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ISBN-13: | 9781906188283 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
Publication date: | 05/01/2015 |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 88 |
File size: | 200 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Observances
By Kate Miller
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Kate MillerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-906188-30-6
CHAPTER 1
WAVE ... CLOUDS PASS
Regarding a Cloud
In the ground is an eye,
satined and turtled,
regarding a cloud.
It studies the scene
from a patch in the earth
and reflects: I am part of that sky.
Just a picnicker's spoon
with no handle, exposed
by a scalping of growth,
and it's upside down,
mortared in mud – as jewels
were set in the eyeholes of gods
till they fell from the temples.
No-one thought twice about
gouging them free.
But it must be earthed here,
as Antony says, to 'amplify
concentration'
holding the trees in its stare,
balancing us on its shell.
Promise
The earth is scanty over London
clay, sour with runoff, a swollen underpass
of beige.
I hoped it would be sweet enough
for planting but already I'm forgetting
the purpose of my dig.
As a child I'd fossick
at the beach or down the garden,
reluctant – family photos show – to pose,
back turned against the camera, absorbed,
uncovering what lay below
not far below.
Now pebbles come to light,
they bob up like small heads.
I shuck them free of soil, saved
from the stew of bones, sewer pipe,
hardcore, next door's
tossed-over glass.
With thumb and fingertips
I clean a clutch of gluey eggs
– such promise
in their ovoid forms, damp
shells – although the shine's ephemeral:
they never feel like stones.
As shingle used to
yield its netsukes,
and sand its curios,
so even this poor ground is inexhaustible.
The Long Goodbye
You always had a way with clouds,
as if they'd started life with you, coddled
in your arms, reared out of bonfire
smoke or hay-steam from baked fields.
Landscape painters looked to you to catch
the best effects, clouds like leopards,
lions, the great processions of a Byzantine
October. Now there's little call for craft.
Or colour – years since you bore flowers
and drifted suns of pollen on the earth.
Tip up your grizzled chins and sky-watch.
Suck on your many pipes and offer me
bassoon pronouncements
on the drought, a fray of cirrus,
freakishness of hail, last hurricane.
Your old scars map a century of weather,
the haul of water, how you leaned
aslant the wind. You stand a long time
dying, but before you die, old tree,
let's drink another rain.
Lines To Convey Distance
Send me one hundred greys to catch
the chill and whip of water,
all those marine and aerial greys
for squalls, cloud, waves
in every cast of light,
also to catch the skirling
marks of different flights
when birds take off in pairs or flocks,
their streamlines paying out,
and put in samples of some even finer
greys, close quiet tones to suit
hunched blots of waders
who inspect their yards of mud
for life, singletons, rain-dark.
Longest Day
Before you leave, before the sea returns,
we draw out our walk as far
from houses and the spire as we dare,
collecting samphire,
salt jade for the passage out.
It grows on mud between the hulls
where broken boats have gone to grass,
become the settled parishes of wood and weeds
I hoped would anchor us.
And still we speak of journeying and home
in port and starboard words
until the pilot buoys and off-shore lights
begin to roll the estuary tar-sleek,
a metalled road beneath first stars.
Nightfall on the longest day
– it doesn't fall. Detaches,
lifts the warmth away.
Every Book is a Long Walk
I remember starting one, a worn green hardback
on a headland, warmed by sun but little visited.
If at first I skipped a page, my eye was met
by black-lashed wild pansies,
staring from the carpet in the dunes.
Here were horses, scrapping gulls – much like the book.
Two characters slipped off along a Baltic beach,
I sat by the Atlantic.
Scanning the sea he talked of prospects,
life not bound by trappings,
pastimes or the filial duties of their age.
And she believed the freedom he proposed
would suit her, à la mode and bridal
in the streaming lace of waves.
I closed the book. I walked and saw her faintly,
filmy in the shallows – then braving coarser surf,
undone to her shift and shivering,
grey as in a mirror
in an unfrequented room – passing
to and fro, passed by
as if she were the shoreline
ceding to, emerging from the tide.
Couple in the Park with No Kids
Beyond the scratchy skirt of yews
my ambling dog has nosed, a couple lies
engrossed, half-screened (have they skipped work?)
pleasure-seeking in the dusty earth.
High-shine, two cans askew in grass have given them away.
Flies graze,
a self-effacing moth lifts itself
off scabious, those pale, heavy-headed flowers.
At Kew one August we lay likewise side by side
on tombs, behind a pall of rhododendrons. That afternoon
a pride of pregnant women bloomed
along the gravel paths, juggernauts of happy families
drove swags of babies past.
No Place
Did you kip here on this lakeside bench, hunched
kid with pepper hair? You're shaking, are you scared?
Those are holes in your black trainers? Just begun
your London life by sleeping rough? (I'm trying not to
stare.)
You're deaf to my 'Hello' and dumb.
Eyes down, we both look sorry, blind to the pair
of crested grebes, crooked like question-marks, who skim
to a deserted clump of reeds, their nest year after year.
