Read an Excerpt
Keats Lives
By Cannon Moya Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Carcanet Press Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78410-061-2
CHAPTER 1
Winter View from Binn Bhriocáin
In the mountain-top stillness
the bog is heather-crusted iron.
A high, hidden mountain pond
is frozen into zinc riffles.
We have tramped across a plateau
of frost-smashed quartzite
to the summit cairn.
Far below, in February light,
lakes, bogs, sea-inlets,
the myriad lives being lived in them,
lives of humans and of trout,
of stonechats and sea-sedges
fan out, a palette of hammered silver,
grey and silver.
Two ivory swans
fly across a display case
as they flew across Siberian tundra
twenty thousand years ago,
heralding thaw on an inland sea –
their wings, their necks, stretched,
vulnerable, magnificent.
Their whooping set off a harmonic
in someone who looked up,
registered the image
of the journeying birds
and, with a hunter-gatherer's hand,
carved tiny white likenesses
from the tip of the tusk
of the great land-mammal,
wore them for a while,
traded or gifted them
before they were dropped
down time's echoing chute,
to emerge, strong-winged,
whooping,
to fly across our time.
(British Museum, April 2013)
Finger-fluting in Moon-Milk
We are told that usually, not always,
a woman's index-finger
is longer than her ring-finger,
that, in men, it is usually the opposite,
that the moon-milk in this cave
retains the finger prints and flutings
of over forty children, women and men
who lived in the late Palaeolithic.
Here, in the river-polished Dordogne,
as the last ice-sheets started to retreat
northwards from the Pyrenees,
in a cave which is painted
with long files of mammoths
and gentle-faced horses,
a woman, it seems, with a baby on her hip
trailed her fingers down through
the soft, white substance
extruded by limestone cave-walls
and the child copied her.
Today, the finger-flutings remain clear,
the moon-milk remains soft;
as we trundle through the cave's maze
in our open-topped toy train
we are forbidden to touch it.
With no gauge to measure sensibility
we cannot know what portion
of our humanity we share
with someone who showed a child
how to sign itself in moon-milk
one day, late in the Old Stone Age.
(Rouffignac, 2010)
Four thimbles
were sieved out of the mud of the riverbank
in the cloister of the convent of Santa Clara a Velha,
were dug out of silt with the convent itself
which had started to sink into Mondego waters
one year after the last stone carver had wiped the dust
off the twined leaves, off the doves
above the door capitals.
In May light, broad sandstone vaults
are sand-blasted, clean as stones fallen
from glacial till at the sea's edge –
clean of mud, of candle smoke,
almost of history.
For seven hundred years the waters rose,
drowning the blue-tiled fountain and the cloister gardens.
The nuns raised and raised the church floor
until psalms were sung high among the vaults.
Finally, they built on higher ground.
Farm horses were stabled in the nave,
the rose window became a farmhouse door.
Four battered silver thimbles
were dredged up with needles, scissors,
broken crockery,
cloister tiles.
Crossed lovers,
widowed noblewomen
or peasant girls who placed them
on middle or ring fingers,
who bent their heads
to stitch plain habits or fine altar linen
were sisters, but only
as stars are sisters,
who form a constellation
but inhabit different planes and eons.
Their stitching talk was
of treachery and love betrayed,
clanking crusades, inquisitions, dynasties
on the rise or on the wane,
new worlds to the west
full of gold and murder,
of fresh bread, olives and always
the rising waters.
Small things survive inundations –
thimbles,
blue tiles,
doves.
(Coimbra, 2013)
'Beware of the Dog'
Cave Canem,
the threshold mosaic warned
but not Cave Montem;
although there had been earthquakes,
no one suspected the mountain,
or understood the shunt and dive
of the earth's plates.
or the burning tides that drive them.
With a long wooden spatula
Celer, the baker, the slave
of Quintus Granius Verus,
slid this round wholemeal loaf,
with both of their names
branded into it,
from the brick oven
hours or minutes before
ash fell like hot snow
and hid their city.
(British Museum, 2013)
Burial, Ardèche 20,000 BC
No bear or lion ever raked him up,
the five-year-old child,
victim of illness, accident or sacrifice,
buried in a cave floor
high above a white-walled, roaring gorge
shortly after the ice-sheets had retreated.
Someone sprinkled his grave with red ochre,
someone tied a seashell around his neck,
someone placed a few flint blades by his side,
and under his head someone laid
the dried tail of a fox, perhaps
a white fox.
In the Textile Museum
for M. Cannon (1915–2005)
These are the cloths of Egypt:
a baby's silk bonnet,
padded and lined, and trimmed
with strips of faded,
finely-stitched
red and green linen;
a tapestry tunic ornament
with its woven image
of a woman in a short tunic
carrying a baby on her back
across a river;
a fine wool curtain
whose perfect, threadbare
blue, green and orange fish
for seventeen centuries
have flashed to and fro
through its watery weave;
I will never meet the weavers
of Antinöe on the Nile
but I remember the swish and click-click-click
of my mother's treadle sewing machine
as she bent to it, intent;
the tissue rustle of a dress pattern
as she sliced through it
with her good scissors;
her appraising eye, by the sitting-room fire,
as she measured a growing piece of knitting
against the arm of one or other growing child,
while behind her, on a high shelf
her books of poetry,
bought before she married,
sat under light dust.
Love slips easily through the eye of a needle,
words clothe us;
not everything ends up in a book.
(Musée des Tissus, Lyon)
I wanted to show my mother the mountains –
the Bauges in deep snow,
pink in the evening light.
Why did I want to show her mountains
five years after she was dead?
