts went to market,

pony traps crossed viaducts, oxen drove sad water-wheels,

history trundled by as birds awoke and the distant sound

of a plane winked lights. Her owl flew back to Minerva

as she flashed her shield while, on Apadana’s stairways,

processions of bearded guards, Persians, Medes, marched past.

Cedar palaces were torched; frigates, night-fishing boats set out.

Passengers flew like vesper bats straight across the moon,

roofscapes listened for child lovers leaning over balconies,

geraniums grew in the dark. I had never been so happy

and historical. Happy enough to see, holding them up,

stars on the tip of each finger, countable, spread far apart,

one by one go out as day rose to pluck the first strains

of a Spanish guitar. Then the silver moon went white.

Updraughts lift sounds of language imperceptibly, even

the silent language of Lula as she hobbles up the steps.

Dogs Lula doesn’t know bark along the terraces, cockerels,

though it isn’t dawn, crow anyway. It could be any village

anywhere in the world, everything in decay. But things

retain their scent – the rubbed tomato leaf – and sound

– the bamboo river – and as if heard behind closed doors,

the angels: angel of September, of the fallen fig and dapple;

angel of perspective that staggers the terraces upward,

white steps downward; angels of the sister mountains –

the first, the second, the third. And the angels, cowled,

circle us like lepers on the hills, they unveil themselves.

And I love my angels not as they were in childhood,

angel of the crab-apple and chine, of calico and sandal,

but as they are: leprous and discharged, violent and betrayed.

Angel of the soft wind that blows across my breasts.

However small, it’s still an orchard –

three limes, a pomegranate and a kumquat.

Each stands in a circle of shade

and bedding plants. Sweetpeas brought

from England have died at the foot

of their canes. Above, the pepper tree

that went wild in a sudden storm,

throwing its branches all over the place,

hangs droops of coral berries against

a calendar sky. Cones, black droppings

in the dust, a fragment of rope

knotted at both ends, a fleeting shadow –

a swallow if you look up. But no,

I keep my gaze on the ground.

If the trees were horses, they’d be foals

and the pepper tree their barn.

It was the pool and the blue umbrellas,

blue awning. It was the blue and white

lifesize chess set on the terrace, wall of jasmine.

It was the persimmon and palm side by side

like two wise prophets and the view that dipped

then rose, the swallows that turned the valley.

It was the machinery of the old olive press,

the silences and the voices in them calling.

It was the water talking. It was the woman

reading with her head propped, wearing glasses,

the logpile under the overhanging staircase,

mist and the mountains we took for granted.

It was the blue-humped hose and living wasps

swimming on the surface. It was the chimneys.

It was sleep. It was not having a mother,

neither father nor mother to comfort me.

On our last day on the roof terrace, our own ‘heavenly message

of the third floor’ that Matisse had in mind for
Les Marocains,

the air’s so still not even the cellophane of my cigarette packet

blows out of the ashtray. Morning sun lies on me like a blanket,

le baromètre a remonté d’un quart de cadran
while down in the storeroom,

where two caged budgerigars have never seen the light of day,

il fait clair comme dans une cave.
Daisy, the indoor cat, grubs around

the soil of the young olive where a few wild grasses in the tub

are all she will ever know of lawns. Fatiha has watered the palm,

oleander, succulents and a dribble of water crossing a barrier

of sun and shade gleams like oil. The cat moves soundlessly,

the sun with stealth until the shade, the chill, swallows our feet.

There’s no accounting for joy, the way it bubbles in the most arid

of deserts or rains blue gold. The muezzin climbs the minaret

in leather mules not on foot but by donkey as if riding, hill by hill,

into Jerusalem. Proust’s voice obeys the laws of night and honey.

I have been looking for the famous gentleness of light

floating on the paper field in the pink city and have seen it

only in passing: as we crept into the old town, the taxi

nudging the cyclists, donkey carts, through mud-walled lanes

as if entering a bible story; in the smoky vaporous haze,

the smoky hooded figures enveloped by it, each man a Yeats

declaring ‘I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing’;

in the blind walled pink of the Tombeaux Saâdiens at sunset,

set off by small red rosebeds, a tall magenta bougainvillea,

the colours proceeding by pulsation, exhaled from within;

seen it in the mosaic of light falling through the reed roof

in the Berber souk or down thin alleys of keyhole arches.

Travelling on a paddleboat to Corazón, battling a channel

of reeds and branches, Paul Bowles wrote that it was like

being in the bloodstream of a giant and so it is, immersed

in a memory of sundown, at any hour, in all his arteries.