CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Also by Adam Thorpe
Title Page
Epigraph
Against
Sketch
Tending the Stove
Errata
The Nine Ladies on Stanton Moor
Big Wheel
Rufus!
Twitchers
New Arrival
Fuck the Bypass
Wild Camping in Sweden
Ghosts
Pickings
Eva
Another Bad Year
King Cnut
Hot-Air Balloons from Marsh Benham
Fossil
Anniversary
Playground Accident
Lichen
Balkan Tune
Windows
Footprints
On the Beach
The Execution
The Exchange
Look
From the Neanderthal
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Author
Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, was published in 1992, and he has written eight others – most recently The Standing Pool – two collections of stories and five books of poetry. He lives in France with his wife and family.
ALSO BY ADAM THORPE
POETRY
Mornings in the Baltic
Meeting Montaigne
FICTION
Ulverton
Still
Pieces of Light
FROM THE
NEANDERTHAL
Adam Thorpe
Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by the laws we know about things. Every day they’re spoken of and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, their secret converting into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. What’s alien peeps at us from the shadows.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude
(translated by Richard Zenith)
AGAINST
for Josh
Against the bolts and welder’s bloom of rhetoric
chamfer the waggon, scoop and shave the grain
to serviceable lightness, take the rein.
Against the packs of fighters shocking screes to fall
gaze on the heron, watch the wings wield their long
elegance over the water, echo the call.
Against the precipitate action of the angry father
loosen the mother, wait for the snow, hold
in a gloved finger his gloved hand, walk the lane.
SKETCH
for John Fuller
I sketched my grandmother walking under the beech trees
where Grim’s Dyke’s little more than a hint of humps,
nettles in a shallow slump under a tangle of wire and posts.
Now she’s gone. The sketch shows only a few lines of her,
but somehow it caught the way she walked in age,
and I do recall (I was nineteen) being amazed at the way it did.
The trees have not gone. The hint of humps, the suggestion
that here men constructed something bold and enormous for reasons
few are sure of, has not gone. The nettles are the inheritors
of the shallow slump of their forefathers my pencil suggested.
Everything is the same, one can say, except for the presence
of my grandmother, tiny in the picture, walking slowly away
and my amazed glance before I rose and called after her,
amazed that I could have caught her with a pencil’s flicker –
knowing already that it would stay long after she was gone
as now she was gone into the beech trees’ shade as if forever.
TENDING THE STOVE
NOVEMBER
The bole’s on the block:
its fell already old, the bark puffs
at the first stroke of the saw
but the heart’s harder: if time’s
embodied anywhere
it’s in this balking of a quick traverse –
each decade’s felloe beaten only
by a lowered head, the chafe of now.
Sweaty, red-faced, I’ll cut a day’s worth,
a creamy pyramid of Os
with their exact configurations:
rolled-up maps the flames can scrabble at
or pore over, exultant
like us with our several plans.
DECEMBER
We scour the river bank for flotsam,
poles the floods tore free of their leaves –
heroically long, dry from abandonment.
Criss-crossed, almost weaved, most caught
by a living trunk that rammed them
into stillness, we thought at first
they were nests – as if the wild boars
had bristled wings, had brought each bole
under massive, retroussé snouts, and fussed.
Yanked free and shouldered, our faggots
bounce behind us, shafts of chronology
so dense we feel a little queasy
as we reach the car. I’ve read
how most of the mornings of the world
are spent this way, but stumbled
ten miles for the twisted bough.
We lie, later, and talk by the heat
we feel we’ve earned in tart shoulders …
we glow. My life is a flicking of switches,
I think, as the lathering turbines roll.
JANUARY
Hours are devoted: the iron crown
perpetually up, ash snowing
the wrought name as I huff… Godin.
God in heat through a hard winter.
The knuckle-rapping flames would take
truck-loads, whole armies of timber
if we had it; toughs of holm oak,
brawny chestnuts scourged of sap,
the fizzling savagery of Hell
become the thrum of warmth we crouch to,
hands outspread. How millennial old
this altar, nurtured into embers
so high by evening we overheat …
like a late, imperial dynasty
dreaming in myth, it shuffles
its purple solely into ash, replete
with memories of the split carton’s
ur-flame; the crackle of vine-butt; the sudden
resinous densities of laurel.
