Nine Lessons from the Dark

Like a person, spookish, spying from on high

over the whispering of marram on the brae,

it stretched up out of a slew of scree

to be this: the peak’s thank-offering to the sky,

our hike’s lynchpin. And the sky was clear

when we started out, singing even up the sheerest

parts, enthusiasm roped to our

excellent spirits. Then the clouds thickened and the four

showers blurred into one – the going far more slur

than stone. Boots squeaked like tholes against the oar

and we lost the cairn, vanished somewhere in layer

upon layer of grey. It was yards away

when we saw it again: a huddle of granite as near

as bereavement, like a small tomb, like fear

that had dragged us to face it from where

we were safe in the glen; unnerved and blinking here.

Beside the thin woodland stream

which runs full at this winter’s end,

still this oasis of moss in the thorn

and blackberry bush and bracken,

the water running the same cold ribbon

through the flints’ fingers (the infant ferns’

sea-horse shapes among the bracts of primrose

sheltered in the wood from the worst)

to the same dammed and secret pond

dinted by drowned trees and their roots

where, as planned, I stole on one knee

and made you laugh, thank God, before you’d say.

Hospitals are ‘hot and sad’

and make her feel ill, my daughter says.

I’d held my broken wrist like a broken wing,

walking the streets between the X-ray unit

and the Maison de la Santé

Protestante, in Nîmes: now, girded

by resin, in a sling, wincing until the panadol

slugs the pain (not the bone-end’s grate so much

as a barbed asterisk, a drill’s deep bit),

I discover how many are willing to say

they’ve been there, done it, showing me

the scars, the precise spot where it fissured, or the way

however hard they try they haven’t got it back

quite as it was, twisting their hand like a doll’s

or as if offering something of their own harm.

The dead have had their say

but the living hang around

for a little longer, meeting them

halfway, pretending

all they’ve done is high

drama and worth preserving:

my hand is a shoot off the root

of a plant in the birthday X-ray

and the broken wrist’s that

dark parasite, introduced

by a lean on a ladder

too far, as if I was entranced

by something out of vision.

Cutting the cake, of late,

I’ve winced; but now the pain is true.

He cleaves the dirty mould

with a whining electric saw . . .

torture, or the idea of it – slipped

under, a metal bar is all that stands

between the psychotic circular blade

and what I can bear. Far

too casual, his expert’s languor. Then,

like a well-split coconut, it’s off!

A limp rag of a hand, the healed hinge

incapable even of acknowledgment . . .

thin, as if wasted, an empty haulm

that only needs the mind to fill it

with impulse, need, gesture –

the sugars flowing in like Fiorelli’s plaster,

a split reed singing at the lips.

The Congo River’s slippage of brown lake,

so wide at times it might, for all one knows,

Niagara over the horizon’s edge, unburdening

the weight of hippos (minnows in its wake)

and bobbing logs like twigs, swallowing pirogues

like seeds then thrashing to froth on rock

or shallowed suddenly by a sandbar,

tempted me to send it, probably, as far

as I could throw, like a stranded cartoon Crusoe

vying with the slim chances of root,

reef, net, surf-fleeced beaches tricked

out in whin or flesh, thalassic wrack

and thirty years or more of gathering storms

in which it still bounces like a periscope,

kept afloat by hope, not foundering, not flung

aside in dune-grass unopened by the lovers,

To the person that finds me pleeease can you write

not even swept beyond time’s shimmering line

to my own hand, the tight cap sticky with Fanta still

and the spelling sound . . . as if regret might know itself

as something never found by another, only,

but visible in the ocean’s vastness, over and over,

redeemed and floating, over and over in the swell.