from Blackwater Quartet, selection 84

after Pablo Neruda

Furies and Sufferings

(Las furias y las penas, 1934)

We are made bone together, in comb

of ribs, in blood pooling, a country

to walk in, a tiger weather.

We skin the minutes, wrap ourselves

in stalking hide, this salt

ours, tasted, running with the vein’s jade

and the kisses melting and running.

You, this bully stance against me,

this insomnia, smoky tendril glass

breaking against sleep, rung, the bell’s note

wrapped sugared and such fragrance,

your swung hips, this pout of expectancy

liquid downy and met and met—

everything else, bone, its incisor edge,

floating jelly lenses

stare into our animal extinction, here,

the tongue’s requirements, its flame-jet thirst.

Make me anyone, make me burning

in this core, circlings of heat white sticky

bursting as a tropic, a voice,

the leaf’s mouth and your eyes’ swarming

insect light, make me anyone with you,

the skewered voice

and bondage silk, its water smoothness.

A painted scene, the smalltalk

boozy air hanging on your words,

quivers

and your eyes sought, seeking—

the light suspended, the polished grit of sun

and your teeth marks in blood,

your legs bruised with solar systems

and the petal footsteps opening

to the journey,

and yet, more, yet in you

the drunken streets, destinations

and shifts of calico adorning

cathedral ruins, huts at tide mark

and you waiting still

in driftwood and the mined vein,

the swollen cell, the sloughed life,

its skin of distance and the going you touch

and the timber’s grain and the iron touch

electrifies, rockets through this black.

…

Observe the moon, rusting in the dark,

the mist of jasmine, the silt of vanished seas,

the ivory yellowed and the image trailing breathless

in that knife-edge air, your sapphire navel

licked and the weight of roses,

and your breasts a roundness

and the moon a roundness that pulls the tongue.

Answer in the bareness of days, in blood

leeching from the sand, in red remembrance,

the dawn primed with corpses

and the slow rot of light begun here,

this month, its tortoise pace

and the ox-hide hour whipped on, death’s procession

and the woman called after flowers,

its bloom and the stem’s spur.

We have eaten our mouths, stuffed with hair

and the tongue’s gold, a pounding

of meal, a bread swallowed root and light.

…

A day remembered, it was forever

and nothing, a day predicted and still

the long knowing of it was enough,

a Thursday, I shall call it Thursday

the way all days would be so-called

from that day, meeting you there

naked in the dance,

or moving through deep water

or laid out in our deaths, entering you

and you above me and around me

and the sounding bell of your presence

the air swallows gulping

and the shell and the sound breaking.

…

I keep this harvest and the storm

over it, and the burst season

of cherry and the tasted

portions of your skin.

Tell me what month, what skin

shall we dress in, the burning soil

below the window, the waves.

Our lives turn through leaves.

The season’s grime

falls around you, clothes you

in the yellow shout of leaves

and autumn’s corrosion.

Your stocking foot blurs

and this motion is what we were,

fingers tobacco stained, shades

drawn blind, doors

bolted against leaving, this rubble

drawn tight into the planet

stabbing and thrown against

the mountain’s high snows,

dove senses, flying

one hour more, the blood turning

on it, this boil of collapsed

time we made in our mouths,

everything born in fear, waiting,

in our mouths the asking.

Hothouse Flowers

In Haworth, West Yorkshire, the Brontë parsonage attracts devotees to the writings of sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Their father, Patrick, was a Church of England curate, and had the living of the parsonage. He was born in Ireland and his original name was Brunty. Two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died young from tuberculosis, probably contracted during their time at Cowan Bridge School, also called the Clergy Daughters' School, a notorious place even in the early 19th century. Effectively, it was a charity school for children of lower Middle Class clergy. Horrific passages in Jane Eyre recall the girls' time there.

Their mother, Maria, died of uterine cancer, and brother Branwell, named after his mother's family, after early promise died at 31 addicted to alcohol and opium.

The sisters published a book of poems under the pseudonyms, Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell. This was followed by the publication Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey. Charlottle's first novel, The Professor, based on her personally intense feelings for Constantin Héger while working as a governess in Brussels, was rejected. Undaunted, she set about writing what was arguably the best known of the sisters' writing, Jane Eyre.

At her brother's funeral, Emily was reported to have 'caught a cold', but it's more likely that she began to exhibit advanced symptoms of tuberculosis, and died less than two months after her brother. She was so emaciated that her coffin was said to be only 16 inches in width. The attending carpenter had to alter a child's coffin for the purpose.

