Amulet: Poems from the Tower Summer School 2005

AMULET

Give me my scallop shell of quiet
Sir Walter Raleigh, His Pilgrimage

And who would have blamed us,
playing here as children
when the shells tinkled like saucers
and the sea grinned in the wind’s fable.

Years later I saw the bone in the cups;
and now, cracked out of boyhood,
this fluted lineaments, smashed
to a mineral grasp.

I stand on splayed hands;
hear a clattering underworld
underfoot, while the sea lifts her skirts
for the siren’s spirited fingers.

They were carried to Santiago
as fellow pilgrims once.
I too would wear one as an amulet;
I would plug my ears with all of them
against this wind.
But I will listen.
And that sea will hurl me to the tumulus,
my skull to the scallop knife.

YOU, READING

You, reading, framed in your window-side chair;
as Woolf rests in a portrait by Bell,
with a blank, anonymous face.

Our usual cracks, past blazered years,
all lost in my copy of Keats:
how strange; that stumbling on you

poised as your name, it’s now
I know you least. ‘Grace?-‘

CARVING THE HORSE

Evening defines the land, collects the shadows
in the soft hallows of the slope. Up here
the road seems to wind across the sky,
valleys flocked with rushes grow gold.

Neck straight, the mare crosses the road
and I stop the car and stare: muscles
hunching underneath the mane, light blushing
on white skin, a limestone dressed to pavane.

Then the head bends and crops grass again,
the herd stirs and stamps to the next tuft,
jaws grinding. But now I can tell why,
in the swart dark of those brute woods,

my ancestors invented wonder and carved the horse
made out of clouds into the windless chalk.

3 CHALCOT SQUARE

all day searching
across the hallway
of your hospital heart,

dogmatizing recipes,
watching manuscripts stutter
into blank sheets.

it’s a long day flicking
the morning into a crisis,

to hear the holy communion of infidels
stabbing at your heart,
ticking the last box

where the howling idea remains
at large;
the beast too fabulous to sleep
bolts off into the evening

when the blinds yawn
and close, the world hits it head
and turns comatose.

you, awake,
tapping the pipes of frozen water
battling the fact
of being a daughter.