When she opened the egg the wise woman had given her, she found inside some of her own hair and a tooth, still bloody, from her own mouth.
One summer after another
The shore advanced and receded
As the boat shoved past the islands.
Dark bushy hills revolved in the path;
and in each
Of the solid still rooms above bars,
the first sight
Caught at an angle, the glass questioning your face.
‘A l’usage de M. et Mme van Gramberen’
— the convent phrase (nothing is to be mine,
Everything ours) marks the small round enclosure,
Its table and bench. Distinguished
From the other old people, from the nuns’ gravel
They sat in the windmill’s afternoon shadow, half
Hidden by a moving carthorse’s huge blond rump
And quarrelled over their sins for Saturday:
Examination of Conscience before Confession
Prepared and calm in case one thought
Struck them both, an attentive pose
Eluding me now, at ten in the morning, alone
With a clean college pantry: piled rings
Of glass rising, smooth as a weir.
So rarely we lie
As then, in darkness
A vertical gleam relieved
Where the brilliance from outside
Struck the glass over the hearth
(Breast high, if one stood,
Night lapped the bookshelves
And a dying light floated
Above us, never reaching
Us, our arrested embrace)
I think at once of
That amphibious
Twilight, now that the year is
Revisiting the spring shrine.
At my window the sharp, grey
Rectangles of stone
Range, parade in squares.
February light
Spreading across the walls over my head
Washes my room with shadows, cold until morning.
Linked by precious chains
The feathered shapes moved with her as she moved,
Still descending lava stairs
Of pines waving on the slope.
The command was, not to look
Down, but she did and saw the shore:
An oval sea, with the gleam
Of an iron lid raised an instant,
The rough pebbles where no boat rested
Or wave stirred among the weed.
And beyond the inlet, beyond the stiff black trees
That circle the burnt-out island,
Still flying, nesting, the slim grey birds
Without a cry, those birds of whom
No history of shapes transformed
Or grief outlived is ever told.
They flourish there, by the subterranean sea.
Because this is the age of his life
In retrospect he will name theirs
He calls now at noon to feed their cats;
And stretched on a chaise longue in the clean house
He bites one of the yellow sweet apples
Wrinkling in the dish, while the female
Noses his feet. The black cat watches him
From the padded rail at his elbow:
A short demanding stare;
he recalls
A hand that shut off day,
An eye so close to what it sought, half-blinded,
A collage of hair and upholstery.
Beyond the half-drawn curtain, past the trailing boughs
Of their proper domain,
A goldfinch lights up
Childhood’s cramped retreats,
Covenants made in
The scarce blood of berries
That dry on the twig.
The cats his shortlived witnesses.
Remembering her half-sister Amelia, that girl
Whose hips askew made every step seem upstairs
The woman at the airport tells me that from her
One spring she bought the first small car.
After that it was trains and taxis for Amelia
For years and years, while the younger lay
In the car in a leafy mews in Dublin
Making love to a bald actor
Her elbow tightening
Linked through the steering-wheel.
She tells me, this hot noisy afternoon,
That Amelia now drives a car like a cabin-cruiser
In Halifax, Nova Scotia, where her husband
Fishes for lobster in short ice-free summers.
I run my hand along the clean wood
And at once I am stroking the heads
Of everyone in the room.
Looking into the grain
Wavered and kinked like hairlines, what I see
Is the long currents of a pale ocean
Softly turning itself inside out.
Palm slack as air’s belly touching the sea —
I feel the muscles tugging
In the wood, shoals hauling.
I look in vain for that boat
Biting its groove to the south-east,
For that storm, the knot of blindness
That left us thrashing
In steel corridors in the dark.
Beyond the open window
Along the silkpacked alleys of the souq
Momentary fountains and stairways
(My hands move over the table
Feeling the spines of fish and the keels)
I look, and fail, in the street
Searching for a man with hair like yours.