Death in Samarkand

Your star’s fixed firm in subtle skies

over the orderly Registan, square

in its maidan; mosque and madrassa ripple

their domes under a cut moon.

Out in the shelter of midnight’s observatory,

your sextant, embedded supple in marble,

measures the sharp shaft from its arc

into the niched matrix of night,

Ulugh Beg.

You pin it down with the gazer’s art,

but decline the empire left to your care,

the son shut out, his fate inclined

to your Hajj and the hunt. And you still commune

with those points in space the Zij-i Sultani

captures. A blood-gout will garble

what’s left when their sparkle is dark, faint

on the page. Your last dawn’s in flight,

Ulugh Beg,

as you fall slant between column and table

of that caught heaven you scribe. Now blink

its blaze from the end of your irritant day,

for no armillary sphere will enable

your sure ascension from life at the brink

as your sun rushes away, away.  

                                                

Snow at Easter

The city’s held in a shiver of snow.

Two days back, daffodils

bounced in a spring wind;

now they are blasted and black.

Venus and Mars unpair

on this crisp night of a moon-thin,

silver dropped behind lumps of cloud

heavy on house tops:

we hold beneath weight,

resentment a yard ahead,

all light out.

She moves beyond

our stand, rising and dipping

with the year’s jarred cycle,

missing the merging

of shoot and snow and star

while the stretched web quivers.

Mad decorators

My husband recently floated the idea of black wallpaper in his study. I don't usually issue vetos, but this time did, foot firmly down and voice raised. As a child, I'd had enough of my mother's sometimes mad ideas of wall decor and she would redecorate every six months or so - an outcome of her frustration and lost dreams of going to Art School, I'm sure.

One time she painted the kitchen scarlet "so it seemed warm in winter." It drove the whole family crazy within days, we all complained and even she finally conceded it was too much. It was soon repainted in a very cool cream.

Yet she had some fabulous sucesses. One was redecorating the living room. She'd found some rolls of wallpaper handprinted with big trails of white camellias and their muted green leaves and just a touch of the palest pinks and yellows in the petals' hearts, all on a very pale silvery-grey ground. She painted the walls the same pale grey, then hung the paper in blocks so that a good depth of the painted walls acted as a frame. After, she found some satin-striped wallpaper the same shade as the palest green of the leaves, cut it along the stripes into narrowish bands and pasted those up at the edge of the wallpaper to act as a coloured frame. With that, white-painted woodwork, and curtains of the same green as the wallpaper border, the effect was superb. It was much admired by friends, neighbours and family and did her ego no end of good.

The craze to redecorate died back when she took up oil painting again in her late fifties, exhibited and sold her paintings thereafter. There was, probably, no time to spend on walls after that.

Moral? Don't frustrate talent.

Milestones: 1. Kingdom

Mist rises this morning;
hills fade as I watch.
By my gaunt fence,
the elder becomes grey

bones; it waits, a shadow

of shape and memory

where the robin’s lull
unnerves the wood beyond.
The elements are out
and I cannot clarify.

My focus is one small patch
around my feet, the grass

my aim in a cast dawn,
one thin shoot taut
where drops depend
on the blade’s arc.

My faces tremble
across their mirrors,
captive, an atom’s

width from extinction
and nowhere to go,
but down.

Over the turning core,
earth puddles and slicks:
one slip and all roots gone,
I am giddy and sick
in a fall where haze
clings cold on my skin.

A small wind
shifts the air,
the beetle flies;
my only tokens
for each fat season
when gold fields shine.

This poem and the ten following are part of the sequence, Milestones.

2. Foundation

 


This garden of mine

is wild with seeds.

I disorder the bed for spring,

grown tough, uprooting weeds

grown deep under a thin sun.

Out of time with the seasons,

I force a habit to dig,

continue to sift where purification

is never perfection under a cold sky.

Hard clouds repeat and repeat,

cast by wind across winter;

the paled sun shivers, bedded in grey.

Acts of an old star

are constantly with me,

shooting and dropping full

from the Virgin's sheaf:

in my living is their foundation.

I reach rock

where the roots clutch dry,

a confusion of need

sunk sure in the fault.

Time's web locked

their wrong growth.

Ripped from their bed,

they maze in my hand,

unlearn the way of the ground.

The stone is pristine now.

I rise up from the split and cut of it

where matter is form and custom

held by impending earth.

It shadows and shines

under a new plane of light,

a tone of stars

beyond our common gods.

3. Reverberations

I

Plainsong of water-fall,

reprise of leaf-drop,

peace,

but night is all boom

reporting terror,

the slap of each wave

an echo of origin

where grieved air howls.

II

On my knees before fire,

which is God, which guy,

I cannot tell.

The wind translates

a chemical fog;

it stings belief from sight,

rattles old breath

through my tight throat

under the cut moon.

III

Rockets flare green, splay red,

spatter silver, freckle, scatter.

Sparks hide in the dark,

rhythms run out to a faint beat

beyond the lie of their long fall.

IV

Behind me and full
the house lights shaft.

4. Forever

You fish between clouds tonight,

eyepiece rolled to her full cycle,

catch her in your wide net.

She clocks eternity,

day-arc, dark-swing,

dame of the turning wheel,

charm of the evening breeze,

cool of the morning desert,

mistress of deep seasons,

the mover of lovers firmed by your scrying,

her rise a slip in the night

where she clings to the dropped sun’s orb.

I watch you watch her ebb from the sky,

veined hand fixing and twisting

on that bright slave to her compelling lord,

mourner of his drowned passions

fallen over your hard world’s edge,

beyond the thrust and suck of the tide.