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Authors: Mimi Khalvati

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BOOK: The Weather Wheel
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Cold, yes, under a sodium sky at three o’clock in the morning.

But there’s this shawl to wear and tea with Manuka honey

and across the only gap in the border, a thousand refugees an hour

pouring through Ras al-Jedir. An hour? By morning, my morning,

another five thousand, by lunchtime, another five and how many

have even a striped hemp blanket? Fifteen thousand blankets!

Imagine one. The way it folds stiffly as a tent around the head

bent back, the shoulders jutting, knees drawn up, wrists free,

the lone triangular edifice. Feel the weave. Hairy, ridged.

Smell it. Determine the sightlines either side of the hollowed cheeks.

Imagine the scene in silence, not as it would be. The blanket

as a block, a wood carving. The tools: straight gouge, spoon gouge,

back bent, dog leg, fishtail chisels, V-tools, punches, vices;

hook knives, drawknives, rasps and rifflers, mallets, saws, abrasives;

slip waterstones – how quiet they sound – and strops for sharpening.

Figure in a blanket. In acacia, sycamore or, most likely, olive.

Snow was literally swarming round the streetlamp like gnats.

The closer they came, the larger they grew, snow gnats, snow bees,

and in my snood, smoking in the snow, I watched them.

Everyone else was behind the door, I could hear their noise

which made the snow, the swarm, more silent. More welcome.

I could have watched for hours and seen nothing more than specks

against the light interrupting light and away from it, flying blind

but carrying light, specks becoming atoms. They flew too fast

to become snow itself, flying in a random panic, looming close

but disappearing, like flakes on the tongue, at the point of recognition.

They died as they landed, riding on their own melting as poems do

and in the morning there was nothing to be seen of them.

Instead, a streak of lemon, lemon honey, rimmed the sky

but the cloud lid never lifted, the weekend promised a blizzard.

I could have watched for hours and seen nothing more than I do now,

an image, metaphor, but not the blind imperative that drove them.

You are the shadows who have miniaturised the cryosphere

into a garden of paradise, yours the silhouettes facing fire.

Yours the skeletons, crystal wasps in the long black coffin,

spiders with egg sacs and glass intestines, stalagmites, goblins,

vertebrae and antlers, melting candles, yours the serpents

swallowing mice; infinite, interminable, your Lazarus dance.

Have you seen aerial fossils, spiculae, birdwings frozen in flight?

Kittens iced to branches, glazed drops, objects crystallised by light?

Yours the glass apple, glass core, that ballooning missing bite;

the wedding arch of crossed swords, apertures jagged as kites.

Go home and imagine them, you can’t. Even as they’re here,

now, they’re gone. And everything outdoors, buildings by the river,

boats, buses on the bridge, everything that runs in lines will run

into fountain, the beauty of the arc against the formality of line.

Yours this catwalk, ghastly, spectacular, and all the faery forms

of fungus, plankton, Venus’s girdle, that have swum through time.

and the road is beset with obstacles and thorns.

But let it take its time for I have hours and hours to wait

here, snowbound in Lisbon, glad of this sunlit café

outside Departures, for an evening flight to Heathrow.

Being my soul’s steed, I should like to know its name

and breed – a Marwari of India, Barb of North Africa,

the Akhal-Teke of Western Asia or a Turkoman,

now extinct? Is it the burnt chestnut colour of the ant,

grey as a Bedouin wind, the four winds that made it?

O Drinker of the Wind, I travel by air, sea, land

and wherever I am, there you are behind my back

pounding the cloud streets, trailing banners of cirrus

or as Platero once did, from fear or chill, hoofing a stream,

breaking the moon into a swarm of clear, crystal roses.

No, no matter your thirst, ride swiftly, mare, stallion,

mother, father, for without you I feel forever homesick.

Even when I was a child, tears were something

other children had – a permission I didn’t understand

other people gave, I thought the children gave it

to themselves: a special treat when they’d already

had their share. My overmind, as H.D. called it,

isn’t a jellyfish, a kind of swimming cap on my head.

My overmind seems to be this sadness – I nearly always

carry it and it is a kind of hat, skysize, skyshape.

I feel sorry for my smallness, short trunk, short legs,

sleeves rolled up, feet too large to be in proportion.

When I sit and plant them squarely, side by side like shoes

with no one in them, I feel how flat they are and firm.

If I were a pot, a round ceramic pot with a mustard glaze

on a whatnot in the guest room or on an outside table,

I’d be, like H.D.’s Delphic charioteer whose feet made

‘a firm pedestal for himself’, I’d be always balanced.

A yellow ladybird is reading the
Guardian Weekend,

alternately reading and grooming, rubbing her hands,

slapping the sides of her face. To do so, she tilts back

on her tail, rearing up as if into a magnifying mirror.

For the time being, she’s entirely forgotten about flight –

the ridgy terrain of a brown paper bag, a valley dotted

with croissant lakes, is only a ten-minute hike away.

Of course she isn’t yellow yellow – more goldenrod

with many black spots, a black and white harlequin head.

I present her with a flake. Momentarily, she looks baffled,

rears again and, in the one instant I look away, disappears.

Next thing I know the ladybird and (croissant) flake –

twice her size – have toppled over the rim of the
Guardian
,

one on top of the other – a perfect landing, ladybird on flake

like man in boat, then, capsizing out of sight, she sails

over the edge of the table, the table travelling to Portslade.

Sun keeps taking its jacket off and putting it on again.