Anne wasn't as celebrated as her other two sisters. Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was prevented from being republished after her death by Charlotte. Charlotte wrote to her publisher that "Wildfell Hall hardly appears to me desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake, it was too little consonant with the character, tastes and ideas of the gentle, retiring inexperienced writer." This prevention is considered to be the main reason for Anne's being less renowned than her sisters, although now the novel is considered one of the first sustained feminist novels. Anne died of tuberculosis and was buried in Scarborough, with only one mourner at her funeral.

Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, and soon became pregnant. She died after a long period of morning sickness, probably exacerbated by malnutrition and dehydration. Typhus was allegedly a contributing factor, most likely contracted from Tabitha Ackroyd, the Brontë household's oldest servant, who died shortly before Charlotte.

Water seeping through the graveyard on the slope outside the parsonage fed into the village's main water supply, and was probably the source of repeated typhus outbreaks. On their local errands, the sisters wouyld have walked past the earthen 'privy' by the roadside and open to public view. The dusty road, the stench of excrement, the bloody flux, are all woven into the Brontë narrative.

Patrick outlived them all, dying at the age of 84.  He was the author of Cottage Poems (1811), The Rural Minstrel (1814), numerous pamphlets and newspaper articles, and various rural poems. Although he accorded his children great freedom and unconditional love, it's now considered that he embittered their lives due to his eccentric habits and peculiar theories of education.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 83

Man From Earth

In the well I lined with stones

the water clears.

Born of decent people,

I look to my conduct, and see in signs

my life my only true inheritance,

sheltered in that strength of witness

as fate is fostered in the stars.

Before the register of any beginning

there is inference to something

darkly visible, instinctive within us.

A plain man and simply spoken,

shall I sojourn in that lost dimension

until my creature code is broken,

and believe my life my own

as signature of that core sensation—

a silence, transfigured by affection?

Divining in the air

the infinite arrangement of another sky,

I serve the time with labour as I will,

by the river in the wilderness

a mercury persona posturing through mirrors,

my voice no soundless ray, or shape

torn from time to ghost among the ruins,

but as a living being in a living air

untroubled by the destiny of nations,

before the invention of letters and crochets,

a brightness binding generations

with hours which echo into days.

Is my father’s house my own,

or do I build a tomb with borrowed stones?

Though clan books house the rights of kin,

when the logos of the feudal life has flown

nameless down some corridor—

the motto on the crest of arms an echo

lost in echoes beyond the darkened door—

what seal of merit defines the man

born to the axe’s double edge

and soft plumes the colour of claret?

I am as I seem, as I was and will be,

in the manner of the simple heart

cut down in the faction fray in honest aid of kinsmen.

Such are the mutations of this life,

in dread of the turning tide and stars

or in the sleepy resolutions of an endless afternoon,

in sudden death or in death that is slow,

in the wash of centuries, unknowing and unknown.

I am as I seem, as I was and will be,

and cherish these freedoms as a separate sense,

the workday sequence of the present tense transcended,

the slug of gravity now the shimmering woman-shape of time

whose grains defy the lateness of the hour—

the parchment of a thousand years decayed,

the names of the elders illuminated dust,

the list of tithes for their souls’ repose now monkscript

scattered in the evening’s merest rays.

I listen for them still, those voices from the clearing:

the Saxon Fulbertus and his sons;

Petrus, the eldest, hunting sanglier,

harpwire of the bowstring taut,

his arrow home before tusk could tear;

Helias in orders, cloistered cold in Paisley Abbey

and there to live The Life;

Sire Robertus if the ilk

descending to the Ulster Scots of Antrim—

my kinsman there a captain who served the Interregnum,

and later wed a widow, daughter of the Chancellor

and heiress to Moneen estate,

her father’s land in Donegal along the river Foyle.

Pride proves the hero.

As with the oldest god in the oldest myth

outwitted by men who will not submit,

so pride proved impetus to men of good name

hard-pressed to flee Charles Stuart’s reign—

gathering their families and faith

to cross to Maryland on the farther shore,

no rooftree but a Bible

and a clock inscribed to the appetite of time,

tempus edax rerum, with nothing as it was before.

The gauze of memory masks ancient ills,

the squeal of gulls on Chesapeake Bay

more foreign then than now:

death in childbirth, fever in the marshes,

ear brands on cattle and tobacco in the fields,

something about labour and the course of dreams,

and what the love of duty yields.

