The Wrecking Light (4 page)

He came instead to a closed silence. Here
were the attributes and trappings of the hunt:
flint blades and fishhooks, bone pendants,
carved figurines of elk, snakes and humans,
a wild boar's leg-bone whittled and whetted
into a dagger, bear skulls for bowls, stone flakes
for arrowheads. A seated woman with a baby
in her lap, dusted in red ochre, next to a man
wearing a crown of antlers. Between the two,
and dead like them, a young child laid down
into the wing of a swan.

The men would sometimes try to catch one,
throwing a looped wire at the great white cross
that tracked their every turn, gliding over their deep
gulfs and bitter waves: the bright pacific albatross.
Now, with a cardboard sign around his neck, the king
of the winds stands there, hobbled: head shorn,
ashamed; his broken limbs hang down by his side,
those huge white wings like dragging oars.

Once beautiful and brave, now tarred, unfeathered,
this lost traveller is a bad joke; a lord cut down to size.
One pokes a muzzle in his mouth; another limps past,
mimicking the
skliff, sclaff
of a bird that cannot fly.

The poet is like this prince of the clouds
who rides the storm of war and scorns the archer;
exiled on the ground, in all this derision,
his giant wings prevent his marching.

It seems I came too late.
The cart-tracks leading
down the hill to the old town
are frosting over, already filling with snow.
If the temple is gold, as they say,
it's too dark now to tell. I tether my horse
and walk through the ruins of the marketplace,
its stalls empty, the tables of the feast
all cleared; mice among the grain, and dogs,
but few people anywhere.
There's ice between the cobblestones
where drink was spilt — some scraps of bread,
chicken bones — that's it.
I had missed the full moon, and the Festival.
Fires sputter here and there but there is little light
and the ground beyond the square
is frozen hard as iron.
I pass what looks like a well in the darkness
— the sharpening wind playing over it
as you would blow on the neck of an empty bottle.
I hear the creaking of a tree so huge
it's blotted out the moon; some birds, scuffling;
a skitter of rats and a dog's low growl.

As I near the tree I feel the ground soften, start
to suck at my boot-heels, and I can
make out shapes in the high branches:
long, hanging shapes that seem to
turn slightly in the breeze, which is sweet now
beyond the frost, and I almost
sense some drops of rain.
Moving around it
and into the moonlight, I see it's as high
as the temple, fully green, and thick with gifts
the way the peasants dress their beams with corn,
at home, at harvest-time. This tree, though,
is decked simply with the dead.
At the top, what look like cockerels, rams
and goats, then dogs and pigs, and hooked
to the lowest, strongest boughs — their legs
almost touching the earth — horses and bulls.
I count nine of each of them, and nine
that aren't animals but hang there just the same,
black-faced, bletted, barely
recognisable as men.
I look down at the spongy grass
and my boots are soaking red.

My name is Adam of Bremen
and I saw these things
in The Year of Our Lord 1075.

The wood is hung with silk anchor-
threads and signal-threads. Draglines
catch on my hair and hands, stringing
my face as I move through the trees: strands
charged and sticky as spun sugar
cling and stretch and fizzle apart.
I am ravelled here
to the live field, in a rig of stress.

Turned on my new axis to a swathe
of shriven grey, I remind myself
of a cork float in a fishing-net spread out
to dry in the sun, waiting for the fisherman
— both
retiarius
and
secutor
—
to attend to what is broken and undone.
I watch now as the spider unknots itself
slowly, and elbows out of the dark.

Under the nineteen stars
and the ninety-six minor stars
of the marble heaven,
he lies crossways
on the heated stone,
his laved body evaporating
upwards to the light.

His smoke of sweat condenses
in the dome's stone cupola
and its slow hot rain
drops down on him hard
as annunciation — or nails,
perhaps, on a sheet of tin,
pricking out some finial star.

I let him
lose himself in me;
finding a way to sleep,
to disappear
out of darkness and in
to some blue light.