FEBRUARY
As Basra is pounded to dust, I puff
old ash to glow
or tip the tray free, watching
the cloud it makes drift palely
into nothing, like history.
Abu Nawas, Hasan al-Basri –
old mystics fogeyish
as finger-bowls to the radio’s
immediacies, old vowels
of the Abbasids, old blown-on ash
glowing in a man’s eyes
short on humanity …
How fine this oyster-coloured
dust, this tossed smoke
floating importantly past the still trees.
ERRATA
No sooner had we come
than already the misfeasances of history
recalled in the bullet-hole
some great-aunt could once locate
where the last priest to inhabit here
slumped, un catholique,
and the line high on the creepered mill
recording the flood
that took the miller’s wife
and left him ruined, still
sued by the landlord
>
for lapse of rent.
I finger our stone wall, searching
as ever for resonance,
time’s contusions, chips
off the old block. The washed-
up body of the miller’s wife
is easy to imagine
now the rains have swollen
the river to a roar,
but the rest is harder: how
the harried widower fared, or what
purpose the shot priest served,
bundled by our step.
Now the times are quieter, rosy
with expectation, le pittoresque.
The shush of the D-road
mingles with the weir: each day
we speed past the cardboard plaque
on the dented roadside tree,
limply wreathed: IL AURAIT
EU 21 ANS
AUJOURD’HUI –
an execration increasingly faint,
a fact that each day makes
increasingly wrong.
THE NINE LADIES ON STANTON MOOR
We know you’ve got a thing about us,
scuffing the earth at our feet,
giving us a voice. Like this.
We know about the groans we’ve heard,
the yelps in moonlight, rumours of progeny.
Bellies keep pressing us; we decline.
Thunder on the moor and your effeteness
assured, we think of us as crown
whetted on the storm, not bald queans.
We know about the influx of coach parties;
the way their crisp-packet ordinariness
ruffles you, the way they laugh as they count us.
We have tumbled from the sky’s favour.
We know we are emblazoned by tussocks,
heather, hawthorn. We have erred, somehow.
Stars! We look up to them. Clear nights
remind us of their massive dignities;
we know what we have known, but forgotten.
One of us is missing. We know this.
Buffed by the flanks of cows, she swings
a gate. We hear her, complaining, often.
Adrift on moorland, we are tethered.
Far off on a skyline, we have caught you.
We dance what we know; you are frozen.
Cromlechs rise routinely from mists:
we are granite lumps. We know
how ugly we are, and once how lovely.
BIG WHEEL
I feinted with my vertigo and curved
to early middle age, I’d say; anyway
the top. There we were stopped and began to sway.
For my idiot daring it was all I deserved.
The remarkable vista of the environs of Gütersloh,
the backs of birds actually in flight, the shrubbery
of trees and the pinhead people made me rubbery
in the legs, of course, but what was worse was the slow
remorseless haul on my brain, or maybe my body
for the earth far below was wide and craving
my entry at whatever price. The kids were waving
and I started to wail, I’m afraid. I clung to the rod
and shut my eyes. You had to hold me tight.
In high air there was no bolt-hole from whatever
sirens were singing me down … as if I could sever
myself from this swaying life without a fight.
RUFUS!
for Emma
Gloominess of oak and Tirel, gut-twanged treason
getting William – every passing forest’s
running commentary for my sister’s obsession.
Rufus! Tell me about Rufus! The Simca droned
and out it came again: from blundering boar
to wail of horn; the Fact that the King was alone.
Thwack! My sister in the back seat, covering her ears,
and me arched next to her, fisting my spine:
what makes most history something to be feared
is simply thwacks and aaaaghs, to a kid. I see us
speeding through the Sixties like a film,
the Simca’s windscreen scrolling up the trees.
A legend gets it in the back from a dream.
History blunders into bracken to retrieve.
If I timed it right, I could make her scream.
TWITCHERS
For every booming bittern there are ten,
for every cliff-stacked gannet mass
there is at least one with his clingfilmed
lunch-pack, wringing his socks on St Kilda.