It the end, it all comes down

to rough hands working sun to sun, the life in the land,

and names free from beggar kingdoms

wrung out by princes and their kind.

Here, the forest runs to the horizon,

to the spine of blue haze we call the Appalachians

and into the valley of the Cumberland beyond.

A man can follow the way of his life

yet never see the end as it all comes down to voices,

speaking softly under still pines so tall,

your sure steps falling hushed on moss and nettles.

Time is nothing if not this.

Where is that world now?

There’s hymn enough in voyages

for those dispirited by the old routine

of fences strung like cages

for the keeping-in of beasts and men,

though barbed wire and meadow grass

take differently to sun and rain.

And what of the world we left behind,

what atlas to assuage that cold geography?

I was exile then, the bleak North Sea

breaking sleek as sealskin on the sands,

walking alone speaking poetry aloud,

myself to myself, until the words grew distant,

like words for people in another life.

… the windy day I saw her…

a lady from London

riding bareback in the hills

hard by those precinct ruins, some fortress family extinct,

her face so fair, her figure lithe upon her smoky mare:

our breath rose lazily in the chill

and for a moment mingled

under skies of a season

not quite spring.

And what is love if not to follow,

to swear the vow, and kiss the kiss

that fires the magic in the ring,

and is this the world, the sign, the spark?

A sunlit morning in the month of May,

a Saturday in St. James’s Park,

she nearby me in the shade

watching people watching her

feeding bread crusts to the swans,

the great black cob and cygnet runts,

beaks in hand, the lucky ones;

our flat in Victoria so small

a shilling in the meter kept us lit and warm,

our milk outside the window on the cill,

and love’s refrain at midnight

where there’s any love at all:

will you marry me… I will.

By their simple elegance I know them,

my children tumbling in their play,

with features as fair as their mother is fair,

should I know them in no other way.

And what will they say of me

when their children’s children ask—

a picture of a gentleman from the century past,

the clothing quaint, the pose uncertain,

the colours in the background faint?

Leaves brighten, a book of verse

and heirloom of the early days:

turning through the pages there

I found a filament of grey,

a human hair, nothing less or more,

yet there before the windowpane

where morning played along the strand

poised brittle on the fulcrum of the light,

I felt the gulf and bond of ghosts in time,

the sign of those who never were

and are again no more.

Where is that world now?

The maps have bled to neutral tones,

the blanks that border in the mind

the colour of the exile years

remembered in some future time.

In the well I lined with stones

the water clears.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 82

North

Beyond the bowling greens of winter wheat

hedged with hawthorn— beyond Lincolnshire,

the landscape slumps north

past freight yard pallet fires, and back gardens

hung with Monday’s freezing washing.

A scraggle-oak profile shoulders slate cloud,

and pylons mark the distance west

with cables, humming overheads

diminishing to points of no return

trans-Pennine or the Borders.

Our seamless Intercity

blurs by the mucky brass of stations

Victorians engineered, their timetables beaded

in biscuit brick, vaulted iron, and rock-face

skewerings beneath the Norman hundreds.

The pit towns, steel towns, the Tyne towns

forging screw and funnel for dead fleets,

survey zero in the tide and from it

sink the mark to Gateshead’s Angel,

its bloom of rust a reckoning.

The underworld beyond the carriage windows

nudges us awake: a girl, hair flying, on a field dyke

by a ditch and upturned caravan,

mouths something we each believe

we understand, waving wildly as we pass.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 81

Fired-Earth Figures in Red Relief

(Pompeii, AD 79)

A shaky, freehand shoreline mocks the notion

of perimeters— leggy, Italianate,

the slip-stack tiles and melting oleander

pooling to a bas-relief of broken gods.

Lizards cling to Mars, the alphanumerics

of his dedication lost to shrugging earth,

volcanic ash and knock-kneed, dazed verticals:

underfoot, smithereens of fractal tempus.

The scenery is goat trails, twisting cart ruts.

The foreground figures sprawl in fixed positions

of tableaux heat and vacuum, everyday life

a held breath, sculpted lastly fallen, spellbound.

Their memories survive these exhumations,

scale models of imagined cities dreaming,

neither sleeping nor awake, patient within

the asphyxia of blue skies swollen red.

In the die trace of streets, a neatness nowhere

in geography accepts time’s tourists, here—

these others, as we, but different now, cast

cold in gypsum— once fizzing, festival things.

No bold poses, mimicking the immortals:

instead, on a day much like any other,

a field hand, pausing on the slopes, sees sparrows

burst and burn, before the shaking loose of stars.