Christopher Middleton

Three Poems

 

A Longer Wind

Don't I know well enough how the world turns,
Yet a May morning, this one, prompts me
Less to question the weight of certain sympathies
Than to memorialize a sprinkle of events.

Wakings, early, from deep sleep or shallow,
That was the local blackbird, first solo
And after, to the chorus of a dozen doves;
As light becomes more largely evident,
Sparrows rap from the parapets,
And flitting in and out the gutter, chirrup.

Mariushka soon, her elfin smile, her silver trays,
Breakfast her scene, applause, bouquets, and kisses —
I must memorialize instanter somebody's arrival
From Charleston. Who? Encumbered
With wedding gifts, he tells me of his daughter
Shortly to wed the proprietor of Le Bombardier.

"My tibia anterior tends to ache."
"My lungs—my captors;"
His calm, despite the foreign taxi-ride,
This chill in the air, sky with puffs
Of Raoul Dufy cumulus above us both,
Far as we are from Darfur, from Java,
From the Gaza Strip and what goes on
There and there. "These days any squit
Can manufacture ruins in a wink."

A clatter of wheels crossing cobblestones
When another traveller hauls
Past the oleander bush, beneath the sycamore
Stuffs to be apparelled in, embarked
On the trip of a lifetime—
Also askance this wallpaper I memorialize,
Outfits from the eighteenth century,
People prod a giant marrow bulging from the ground;
Lovers in a gondola slung under a Montgolfier balloon;
Near several prone sheep a man dangles a parasol.

Then, heard on a swerve, the repetitions:
Children singing loud and clear from school
A complicated anthem in their echoing
Assembly Hall, arpeggios on the piano—
Elation, elasticity, a pattern models the air
As when, as when for pity's sake
Hölderlin felt it, took it for a beacon
Planted by some disconcerting gods
Tenuously under contract still,
Vague as the covenant became, to the likes of us.

Even so don't stop there though the hustle
Panics memory, bless me, how awkward now—
Tudela or Battuta, which to memorialize?

Wasn't it one of them commits to words of power
The singing of Constantinopolitan children;
A pervasive music stole upon him as he wandered in
The maze of monasteries crumbling thereabouts:
And what they sang of, did they precisely know?
That might have been two centuries, even,
Before the city, all its instruments betrayed,
Its ruins more conspicuous than ever,
Opened to the army of the Barbarian.

(Paris, Hôtel des Grandes Ecoles)

 

 

Savanna Rose

Just what would she know of it,
Of this antique turbulence—

Merest slip of a girl
But history shook up.

Time and again you scoot
In and out of mine—

No idea how short
Mine now likely is,

Yours a restriction long
With hope deferred.

Then, sugarpie forever
Lost in advance,

Never remote like Beatrice,
Soon you saw through my ego trip

My wanting only to fish
For fresh heart in your torrent,

Where constellations glow afloat
Yet extravagance is forgone.

 

 

Homage to Alkan

Probably, led by a little girl,
I'm walking out, in 1865 or so, my white stick
Tapping among the roses for the right path
Which even she is not altogether
Certain of. No, probably it is twenty ten,
Late Spring, our village is in France,
Burgundy precisely, not far off somebody
Strums on the piano happily in tune
A composition by Alkan, an old one too,
His Petit Conte with its quite mischievous
Grace-notes and trills in high registers.
Probably, as on we plod, I'm first of all
Troubled by a thought—old X, his novelettes
And ravings, don't they achieve magnitudes
My own endeavours lacked? Some of them
Bloom, over and again (mine are not annual).
But does it matter now? Probably
Not. At eighty-four you put up with anything
Except these impersonations of God,
Besides, they haven't started the war yet
And this village blackbird now
Starts to quote notes from Alkan's Conte
Among the village chimney pots. Probably,
Too, the air in Burgundy is arranging
To house a marvel of a harvest, already
You can catch a whiff of it in fresh air
That's, well, how to put it, ripe,
At least with fragrance ripening. So on we plod
And the little girl is probably
A grand-daughter, misty little thing
I can barely see, though her touch
Thrills me through. Not chattering now
She is leading me past the graveyard.
Probably none of my relatives there
Would complain if I were to substitute
For their names, momentarily, I mean
In thought, in rose-petal probability,
The names of some uncanny composers,
Whose influences chastened my lines. Yes,
Probably, inside the little church,
Where faint incense is spliced with mould,
Great black tombstones let into the floor
Carry names and dates that ask for wonder,
Cut by crafty chisels (so you can hear
The mason wheeze, the mallet tap)
Calligraphically into them. No,
What is it, the real thing? Probably
I could have pursued the reverie
With the sight of a four-masted clipper
Cleaving the mist, though here is Burgundy;
It is sailing in later than was expected,
Cargo however intact, probably careening
Superbly with a salt west wind astern,
For, Alkan, there it does come in,
You hear the gulls hungrily yelping,
The splash of porpoises caracolling,
And that old ship creaking throatily,
Was this the thing? Probably it was not.
What's to be done with an old ship or for it?
But let it float, probably, so
That expression may be bright and early,
That vigour for the new may sustain
In souls a passion for the immaterial,
That the straws of Burgundy be brought in dry.

 

Copyright © 2008, Christopher Middleton.

Christopher Middleton is one of our finest poets. Born 1926 in Truro, Cornwall, he lives in Texas, after retiring from his professorship at UT, Austin. His magnificent 700-page Collected Poems appeared in June 2008 from Carcanet Press, Manchester. His Palavers, and a Nocturnal Journal—an interview and excerpts from his journals—is still available from Shearsman.