Night Photograph Read online

  6 There are six bars run by two people.

  7 Cool, knowing, they circle on mopeds

  8 and get there before us, perfectly timed.

  9 We use the phrasebook like a dirty handkerchief

  10 and spill coins, inscrutable treasure.

  11 Shops open when we fall asleep.

  12 The square is always shuttered and barred,

  13 no clues given by casual bystanders

  14 loitering with arms full of wine and bread.

  15 For days you lie in wait with the rubbish

  16 for the boy who drives a dumper truck backwards

  17 down the street at a different time each afternoon.

  18 You never catch him. Nor do you ever

  19 satisfy that thirst for chilled white manzanilla

  20 sipped while playing croquet on an English lawn.

  21 By Sunday you have put together

  22 enough of the language and local connections

  23 to leave a message with the builder's wife.

  24 He plays with the mains box. We rediscover

  25 cold beer and light. Heat and silence

  26 absorb curiosity, simplify response.

  27 We lie on the roof, tracing the movement

  28 of sun and shadow on mountain terraces;

  29 exploring the erotic possibilities

  30 of peeling an orange or playing chess.

  31 One evening, lost in abandoned olive groves

  32 where paths disappear into rock and gorse,

  33 every house we come to is deserted.

  34 There are no more good jokes about snakes.

  35 Climbing out of a cactus-filled ravine

  36 you claim this is where they shot that famous moment:

  37 black stetson, gold tooth, single bullet.

  38 I am picturing it. Then an English voice,

  39 a man who once played football in my village,

  40 calls down from a hidden garden, offers us a drink.

  A Change in the Weather

  1 They drive to the beach at Seatown,

  2 entering a scene that the winter light

  3 has overcast with single shades of grey

  4 and brown—old like an old painting.

  5 The child finds the curled fist of an ammonite

  6 and traces its shape with each plump finger,

  7 curious at something so round and so dead.

  8 The man explains about the failure to adapt;

  9 how the shell gives up its flesh,

  10 each pore filling with grains of sand,

  11 turning to stone. The woman walks on

  12 (there is a way of leaving but staying

  13 in sight). Her child runs to give her this,

  14 the only still thing in a shifting world

  15 where land becomes sea then Seatown beach

  16 where she tries to fit her hand to the curves

  17 and studies the clouds, not knowing their names

  18 but looking for a change in the weather.

  Thanksgiving on Ghost Ranch

  1 We had no sage, so I flavoured the bird

  2 with chimaja, a desert herb the antelope eat.

  3 It is good with eggs, in soup.

  4 I was interested in the hardening green

  5 of the leaves as I slit the skin and squeezed them

  6 beneath the fat—mineral, opaque.

  7 Roasting a turkey is predictable.

  8 Skin dries, pulls away from the flesh,

  9 tissue condenses to inanimate white.

  10 But there are unexpected chemical reactions:

  11 scorched in the oven, coated with grease,

  12 the scent of the desert herb is trapped and withers

  13 to a putrid stink—the smell of meat

  14 that has found time to rot luxuriously

  15 where bones are clean and bleached before dark.

  16 The guests were on their way from Española.

  17 There was no other food. So we packed up the car,

  18 drove to the Black Place, cleared the snow and slept.

  19 I wanted to paint this landscape

  20 but did not know how until, back in New York,

  21 I filled a cow's skull with calico roses.

  The Gift of Life Dr William Pancoast,

  Philadelphia 1884

  1 In March I inseminated the wife

  2 of a Quaker merchant who was childless.

  3 Extensive tests had led me to believe

  4 the cause of her infertility lay

  5 in the merchant's limited production of sperm.

  6 His wife was brought to the hospital

  7 for a final examination during which

  8 chloroform was applied to face and mouth.

  9 This led to complete unconsciousness

  10 facilitating the insertion of a speculum

  11 and the dilation of the uterine canal.

  12 My finest student provided the sample,

  13 applied with the aid of a rubber syringe

  14 commonly used for agricultural livestock.

  15 I took the additional precaution

  16 of plugging the cervix with cotton rag.

  17 It is now the day after Christmas.

  18 I heard this morning the merchant has been

  19 blessed with a son. God's will be done.

  The Patagonian Nightingale

  The colonists have 3 flour mills, 8 threshing-machines, 70 reaping machines, 6 pianos, 3 harps, a brass band and more than 100 violins ... Music is much cultivated and Miss Lloyd-Jones is called the Patagonian Nightingale.