I hear him
sobbing as he
nears the centre, to release
the flare, send up
the high maroon, feel it
flooding the night.

It wasn't meant to be that way.
I never expected it to shoot so hard
it blinded me: I'd wanted to watch
the way it went. The pumping-out not like
coming at all, more like emptying
a bottle: blacking out
a little more with every pulse.
I just felt light and very cold at the end,
astonished at how much red there was
and my wrist so white.

We went walks here, as children, listening out
for gypsies, timber wolves, the great
hinges in the trees. Hours
we'd wander its long green halls
making swords from branches,
gathering stars of elderflower
to thread into a chain.
Today the forest sends up birds
to distract me, deer to turn me from the track,
puts out stems and tendrils
to trip and catch at my feet.
The sudden sun opens a path of flowers:
snowdrops, crocuses, hyacinths,
a smoke of bluebells
in the shade on either side;
a way of stamens and stigmas: the breathing
faces of flowers. I look back at the empty trees,
look up at the green, and I'm walking
through daisies and honeysuckle,
fireweed, crab apple, burnt-out
buddleia, a tangle of nettles,
berberis, bramble-wire;
the flowers gone,
just the starred calyx
and the green ovary
hardening to seed.
I take a last look at the yellow trees,
a last look at the brown, and I hear the sound
of old leaves under my feet
and the low noise of water.

I have found the place I wasn't meant to find.
The shallow creek, churning
its red and silver secrets:
failed salmon, bearded with barbs,
riding each other down;
the shore lined with baby pigeons, animals
birthing, others coming back to die.
Placenta and bones in the undergrowth,
in the clearing, in the places of drowning.
Jellyfish have taken to the woods;
mussels rope the tree-trunks.
I watch a fish flip on a thorn
in a pester of flies, one eye fixed on mine.

The wood stretched behind me, now full
of my own kind, those
who have stepped through my shadow;
a life's-worth of women in the forest corridor,
faces turned to the bark. The rows of lovers.
Mother and sister. Wife. And my daughters,
walking away into the blue distance,
turning their heads to look back.

Hung on a silver birch, my school cap
and satchel; next to them, the docken suit,
and next to that, pinned to a branch,
my lost comforter —
a piece of blanket worn to the size of my hand.
My hand as a boy. The forgotten smell of it,
the smell of myself.
And something is moving, something
held down by stones, and one by one
I see the dead unbury themselves
and take their places by the seated corpse
whose face I seem to know.
He was shivering.
It's cold,
I said.
He looked up at me and nodded,
It's cold.
What is this place? What brings you here?
This is my home, we replied.

He switches off the fridge
just to sit and watch
the hardness of the iced-up
ice-box start to drip,
its white block
loosening like a tooth.

The fishboxes
of Fraserburgh, Aberdeen,
Peterhead, the wood that broke
on your beach, crates that once held herring,
freshly dead, now hold distance, nothing but the names
of the places I came from, years ago;
and you pull me from the waves,
drawing me out like a skelf,
as I would say:
a splinter.

Our phonecall spilled out into the dark
and glittered between the countryside and the town
like the mess of a knife-fight.
Afterwards, all night jittery and spent in the hotel bed,
I dreamt I was the needle in a compass
some orienteer bore through the forest with a spinning heart.

I find myself at your side, turning the pages
for you — haltingly — with my wrong hand,
while you play those delicate, certain notes
without effort, sounding a long
free line through the sea-lanes on the skiff
of
your
wrong hand, the left,
your only moving hand,
your whole right side snowbound.

Who would swap the hammer
for the hammer-blow, the seasons
for this wintering life, that
lethal fold in time? No one I know.
But there are those who can make an art
of setting a logan-stone rocking
here in'Södermalm, or learn the perfect
stress of lines, and ferry-times, by heart.

I find I can suddenly read the score, know
when to turn the page: cack-handed,
my dull heart-tick always indicating left.
Sunlight squares the room
and I am snowblind. You slip away
on the wind. Your grandfather,
the pilot, stares out over the archipelago
from his solid wooden frame.