The Hoopoes Have Come Home
My father calls. He interrupts me
folding down a family of shirts and stiffened sheets.
He says the hoopoes have come
home. His eye is on them
now: they strut between the pines, prospecting,
always doubling back to that
patch where the tower burned.
With banded heads like hammers
they fine-pick in the dirt – wrecking
where we used to sit; in spring, he sighs,
it's only briefly green until the hoopoes come.
Time for his old lament (I fumble
the refrains) about the birds, forgiven
for their grubbing-up but never
letting him forget this was their field,
ditch and scrub he cleared for house, sheds, folly.
City birds, I say, behave as if our backyards
were the hood: crow speared another frog,
jays squabble three doors down, starlings
scrape gutters for the moss,
and all the while I'm watching skipping tits forsake
the ivy's closeness and flit
quick, flicker like matches lighting.
I do not ask after Mother.
Against This Light
You ask me, Marie-Amélie, am I the youth
who said goodbye last month?
To answer you
I'll paint myself against this light, immersed in
your first words from home, tempered in the blaze of blue
and gold that is an April sky in Rome.
In my high-ceilinged room the window opens
on a crinkled map of roofs and parapets.
Swallows clip the sill. In their bright air
I thrive.
I ache to think of you – confined,
the Cast Room stove not lit since Easter,
among the plaster limbs the master favours – frozen
forms I've left behind.
Everything I see
if I go down to watch the market in the Campo
moves: knives and scales flash at fish stalls
decked with lemons, to the thrum of forge and stable,
fresh stone-dust loads loaves and cheeses, and a girl
in carmine slips into the shade beyond a column,
out of the flap of sun-bleached linen.
I own I've fallen
more than half in love with Romans. Young or old,
they hold themselves as proud as any figure in a frieze.
I'm hungry for the way a woman turns her head,
the telling language of a trader's hand.
Alive or carved, they're definite and grand,
even in the shadows of an alley, warm.
all'antica
Hot with pink, fruit trees strip, slop blossom
on the rubble wall, when out [through garage doors]
across our path is thrust the gleaming barrel
of a mare – not a battered motorino – oiled
flanks, arched tail swinging from the bronze
rump like a sign above a shop.
Her handler's swearing as she bucks,
hooves ringing on the stones.
Between the trees stooped gardeners turn to look,
then go on, unconcerned, the tools to hand
unaltered since the year the Empress indulged
her husband's whim for orchards.
On Lower Marsh, the Wallflowers
self-seeded, streaky oxblood/English
mustard, breeze along hot bricks
in sunshine. Their sweet smell of sherbet
coaxes from the pissed-on wall
another possibility:
substitute hibiscus
for the small pink swimsuit
draped where it was found and left
to fade.
Under the arches in olive green
a man shouts out he always likes to
see a woman's collarbones. Only
April but she's taking off her cardigan
to be presented with a sheaf,
liver-dark in her white arms,
of wallflowers.
Not Dormant Now, la Belle au bois
If you want her, try the attic
where she won't be dressed much longer
in a painting shirt, old canvas shoes.
She's all for mingling
in the evening's passeggiata
among a crowd in pink and gold
escorted by a crocodile of cupids
on little clouds that sail
from Titian to the Biennale.
She's going to ride in water taxis
to and from Murano,
squander all her savings
on a longed-for chandelier.
I guess when she returns
she'll keep the house and garden
just as crummy as the locals do
in Venice. Let the cupboards smell
of must! I don't believe she ever will
replace that red ill-tempered rose
with one less spiky. Anyway, she rather likes
the scratch of briars on glass.
Passage
Within the wood a century is all
but lost, graves overgrown, headstones
tumbled, going-nowhere stairs,
disconnected from the distant dome and towers,
the rush of comfort from a passing train.
Wind and a pigeon hurry overhead
along green pipes of ash and elder.
Two branches hold the moment of their passage,
lacing, give them lease, like lungs.
Two paths diverge.
One leads a slow life
lying lush beneath the polished ivy,
the other has a pelt of sorts,
a rug of mulch, rag and bone of littered leaf.
Dog detects a trot of fox, the stop of feet.
And the path you'll take
meanders. Punts its snaky trace through weed,
as a boat – responding to the river's pull –
cleaves a road, rich and dark as bread, that carries
someone home
at first light, before green closes over.
LIFE CLASS
Patient at Paimio
Dusk lasts till midnight, dawn lights up at two,
long-drawn days – I follow Keats
and if a sparrow come before my window
I take part in its existence
and pick about ... On this path lingonberries
grow, where needles drop from feathered pines
to lie in rafts, browning, as my fellows do,
on the sun decks of our forest ship.
We never seek landfall – only I
take in the creak of woodland, thump of water
in the purifying plant, bird squawk, infrequent
engine thrums. A laugh drifts from the sauna
– some acrid edge of resin in the steam
triggers the old impulse to cough
as if bacilli kept on doubling daily,
shoving, crowding into the lift of my lung.
After the sweats, white nights, snow-blank
... so many passing hours scarcely sensed,
today I'm breathing – ozone – and I smell
the warming bark of leafless birches
budding in the light.