  The Standard, Buenos Aires, 1889

  1 Her hands play with the map on her apron,

  2 Carmarthen and Cardiff slip through her fingers

  3 as exotic and dangerous as the red dragon

  4 that used to hang above the mantelpiece.

  5 Her son fills the room with Spanish gestures.

  6 She sends him to sleep with stories of Wales,

  7 a country drawn from her parents' memories,

  8 where you did not have to fight the weather

  9 but rain fell like a lace curtain

  10 and sunlight passed, barely noticed.

  11 She remembers her father learning to hunt

  12 like the Indians with a three-ball sling,

  13 and bartering rum for meat and skins.

  14 His newspaper was always twelve weeks old

  15 but he inched his way down the columns for hours

  16 and swore this valley was like all valleys,

  17 only, here, spring came in October.

  18 The summer she married, there were dresses from Europe.

  19 She sang at dances every Saturday night

  20 and fell for a cousin who translated himself

  21 into ApJuan, Welsh son of Spanish John,

  22 looking backwards and forwards in two syllables.

  23 He decided the voice of Mary Lloyd-Jones would be

  24 his to cherish and keep safe at home.

  25 Now she meets the train at the new Bethesda or Bryn Crwm

  26 and sends cheese or butter to be sold in Buenos Aires.

  27 After chapel she sifts flour, picks out weevils

  28 and soaks scarce currants in strong cold tea

  29 to make barabrith because her mother did.

  30 Some days she tests that remote language

  31 and tells anyone who'll listen what they already know:

  32 how her pregnant mother crossed the Atlantic,

  33 three months of hymns and seasickness,

  34 and how Mary was the first Welsh child to be born

  35 in Patagonia. And they named the hills for her.

  The Man Whose Smile Made Medical History

  1 On dead afternoons my brother would borrow

  2 rubber gloves and wellington boots

  3 to chance the electrics of the ancient projector.

  4 We would interru
pt fifty-year-old summers where

  5 a woman I now know in nappies and a walking frame

  6 played leapfrog on a beach in West Wales

  7 with a man whose smile made medical history.

  8 The First World War revealed the infinite

  9 possibilities of the human form,

  10 so when in '16 he was sent back from France

  11 without his top lip, the army doctors

  12 decided to try and grow him a new one.

  13 They selected the stomach as the ideal place

  14 from which to tease a flap of skin

  15 into a handle that could be stretched

  16 and sewn to what was left of his mouth.

  17 This additional feature was surgically removed

  18 once it had fed the regeneration

  19 of a thankfully familiar shape.

  20 All I can find in my grandfather's face

  21 to record the birth of plastic surgery

  22 is the tight shyness he pulls into a grin,

  23 unaware that scientific progress

  24 which had saved his reflection could do nothing

  25 to save his life. A doctor, aged thirty-four,

  26 he died of viral pneumonia,

  27 having recently heard of antibiotics.

  In the Zoo after Dark

  1 No full moon or forest fire.

  2 Unnatural light

  3 takes shape and stays there.

  4 Shadows adjust

  5 to what could be night.

  6 Animals intended

  7 to live an ocean apart

  8 have got an idea of each other.

  9 All day

  10 the lion has watched

  11 a dolphin curve into vision

  12 with the promise of its element,

  13 the taste of salt.

  14 There is containment

  15 and release:

  16 the instinct of the death-watch beetle

  17 to beat its head against the wall

  18 in love song,

  19 or the stillness of the golden eagle,

  20 wings folded, waiting

  21 for the sky to break.

  Electricity

  1 The night you called to tell me

  2 that the unevenness between the days

  3 is as simple as meeting or not meeting,

  4 I was thinking about electricity—

  5 how at no point on a circuit

  6 can power diminish or accumulate,

  7 how you also need a lack of balance

  8 for energy to be released. Trust it.

  9 Once, being held like that,

  10 no edge, no end and no beginning,

  11 I could not tell our actions apart:

  12 if it was you who lifted my head to the light,

  13 if it was I who said how much I wanted

  14 to look at your face. Your beautiful face.

  Linear, Parallel, Constant

  1 Driving down to Jericho

  2 my car was overtaken

  3 by a trio of missiles.

  4 This was a precise migration—

  5 linear, parallel, constant.

  6 An exact miracle

  7 on a straight road

  8 over flat land

  9 under clear sky.

  10 Such mathematical beauty

  11 filled me with the same

  12 superstition and certainty

  13 that send a rocket

  14 to meet the heavens

  15 carrying the name of a Roman god.

  Galileo’s Wife

  1 He can bring down stars.

  2 They are paper in my hands

  3 and the night is dark.