So, down here, do I. Of every shape and size and species,

wasps, flies, bees, midges, gnats, gather in this seeded

cottage garden like pilgrims to a church. The foxglove bud

hasn’t yet unfurled, tug at it tug tug but there’s no entry here.

So the blithe bee flies away. How busy skies once were

– as they are now – with a glut of nectar, colour, nestled

between rock walls to draw them in – fleets of giddy insects.

They land on my glasses, thigh, buzz around my hair,

whizz by, zoom in and out of vision but nothing annoys me

except my clumsy language, my laggard apprehensions.

Sleep, sleep is the only word I hear. I’d curl up in it

as a bee in a foxglove bell. And I see the blonde schoolboy

at Leeds station, left on a bench with a younger brother

and a punnet of raspberries to look after, calling out
Mum!

holding a finger up in the air, capped with a raspberry bell.

It was when he leant close to me, his little naked torso,

brown and thin, reaching an arm into the row of raspberries,

that I snatched a kiss. The raspberries smelled of rosemary

and among them, like a cuckoo’s egg, grew the odd sweetpea.

Do you know why they’re called sweetpeas? Mowgli asked.

No, why? Because look, he said, fingering a sick pale pod,

this is the fruit and this is the flower and inside the pod are peas.

Mowgli looked inside things. Inside the sieve, a spiderling

trailing a thread his finger trailed up, over, under the pile

of fruit he prodded. Don’t pick the ones with the white bits,

Mowgli ordered, they taste horrid. Sun tangled in the canes,

cobwebs blurred the berries. Mowgli progressed to the apples –

small bitter windfalls. I’m going to test them, he said, for smashes.

Mowgli, throwing apples high against the wall – and missing;

Mowgli squinting, testing the poor things now for bruises; Mowgli

balancing on a rake, first thing in the morning, grinning shyly.

It was Sniff who chose Kai, not the other way round, at Sharon’s

Fugly Rats, by licking him all over, grooming him, virtually everything

short of saying
please choose me
. In the car, he sat quietly in his hand.

And now it’s only Kai he comes to, sniffing, only Kai he’s bonded with.

Sharon breeds dumbo rats, sometimes top-eared, rex and smooth

as well as hairless and double rex in a variety of colours and markings –

great pets, well handled, not ‘the cowaring wrecks you can sometimes see’.

Sitting next to Kai on our deckchairs, I am finally introduced to Sniff

– ‘feel his tail, it’s really soft’ – on my birthday. The size of him!

Sniff is a cinnamon hooded fancy rat, hooded not only by the fur

cinnamon saddle that runs the length of his spine but also, currently,

by Kai’s t-shirt sleeve, whom I have presented – for his owner’s birthday –

with a three-tiered rat cage complete with double hammock, straw nest,

swinging tunnel, mineral tube, cat litter tray and dog potty training pad.

I hope he knows who he is. To find out more, visit Fancy Rats Forum

whose menu includes bulletins, articles, reviews, tutorials and obituaries.

Her voice had that dreamy quality that made me think

she had been watching telly, so early on Sunday morning.

When it brightened as I said ‘It’s Granny Mimi’, I did,

for a moment, feel like Granny Mimi as if she had brought me

slippers, a cup of coffee. ‘What were you doing?’ ‘What?’

‘Were you watching telly?’ imagining her under a blanket,

curled on the sofa, slightly sulky. ‘Mum’s drawing me.’

‘Drawing you?’ ‘Yes, Mum’s doing a drawing of me.’

I saw the darkened room and, in a spotlight somewhere,

Bea keeping unbelievably still. I heard the stump of charcoal

hatching, shading, stroking her hair, her mother breathing;

felt her whole outline being transposed, lifted like a transparency.

But the reality was they were facing each other, like card players,

across the kitchen table. While Tara drew Bea, Bea drew Tara:

heads down, heads only, a shoulder, an arm maybe, no hands,

quick sketches on copy paper – Tara’s to bin, Bea’s to sort out later.

Parked cars are sleeping like animals in their baskets.

Sally, Bea’s corn snake, coils by her rock and the mollies

who know neither night nor day keep swimming round

and round behind glass. Lucky the brain awash with sleep

flushing its toxins out. However, according to my mother,

so groggy in the mornings, she never slept a wink all night.

What did she do during those long useless hours? Worry,

endlessly worry, take more pills, eat something sweet, biskwits

as she called them, never more than one or two at a time?

The dead have taken our questions with them, leaving,

in their stead, fresh shocks: discoveries in drawers, files,

that become the significant things we remember them by:

not the memories that swim round and round behind glass

– how they were, how we knew them when they were alive –

but realisations after the fact, small sleepless leapings

and floodings, spasms, nocturnal poundings in the heart.

Every day the world is beloved by me, the seagull eager

for its perch. I woke this morning to a darkened room,

my soul stabled at the gate. We grow older, quieter,

hearing degrees of movement, distance, and the dead

would listen if they could to the voices of the living

as bedrock listens to the ocean. I listen to the waves,

trying to make them go one, two, one, two, to hear

what Virginia Woolf heard. But she heard it in memory,

darling memory that delineates. One, two, one, two,

and all the variable intervals in between surrendering

to ‘the very integer’ Alice Oswald rhymed with water,

creating a thumb-hole through which to see the world.

Light fluctuates and my soul fluctuates like a jellyfish

underwater. My hand throws animal shadows on paper

and there, outlined, is a single goat, black and white,

standing on top of the mountain, like a tiny church.

BOOK: The Weather Wheel
12.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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