She was as terrified of heights
as any eighteenth-century traveller ...
Perhaps I wanted to show her mountains
because so often she had said,
Oh, look, look!
Bees under Snow
In a valley beside the black wood,
this year there are fifty-two beehives –
orange and blue cubes with zinc lids,
raised on long girders.
Last winter, under a foot of snow,
they were square marshmallows in a white field.
By a minuscule door lay a few dead bees
and one or two flew about distractedly
but the bees inside hovered in a great ball
shivering to keep warm, to stay alive,
moving always inwards towards the globe's centre
or outward towards its surface.
As much as their hunt for sweetness
or their incidental work, fertilising the world's
scented, myriad-coloured flowers
to bear fruit for all earthbound, airborne creatures,
this is part of their lives,
these long months of shivering, of bee-faith.
November Snow
Our boots creak down through a foot
of white shafted with blue. The hedges,
humped and swayed under huge burdens,
white mammoths' heads.
From under a smothered bush
to the trunk of a young oak,
runs a tiny track,
oval prints on both sides of a broken line –
someone's frozen tail.
and the young oak scatters
wide its bounty –
gold bullion on white linen.
Primavera
A first sighting,
five low primroses,
and later, near the compost,
a sliver of white among clumped shoots –
a snowdrop splits its green sheath,
and high birdsong in the hazels –
a jolt to realise that here too,
below snow-shawled Alps
with their tunnels and ski-stations,
this is St Bridget's Eve.
This is the evening when my father
used to knock three times on the scullery door
and wait for an invitation to enter
with a bundle of cut rushes, saying
Téigi ar bhur nglúine,
fosclaigí bhur súile
agus ligigí isteach Bríd.
Older, he told me his sisters used to vie
to be the one to knock three times
before entering with the first greening.
What ritual were they re-enacting?
Or we, in the warm yellow kitchen, suddenly full
of rushes and scissors and coloured wool-ends,
what ceremony were we weaving there,
folding the silky stalks into crosses
to hang above the door
of each room in the house,
or what do those little island girls celebrate
who still carry the Brideóg, the spring doll,
from house to welcoming house,
if not the joyful return
of the bride of Hades after three months of deep
wintering, if not a first sighting of Persephone
among the rushes in a wet western field?
And what caution was told in the hesitation,
until that third knock granted admission,
what fear of deception, of late frosts,
of February snow and dead lambs?
Our fears are different now,
of floods and fast-calving glaciers,
of birds and beasts and fish and flowers forever lost
and the earth's old bones pressed for oil.
But our bones still bid her welcome
when she knocks three times,
when she enters, ever young,
saying
Kneel down,
open your eyes
and allow spring to come in.
The Tube-Case Makers
(Les Ephemères)
This one-inch mottled twig
is built of silk and stone.
Inside it, under a larva's translucent skin,
are shadowy, almost-ready wings,
a heart that pumps and pumps.
For two or three years
it trundled about
in the shallows of a mountain river
in this stone coat, eating leaf-debris,
adding, as it grew, a little sticky silk
to one end, a few more tiny stones,
until the time came to shut itself in,
to almost seal both ends of its tube –
as intent on transformation
as any medieval anchorite.
It is not true that it
turns into a green soup
but how does it happen,
the breaking down of redundant muscles,
the building of flight muscles
as a grub becomes stomachless,
rises out of the river,
for one summer's day, to mate,
alight at nightfall,
and lay the eggs
that have kept its tribe alive
since it rose in clouds
around the carbuncled feet of dinosaurs –
with each tiny,
down-drifting egg
encapsuling
a slumbered knowledge
of silk,
stone
and flight?
Fly-Catcher
Last month, Doris, the bird-bander,
told us about a one-legged bird, a fly-catcher
who traced the spine of the Appalachians
year after year, and flew south,
balancing her tiny, tattered body
down through Mexico
all the way to South America
and back to the same Philadelphia hedgerow
to draw breath among cat-birds and orioles,
to be caught in the same birders' net,
to raise brood after brood, and then
to balance on a twig,
on her single, fettered leg,
to feed on passing insects,
to store fat for her next Odyssey.
Life can be so rough,
yet we can't get enough of it.
Keats Lives on the Amtrak
for Jim and Kathy Murphy
Today, on the clunking, hissing, silver train
between Philly and New York,
the African-American conductor squeezed himself
into the dining car seat opposite,
genially excused himself and,
when I responded, asked why my novel
was full of page-markers –
'You have it all broken up' –
and I said that I was teaching it.
He leaned forward, smiled, and said,
'I'm going to get a t-shirt with
Keats Lives on it. This time of year,' –
he gestured towards the window,
trees were blurring into bud –
'when everything starts coming green again,
I always think of him ...
A thing of beauty is a joy forever,
Its loveliness increases, it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us...'
I told him that it was a Dublin taxi-driver
who first told me
that Keats claimed his only certainties were
the holiness of the heart's affections
and the truth of imagination.
He took a ballpoint from
the pocket of his uniform jacket,
wrote down the quote,
asked where it came from,
as I had done, two decades earlier
in the back of a taxi,
as hundreds had
since the young, sick apothecary
penned it to his friend.
'That is a bombshell', he said,
'I'm going to give that to my little girl tonight –
Oh, light-winged dryad ...'
The intercom announced next stop, Trenton
and the steel wheels began their loud, long scream.
He hauled himself up out of the seat,
smiled again and, drawing a line
across his chest with his thumb, said,
'Keats Lives'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Keats Lives by Cannon Moya. Copyright © 2015 Carcanet Press Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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