THE NEW WORLD
I
A scrubbed potato still
remembers the land
that buried it: no telling where
raw skin ends and dirt begins.
Peeled, it's something made
soapy, geometric.
Sharp pits and angles
shine like cream for the pot.
Somewhere in between is
a woman in her thirties:
standing over the garbage,
stopping the blade with her thumb.
II
She could draw a map
of the chill, familiar
kitchen in Leeds:
mark this rough spot
on the floor, that sticky
drawer that she used to jostle shut,
the string-wrapped handle
and tough blunt point
of the Lancashire peeler
she lost in the move.
Dinner simmers. The sink
is a litter of mud and ivory.
III
She talks about the cottage they kept up
with an electric fire and cheap cuts of meat--
her stone hot water bottle,
his razor frozen to the windowsill--
and her rationed childhood,
grim dinners of fish and sticky pudding
in a seaside town: thin donkeys,
sugar rock and pale goose-pimpled bathers
washed in the chill of distance.
"San Fairy Ann . . . ."
IV
>From the cheerful sadness in her voice
you'd think San Fairy Ann
was an island thick with yellow flowers,
run with wild horses.
In class ten years later
I'll hear the same word from a slouching tutor--
"Ça ne fait rien"--
without my mother's flattened vowels
or any need that I could recognise.
NILAUS ERLANDSEN
In the dark linden forest
that borders the icy bay,
the linden roots split the rocks;
their branches shut the sky.
The roebuck under the linden tree
walks softly with his doe;
the nightingale in the linden tree
makes a sweet-throated moan.
Nilaus heard the nightingale
as he hunted in the wood,
and Nilaus urged on his horse
with its shoes of gold and blood.
Nilaus set a wire snare
to catch the wild bird's feet,
but her eyes were so quick and sharp
she never set foot in it.
Nilaus Erlandsen took an axe
and went to fell the tree;
but the man who owned that land
spoke in anger and in grief:
"If you cut down my father's tree
on my ancestral land,
I'll see you dead, Nilaus Erlandsen,
and buried in this ground."
Then up and spoke the nightingale:
"Listen, my pretty boy:
if you'd catch this bird, Nilaus,
then listen carefully.
If any man could give to me
the sweetmeat that I crave,
this bird would brood on his sweet flesh
and never think to leave."
He carved the flesh from his own breast
near unto the heart,
and drew close to the linden tree
to watch the sweet bird tear it.
And when the thirsty songbird
whetted her beak in his blood,
she turned into the fairest maid
that ever spoke or stood.
He lifted her into his arms
and kissed her cheek and chin:
"Oh little one, my little one,
who stole your human skin?"
"I strung roses and lilies
in my own father's room:
my stepmother saw me there
and swore she'd do me harm.
She turned my skin to feathers
and flung me out of doors;
she turned my sisters into wolves
to hunt me to the fjord."
The maid stood under the linden tree
combing her dark red hair,
when seven maids came running
where seven wolves there were.
Nilaus Erlandsen has a scar
near unto his heart,
but he sleeps deep and quietly
in his wild bird's arms.
Translation of a traditional Danish ballad. I worked from Lisa Null's abbreviated version (sung on her album, The Feathered Maiden) of Henry Meyer's translation, originally published in Danish Ballads and Folk Songs (ed. Erik Dal).
ONION
Its roots are clipped and brittle.
Its lucent copper skin
crackles around an orb:
a cache of tears withheld
in the pale, lucid stem.
It contains its own necessities:
food and water converted
into cool satiate circles.
Left to itself in the cellar,
it sends out a prodigal shoot--
a gold-tipped blade
that thrives without light or dirt.
PITY
In the road, a mud-colored
twiggy plastic giraffe, long
as a child's finger, needs
to be picked up: asphalt
ground into hip and shoulder
like third-degree burns, its head
a tiny mouse head. Funny
how pity hobbles you to a thing
nerveless and inert, like
the cold egg in the grass by Skinker
that I warmed in my fingers, failed
to find a nest for, and carried around
four days before I put it down
in the same place, knowing I had mis-
carried, chosen badly. That shame
makes a little sense; the pity
none. But we do, we feel
for things that can't feel, most of all
if they're small, shaped something
like us, and look as if they've lost
their place. Look. I'm starting to say
that girl was fifteen when she
lost her nerve in Paris, breathing in
cigarettes and urine, and the grey
school smell of low-grade paper, which she could never
explain. Sewing machines bolted to tables.
A jug of water by the toilet. And the awful mis-
understanding: her bad French,
and her, slow to grasp
that this was somebody's
windfall: dislocated, bruised,
free for the taking. Bitten
off, she shut her mouth. Scared mute
gratitude hobbled her to the thing.
She managed a cheap ticket home
and a clinic. Even knowing
the fact of unformed nerves, blank spot of brain,
she couldn't help pitying the thing:
tiny, soft, something like her
and something like a smear of phlegm.
Like you, I feel most sorry for things
I'm about to let slip. There's something
terrible about pity, making us steal
a child's toy, an egg's chance
of recovery by the grown bird.
He felt sorry for her. He really did.
SNAPSHOT
He and the bird are the only things in focus.
The man raises his hand like a falconer,
the jay's claw ringing his third finger.
His hair's thick silver answers the bird's grey.
They eye one another with what I can only describe
as respectful attention. Behind them, a blur
of wood and glass--the house he built himself--
a sliver of my face, a pale blue dress,
a chunk of plump arm. My sister stands before me,
one hand on her hip. She has his mouth,
his half-smile and eyebrows; her chin
wants to lose itself in her neck.
He looks as thoughtful as I've ever seen him,
neither angry nor smiling.
He may wonder what to do with the thing--
its calm, unnatural trust--
or he may simply admire the clean lay of its wings,
the warmth of its claws, the brief wobble
as it shifts its grip; the blink of its round eye,
the brush of down against his hand.
Perhaps he thinks, This is the child I wanted--
quick without insolence, wholly unafraid,
unsexed, holding his hand and meeting his eye.
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Poetry, Part I
Poetry, Part II
Poetry, Part III
Poetry from The Literary Review