This is surety of sorts. That the index finger
will go on twitching till the loch
gives up its greylag, the moor its merlin,
that even the chough has its hangers-on
grim-jawed on outcrops where the breakers sting
assures Him that all the aeons’ messy fuss
holds some of them in thrall, despite the mockery.
When the Trumpets sound, drowning the guillemots,
when the souls rise like a billion fulmars
discarding behind them the stink of cerements,
when even the dotterel has shrilled its last
over the wrathful tussocks of Beinn Bhreac Mhor
He’ll be there with his binoculars and notebook
spotting them: the Chosen, the ones who bothered,
the twits who noted His miraculous exactitude
all day in everything He could throw at them.
NEW ARRIVAL
for Miranda, much later
The announcements mangle the names
of nineteenth-century villages:
Streatham, Norwood, Bermondsey.
The rest drowned in the vowels of the fast one to Brighton.
The platform indicator clicks to 6.
It’s made by Solari and C. Udine,
Italy. Boredom yields such things,
presses them on you like a sales trick.
I think of Tarkovsky, the planet’s brain
in Solaris like a broiling ocean.
They’re sealing the roof in a fierce stink
of fibre-glass: there are so many jobs,
so many rules. We live in a world
of ladders and paint-splashed footstools.
Here it comes – always the one
with a friendlier look (if still aloof), the dummy
of the driver tiny in one of its eyes.
A schoolgirl drops her files, pushing
onto the carriage before me; her papers
wheel into a cogged underworld of grease.
The doors clam up, bad-tempered as ever;
pistol-shots to have us shake.
Humans make so much noise of the world.
It comforts us, I think. Death’s to be deaf
and on one’s own. Settled among litter,
I remember Cousin Ruth, my age;
at five, on a journey, she slapped some seats
like these, full of BR dust and something
strange that turned her blind and simple.
The guards are stranded for life between
thirty and fifty, sidle past
in cocked hats, condemned to being this cocky
or miserable, one with such long hair
his uniform is more an outfit.
Maybe they dreamt of being this,
as boys: whistling a real train into gear.
The platform removes itself discreetly
like a ship, along with its passengers,
or like a country with its population
staring as if curious, without compassion;
why does everyone look as though
they know what they are doing, as if
they have never not been here? The river
beyond the bolted trellis-work of bridge
is so wide we stop on it
for breath. The woman opposite
watches me read. My harmless book
&n
bsp; becomes embarrassing, opening its legs of pages.
Her benign smile struggles against
the rapid blink of eyelids. Today
my wife’s new niece had hers ungummed,
their two pale leaves now open to infection:
this is what life is. Duress
begins with the light, the looming faces.
We’re really all too delicate for this,
this life, these jerks of some machine, this air.
At Charing Cross the metal turnstile
tries to keep time with a cellist’s Bach.
It doesn’t, quite, and the effect is brutal.
Think of all the thighs its bar has pressed.
Toughen up. London yanks
us out and in like a clumsy midwife
and I make for the museums, the bookshops –
those cots where I can suck my thumb and dream.
FUCK THE BYPASS
Cycling to the theatre on the ‘other side’,
I pass between the high wire fences
and feel the chicken. This is where the mammoth
project strides, like a pause in language,
a gasp between the murmurs of woods.
There are a thousand, ten thousand guards
in Pinkerton surcoats, helmets carnation-bright.
They laugh as I shout, scattered up the ridge
like a countermanded army, still confused.
Or flowers swelling where the ogre slew.
Each little lane demands a massive bridge
and likewise the winding Lambourn’s stream –
where I tick now under a clear sky
will be thundered gloom too soon for this moment
to be more than dream, or a war’s false lull.
The hedgerows return like cool pillows
discovered after nightmare, and I breathe again.
Yesterday’s battle’s caught its sleeve;
lying in the ditch before the old stone humpback
into Bagnor, the plastic hull of a duffed-up helmet’s
scrawled all over in black felt-tip.
Curses that might or might not serve,
strangled war-cries, the head of the enemy
lopped and kicked and left to rot.
Keep it as souvenir of a strange time.
WILD CAMPING IN SWEDEN
Our trouble at first was the pegs
our mallet got emphatically in
to the tufty pelt of needles;
they kept emerging. As if distrusted.
The lake bred plops of frogs