  4 He knows why stone falls and smoke rises,

  5 why the sand on the shore in the morning

  6 is gone in the afternoon.

  7 He gobbles larks' tongues from Tuscany

  8 and honey from Crete. If only he could

  9 measure me and find my secrets.

  ∗

  10 I have dropped pebbles into water

  11 six hundred times this morning.

  12 The average speed of descent

  13 was three pulsebeats with a half-beat variable,

  14 allowing for the different angle and force

  15 with which each pebble hit the water.

  16 Galileo wants me to explain my results.

  17 He lectures on naval engineering

  18 at the university tonight.

  ∗

  19 There has been a fire.

  20 Our children were trapped in a tower.

  21 He watched them fall, a feather, a stone,

  22 and land together. He dictated notes

  23 and ordered their bodies weighed before burial.

  24 I sleep among their clothes.

  25 I must leave Pisa.

  26 He says I am to locate the edge of the world.

  27 Galileo must complete the map.

  28 He has a pair of velvet slippers.

  29 It takes half an hour to lace my boots.

  30 I like to keep my feet on the ground.

  ∗

  31 There is a cloud over Dalmatia.

  32 It is the colour of my wedding dress.

  33 Shadows burn stone.

  34 The bears in Natolia

  35 follow me to the marketplace

  36 and carry food to the houses of the poor.

  37 In Persia I walk east all day

  38 across a desert. I look back at sunset.

  39 The desert is a sea of orchids.

  40 Tartaria is cold. Horses dance

  41 on the path down the ravine. I fall

  42 and the frozen air catches me.

  43 In China I come to a walled city

  44 where they know how to make a powder

  45 that turns the sky to thunder and gold.

  46 In the land of paper houses, a tidal wave

  47 carries me up into the mountains.

  48 I feed children with the fish in my pockets.

  49 I fall asleep beside the ocean

  50 and wake up in the New World

  51 where my footsteps split yellow rock wide open.

  52 A wind I refuse to name carries me home.

  53 Galileo opens the door. I draw a circle

  54 and he closes my eye with a single blow.

  ∗

  55 He says my boots have kept him awake

  56 for the fifteen years I've been away.

  57 He gives me pebbles and water.

  58 Every night he is at the university

  59 proving the existence of the edge of the world.

  60 His students sleep and applaud.

  61 I leave the truth among his papers

  62 and thank the bears of Natolia

  63 that I never taught him how to write.

  Beyond Gravity

  1 What was it

  2 that scorched your face

  3 and stole your sleep?

  4 An eagle's feather

  5 or the hand of someone

  6 lost to you?

  7 Terror. Desire.

  8 All that is left

  9 of the absolute disintegration

  10 beyond gravity.

  11 Like sun on water,

  12 a ripple of gold

  13 at the corner of the eye

  14 as heavy skirts

  15 fold into the river,

  16 wings close.

  Thirty Miles North-West

  1 There were thirty miles he never travelled,

  2 north-west to the sea which was all he talked of:

  3 the breakable blue of a northern summer,

  4 thin as a bird's egg, soft as a blanket,

  5 the light of a ferry-crossing out of Danzig,

  6 endless cement and tarpaulin scattered

  7 with the quartz of a Baltic winter afternoon.

  8 He tasted the air and predicted its colour—

  9 lambswo
ol, pigeon feather, oil, steel—

  10 and believed he'd never lose his way

  11 among the deadly architecture of its sudden cities.

  12 He heard its music in shattering glass,

  13 dropped cutlery, a river of grain,

  14 sheets thrown into the air above a bed.

  15 He felt it on his lips in samphire and dulse,

  16 and caught its scent through an open window

  17 the morning after five days' rain.

  18 And in his pulse, the percussion of its breaking,

  19 the pendulum swing of its tides. Thirty miles

  20 he never travelled—towards the possibility

  21 that there might be no words for it.

  The Cost of Getting Lost in Space

  I

  1 On New Year's Eve, the keeper of the clock

  2 balanced time with the help of old money.

  3 His threepenny bits outwitted the earth

  4 which flexed in its orbit again and again

  5 to create an extra second among the strokes

  6 of midnight. Each person raised a glass

  7 and counted from one to twelve

  8 while the keeper wove a little into every chime,

  9 adding the possibility of a word, a gesture,

  10 a brief incandescence that could have made

  11 a different future, or no difference at all.

  12 It was there. Nobody noticed, but it was there.

  II

  1 From a distance of ninety-three million miles,

  2 a solar flare unravelled the earth's

  3 magnetic field and set a cat among