Only this? Those shivers at first-light, this succession
of moments, thread after thin thread — hours, years
drawn into the curve of a life — is this it? That pair
of dolphins, circling with their young, do they only
leap and tumble for a few hours, a few days? No,
I don't want to hear from you,
don't want to see your eyes.
There's more to life than this.

I can't dive, can't reappear; night's red
pyrotechnics are running late, the evening drags,
all prayer is hopeless, the message
in its bottle hasn't made it through the rocks.
The empty waves smash open
on the point at Finisterre.

I find a kind of hope here, in this
homelessness, in this place
where no one knows me —
where I'll be gone, like some
over-wintering bird,
before they even notice.

Healed by distance
and a landscape opening
under broken sun, I like this
mirror-less, flawless world
with no people in it,
only birds.

Unmissed, I can see myself again
in this great unfurling — the song,
the fledged leaf, the wing;
in these strong trees that
twist from the bud: their grey
beginning to green.

I tried to tell the Baronessa
she shouldn't cut the
biancospino
and certainly never bring it here indoors.
In my country you fetch
death into the house with hawthorn,
I cried;
but seeing I hadn't impressed her
with my folklore, tried again.
Better to leave it, wild,
standing like smoke in the olive groves
or in the hanging valley down below,
than set it on the dresser
and give us all bad luck.
Then, changing tack:
It was Christ's crown and the faeries' bed,
I said to my hostess, my poor confessor,
getting her attention back,
but 'Ladies' Meat' is another name
because it smells of sex and it smells of death.
Then brilliantly I second-guessed her:
For years I was only able to smell one.
Now I can only smell the other!
And with that — heaven bless her —
she rose, and left the table.

The wind-devils stir up the dust
and swirl over the roof-tops, waltzing
down the empty driveways
of all the grand hotels, where the horses
stand, hooded and stock-still
by the blaze of windows,
noses to the ground.
You go down the promenade, facing the sea
on this day of rain, this day of fire,
when a fusillade of castanets
shakes out the stitches of this
tightly woven plot of hour on hour on hour.

It is the call of another orbit:
follow it, go down to the horizon,
impending, overhung
by a lead-grey waterspout, a twister
more restless than the waves it spirals over,
a long salt whirlwind, whirlpooled to the clouds.
You must go down to where your feet
squeak on the wet shingle, catch
in the tangle of seaweed: this
is the moment, perhaps,
the long-awaited moment
that will save you from the end of your journey,
your days like links in a chain — motionless
progress, Arsenio, the familiar
frenzy of paralysis.

Listen: among the palm-trees
the tremulous stream of violin music
drowned, as it begins, by the thunder's
rolling iron drum.
The storm is at its sweetest
when the white eye of the Dog Star
blinks open in the brief blue
and the evening seems so distant
though it's coming soon enough;
lightning etches the sky, branching sudden
through the blushing light
like some tree of precious metal;
listen: the rumble of the gypsy drums...

Go down into the hurled, headlong dark
that's turned this noon into a night of lit globes
swaying down the shore —
and out there, where sky and sea
are all one shadow, slow fishing boats pulse
with acetylene —
till anxious drops
start from the heavy sky, and the earth
steams as it drinks it down, and you
and the world around have rain
lapping at your ankles; drenched awnings flag
and flap; you hear nothing but the giant shearing
hiss of water hitting the ground, the wheeze
of hundreds of paper lanterns
crumpling on the street.

And so, lost among the sodden mats and wickerwork,
you are a reed that drags its roots behind you;
they cling so tight you'll never be free;
trembling with life, you can only stretch out
to a ringing emptiness of swallowed grief;
the crest of that old wave rolls you,
overwhelms you again,
everything that can reclaim you
does — street and porch and walls and mirrors — all
lock you in with the frozen myriad dead;
and if you feel the brush of some gesture,
the breath of a word,
that, Arsenio,
might be the sign — in this dissolving hour —
of a strangled life that rose for you; the wind
carrying it off with the ashes of the stars.