I'm in a clearing when I feel
the swell inside my sunken back,
a readying of wings.
Observances: The Chapels at Paleochora
In every tiny church
a tattered mat,
an old pair of plastic
or rush-seated chairs
placed neat and straight
before the vestiges of murals.
* * *
We have climbed the hill
and visited fourteen,
each with its whitewashed apse
each nearer to an empty
larder than the last,
preserving on a shelf,
beside a shallow dish of oil,
thin candles for a prayer,
a water bottle much re-used
and ironed red plaid
cloth on which a faded holy image rests.
* * *
Outside a nearly hidden door
where fig-leaves droop
old trees are proffering
black fruit.
Fallen almonds
still in thick grey coats
dry in the dust.
* * *
Silver-gilt, on thorny stalks,
tall brittle weeds,
brass umbrels
and a fence of blood-brown sorrel
spikes thrust from the verge
lances and arrows of desire.
* * *
A pilgrim's button, broken
mother of pearl, seeks to be blessed,
set down to dress a shrine.
Compelled, palms cupped,
we gather up and ferry
into cool stone rooms
simplest of gifts, the offerings.
The Deposition
A ladder has its old feet taped
to keep from scratching
parquet in the gallery.
How often it has stood there
flecked with paint, stiff as a tree,
beside the other ladder's picture
in the presence of familiar
tools from daily life:
nails, rope, bucket, knife.
From the Gods at Oz Adana, [Pas de
deux
a ritual observed
Light enough for us to see her
settling like a large gull to its ledge,
her shalwar faded to the once blue
colour of the bench
and light enough for him to go on
weeding rows of beans. Beneath
the vine she's shelling beans
he brought her in a basin.
Dusk gathers its brown air
above the earth they tended.
Insects hush
as bats begin to net the sky.
She goes indoors. A little light, perhaps
a single bulb, illuminates the room
where almost nothing's set
upon the table or beside their bed.
He cleans and stows his tools,
she brings outside two bowls.
A canopy of grapes is not so dense
it stops the moon
tracing their duet. Shooting stars
flare overhead and they look up.
He helps her to her feet. They step
into the garden, bowing to the night.
Pilgrimage
to the Palominos, Zippo's Circus
Unharnessed in the sun
they splay like Calder's sculptures
being placed by crane, and where they hover
muzzles scan the earth,
mole-skinned, mumbling at the turf.
One paws, another makes a stream of piss.
Heads up, one bites a rival, the pretty blond
kapok of shaken manes can't veil
big teeth which grip the gully of a corded throat.
Composed again, the tables of their spines
and buff boiled-egg behinds are suntraps,
sands smoothing dunes.
They'd overwhelm their devotees,
small girls on pilgrimage, but for CCTV and wire,
electrified, to keep the awestruck out.
The Apple Farmers' Calendar
And after all these years she wears
a skin of dirt. He didn't take her
down at the millennium,
too fond of letting his eye
run to her pale belly,
a quince compared to stripy
watermelons that block the light
beside the dented pewter bowl
weighed low by a pumpkin
heaved on the scales.
The woman at his stall
haggles for a better price
while, inches from the plank
where he wraps figs
in fig-leaves, Eve regards him
with her usual calm.
The apple in her hand
is coated in a powdering of dust,
swirled by the growers' trucks
that labour up the mountain.
Delicate, she offers it
time after time. If now and then
she slips, her painted toes
just touch the bluish paper
he keeps to parcel eggs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Observances by Kate Miller. Copyright © 2015 Kate Miller. 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.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
1 WAVE ... CLOUDS PASS,Regarding a Cloud,
Promise,
The Long Goodbye,
Lines To Convey Distance,
Longest Day,
Every Book is a Long Walk,
Couple in the Park with No Kids,
No Place,
The Hoopoes Have Come Home,
Against This Light,
all'antica,
On Lower Marsh, the Wallflowers,
Not Dormant Now, la Belle au bois,
Passage,
2 LIFE CLASS,
Patient at Paimio,
Observances: The Chapels at Paleochora,
The Deposition,
From the Gods at Oz Adana, Pas de deux,
Pilgrimage,
The Apple Farmers' Calendar,
Girl Running Still,
Under the Hill,
Life Class,
And now you,
Isolated Vocal Track,
3 VIGILS,
Landscape in Light Cast by the Moon,
Minding the Antiquarian Bookseller's House,
From the Sleeping Car,
God of Flame,
Colour Beginnings,
At the Root of the Wind is Strife,
Single Figures,
The Realism of Late Roman Portraits,
Solo,
Emergency Landing,
4 ENTER THE SEA,
Enter the Sea,
As It Was,
At the Dew Pond, West Dale,
The Shift,
Of Vertigo,
Sallyport,
After the Ban,
The Sea is Midwife to the Shore,
House at Sea,
Nelson's Last Walk,
Sea View and Separation, Sole Bay,
Stay,
The Crossing,
Again (reprise),
Notes,
Acknowledgements,