Written by
Ruth Padel |
(After Pushkin)
Look at the bare wood hand-waxed floor and long
White dressing-gown, the good child's writing-desk
And passionate cold feet
Summoning music of the night - tumbrils, gongs
And gamelans - with one neat pen, one candle
Puttering its life out hour by hour.
Is "Tell Him I love him" never a good idea? You can't wish this
Unlived - this world on fire, on storm
Alert, till the shepherd's song
Outside, some hyper-active yellowhammer, bulbul,
Wren, amplified in hills and woods, tell her to bestow
A spot of notice on the dawn.
*
"I'm writing to you.
Well, that's it, that's everything.
You'll laugh, but you'll pity me too.
I'm ashamed of this.
I meant to keep it quiet.
You'd never have known, if -
I wish - I could have seen you once a week.
To mull over, day
And night, the things you say, or what we say together.
But word is, you're misogynist.
Laddish.
A philanderer
Who says what he doesn't mean.
(That's not how you come across
To me.
) Who couldn't give a toss for domestic peace -
Only for celebrity and showing off -
And won't hang round in a provincial zone
Like this.
We don't glitter.
Though we do,
Warmly, truly, welcome you.
*
"Why did you come? I'd never have set eyes
On a star like you, or blundered up against
This crazed not-sleeping, hour after hour
In the dark.
I might have got the better of
My clumsy fury with constraint, my fret
For things I lack all lexica and phrase-book art
To say.
I might have been a faithful wife; a mother.
But that's all done with.
This is Fate.
God.
Sorted.
Here I am - yours, to the last breath.
I couldn't give my heart to anyone else.
My life till now has been a theorem, to demonstrate
How right it is to love you.
This love is love to death.
*
"I knew you anyway.
I loved you, I'm afraid,
In my sleep.
Your eyes, that denim-lapis, grey-sea-
Grey-green blue, that Chinese fold of skin
At the inner corner, that shot look
Bleeping "vulnerable" under the screensaver charm,
Kept me alive.
Every cell, every last gold atom
Of your body, was engraved in me
Already.
Don't tell me that was dream! When you came in,
Staring round in your stripey coat and brocade
Vest, I nearly died! I fainted, I was flame! I recognized
The you I'd always listened to alone, when I wrote
Or tried to wrestle my scatty soul into calm.
*
"Wasn't it you who slipped through the transparent
Darkness to my bed and whispered love? Aren't you
My guardian angel? Or is this arrant
Seeming, hallucination, thrown
Up by that fly engineering a novel does
So beguilingly, or poems? Is this mad?
Are there ways of dreaming I don't know?
Too bad.
My soul has made its home
In you.
I'm here and bare before you: shy,
In tears.
But if I didn't heft my whole self up and hold it there -
A crack-free mirror - loving you, or if I couldn't share
It, set it out in words, I'd die.
*
"I'll wait to hear from you.
I must.
Please let me hope.
Give me one look, from eyes I hardly dare
To look back at.
Or scupper my dream
By scolding me.
I've given you rope
To hang me: tell me I'm mistaken.
You're so much in
The world; while I just live here, bent on jam
And harvest, songs and books.
That's not complaint.
We live such different lives.
So - this is the end.
It's taken
All night.
I'm scared to read it back.
I'm faint
With shame and fear.
But this is what I am.
My crumpled bed,
My words, my open self.
All I can do is trust
The whole damn lot of it to you.
"
*
She sighs.
The paper trembles as she presses down
The pink wax seal.
Outside, a milk mist clears
From the shimmering valley.
If I were her guardian
Angel, I'd divide myself.
One half would holler
Don't! Stay on an even keel! Don't dollop over
All you are, to a man who'll go to town
On his next little fling.
If he's entranced today
By the way you finger your silk throat inside your collar,
Tomorrow there'll be Olga, Sally, Jane.
But then I'd whisper
Go for it, petal.
Nothing's as real as what you write.
His funeral, if he's not up to it.
What we feel
Is mortal, and won't come again.
*
So cut, weeks later, to an outside shot: the same girl
Taking cover ("Dear God, he's here, he's come!")
Under fat red gooseberries, glimmering hairy stars:
The old, rude bushes she has hide-and-seeked in all
Her life, where mother commands the serfs to sing
While picking, so they can't hurl
The odd gog into their mouths.
No one could spy
Her here, not even the sun in its burn-time.
