Lesley Saunders
A Person is Not a Landscape
As always, it’s the hills that impress me, their bare mauve cones
and the wisps of high cirrus hanging about like old smoke
though I notice my colleagues prefer to turn the other way
towards the endless renewing of sea and sky, the view over the bay.
I remember we clinked as we trod, trowels and steel rods
imprinting our soft pockets, swifts dinking over our heads,
then the turbine of midges, an occasional white sparkle off the stones
as we rootled in ditches, listening for the tap or scrape of the unknown
yet also, I think, unwilling to imagine the mountain leaping out of its skin,
the trees turning the silver backs of their leaves to the burning wind.
Most of the gold had gone; what else was there under the rubble and ash?
(We’d heard a whole statuette had been gentled up from beneath the crush.)
In time, I confess, it came to obsess me. What kind of space is a person,
what shape is made in the air by her passions, prayers, reasons?
We poured plaster into the wounds of the city, watching while it congealed
until we could see the shapes people made in the tuff like hares in a field:
the shallow platters of their bellies, the calderas of their breasts,
the elegant arcades of their legs, the meditational hoods of their heads,
the lipped ceramics of their ears, the locked cabinets of their chests,
the peripateias of their elbows, the lotuses of their wrists,
the exhortations of their arms pulling each other closer,
the heavenly domes of their eyelids, the last refuges of their toes.
Their bodies — what else could I call them? — became a dead, leaden white,
their clothing and skin bled a stale darkness into the day’s stark light
and I began to wonder, what have I done, what could it possibly mean,
if we were stealing their freedom, dreaming we’d set them free?
What was real was the cloudburst of a man’s breath like a shout on his tongue
and the fire in the mountain that put itself out in his lungs.
The New Look
‘horse-(chariots), painted crimson and with joiner’/ work complete, supplied with reins. The rail(?) is of fig-wood, with fittings(?) of horn, and there is (no?) ‘heel’(?).’ Linear B tablet
There had just been a war and in its wake
came glamour, cinch-waisted, gloved and hatted;
up and down the land the soft scrape
of tailor’s pins on tissue, tiny stencils of sound
as women and their apprentice-daughters knelt
to their guesswork: barathea, organza, jacquard, poplin,
reading in the dots and dashes darts, back-half-belts
seven-eighths sleeves, side-vents, double-peplums
while dragons’ teeth sprang up in the aftermath.
The trick was turning the chiffon or buffalo
carefully round on the needle or shoulder of earth
goading garments or armour into eye-catching poses,
greek still being a classical affair very vogue
very english, glaphyròs and taffeta to mid-calf,
when suddenly out of a new-fangled past a brogue
blew in like a bare-arsed ruffian ka-ko to-ra-ke ko-ru,
his grey clay of man-verbs threatening a landslide
of glottals stuffed in the throats of foot-soldiers
holing out in some tora bora on rations of flies
and dry winds through an age of iron and thunder:
all the war-words that had been trying like utility frocks
run up from parachute-cloth to forget themselves
and what they stood for, all those lives, times, locked
tightly in, writing with no reading, all the key-words in hiding.
There had been a war, or soon would be again,
another lingo to go missing in action or awol,
its shot silks and syllables left out in the sing-song rain
all greek, no cribs, no titles, just these tiny stencils of sound.
Everything
‘This man is dying not because of something that has happened to him but because of everything that has happened to him.’ Michael Wood, At the Movies
‘Aun aprendo [ I am still learning]’ Francisco Goya, aged 83
write the story backwards just as you found or invented him:
how the pain had become a parody of agony
how the white noise of his own voice
had wound itself like a sheet round his mind;
how the thin wafer of strangers’ kindness
had grown too hard to swallow, how his own life
had turned into an impossible act to follow;
you could mention how his best friend told the world
about this deaf, clumsy, weak old man he knew
that his notes add he was suffering from spasms of the bladder,
hardening of the bowels, an unpardonable tumour,
that his eyes had started playing fancy tricks on him,
that even before his stroke he walked with sticks;
you could say — who’s to argue? — he’d had ten more years
of borrowed hours, squeezing himself a breath at a time
through the narrowest of cracks, only rarely looking back.
But do not neglect to tell us how he went on painting
pushing crayons when a brush wouldn’t obey or stay in his hands,
that his patrons were all ill or abroad, that his only son was a lush,
that he knew death best as assassin or hangman, blood on the tracks —
and how then he teased with dabs and puns of carbon-black
on ivory squares, for all the world like a man searching
in his shirt for fleas, furious and alive, furious
but alive, a lunatic in a sack, a grinning buddha swinging through the air;
at last how the flat line of the horizon slewed straight at him
flew him out of everyone’s reach and way past anyone’s imagining.
Eriocheirsinensis: Chinese Mitten Crab
This is my last self, hard-backed
I became a goddess of the old kind
— oh here comes the Iandslip
as low as you can get. I am not made opal