Her cheeks
Are simmering fire.
We're talking iridescence, a Red Admiral's last tremble
Before the avid schoolboy plunks his net.
Or imagine
*
A leveret - like the hare you shot, remember?
Which ran round screaming like a baby?
Only mine is shivering in papery winter corn,
While the hunter (as it might be, you) stomps his Hush
Puppies through dead brush.
Everything's quiet.
She's waited - how long? - ages: stoking pebbly embers
Under the evening samovar, filling
The Chinese teapot, sending coils of Lapsang Suchong
Floating to the ceiling in the shadows, tracing O and E
In the window's black reflection, one finger
Tendrilling her own breath on the glass.
Like putting a shell to your ear to hear the sea
*
When it's really your own red little sparkle, the echo
Of marching blood.
She's asking a phantom
World of pearled-up mist for proof
That her man exists: that gamelans and tumbrils
Won't evade her.
But now, among
The kitchen garden's rose-haws, mallow, Pernod-
Coloured pears, she unhooks herself thorn by thorn
For the exit aria.
For fade-out.
Suddenly there he is
In the avenue, the man she's written to - Charon
Gazing at her with blazing eyes! Darth Vader
From Star Wars.
She's trapped, in a house she didn't realize
Was burning.
Her letter was a gate to the inferno.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
(This poem appeared in Pushkin: An Anthology, ed.
E.
Feinstein, Carcanet 1999)
|
Written by
William Topaz McGonagall |
Oh! beautiful Oban with your lovely bay,
Your surroundings are magnificent on a fine summer-day;
There the lover of the picturesque can behold,
As the sun goes down, the scenery glittering like gold.
And on a calm evening, behind the village let him climb the hill,
And as he watches the sun go down, with delight his heart will fill
As he beholds the sun casting a golden track across the sea,
Clothing the dark mountains of Mull with crimson brilliancy.
And on a sunny morning 'tis delightful to saunter up the Dunstaffnage road,
Where the green trees spread out their branches so broad;
And as you pass the Lovers' Loan your spirits feel gay
As you see the leaflet float lightly.
on the sunny pathway.
And when you reach the little gate on the right hand,
Then turn and feast your eyes on the scene most grand,
And there you will see the top of Balloch-an-Righ to your right,
Until at last you will exclaim, Oh! what a beautiful sight!
And your mind with wonder it must fill
As you follow the road a couple of miles further, till
You can see Bennefure Loch on the left hand,
And the Castle of Dunstaffnage most ancient and grand.
Then go and see the waters of Loch Etive leaping and thundering
And flashing o'er the reef, splashing and dundering,
Just as they did when Ossian and Fingal watched them from the shore,
And, no doubt, they have felt delighted by the rapids' thundering roar.
Then there's Ganevan with its sparkling bay,
And its crescent of silver sand glittering in the sun's bright array,
And Dunolly's quiet shores where sea crabs abide,
And its beautiful little pools left behind by the tide.
Then take a sail across to Kerrera some day,
And see Gylen Castle with its wild-strewn shore and bay,
With its gigantic walls and towers of rocks
Shivered into ghastly shapes by the big waves' thundering shocks.
Then wander up Glen Crootyen, past the old village churchyard,
And as you pass, for the dead have some regard;
For it is the road we've all to go,
Sooner or later, both the high and the low!
And as you return by the side of the merry little stream,
That comes trotting down the glen most charming to be seen,
Sometimes wimpling along between heather banks,
And slipping coyly away to hide itself in its merry pranks.
Then on some pleasant evening walk up the Glen Shellach road,
Where numberless sheep the green hillside often have trod,
And there's a little farmhouse nestling amongst the trees,
And its hazel woods climbing up the brae, shaking in the breeze.
And Loch Avoulyen lies like a silver sea with its forests green,
With its fields of rushes and headlands most enchanting to be seen,
And on the water, like a barge anchored by some dreamland shore,
There wild fowls sit, mirrored, by the score.
And this is beautiful Oban, where the tourist seldom stays above a night,
A place that fills the lover of the picturesque with delight;
And let all the people that to Oban go
View it in its native loveliness, and it will drive away all woe.
Oh! beautiful Oban, with your silvery bay,
'Tis amongst your Highland scenery I'd like to stray
During the livelong summer-day,
And feast my eyes on your beautiful scenery, enchanting and gay.
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