May Day

for Clara, born 30.4.11

 

In this damp, forgotten field

beside the ribcage of a muntjac,

above the remains of ridge-

and-furrow, someone has been

celebrating last night. The picnic

is finished now, the fire's out,

adder and lightning watch

as we inspect something new

that isn't Evian or Big Mac -

 

Cuckoo Flower (Lady's Smock)

pervading a patch of meadow

developers haven't taken,

where it listens for a cuckoo

that no longer calls, calls

to a maiden who's abroad

improving her tan, the long

stalks dancing in the white-

and-lilac petals at her ears.

 

But for you, Clara - who are

far from all this folklore,

safe in your nest in a smokeless

ward near Highgate Hill,

the Queen of the May, April

already passé - I shall pick

(if I may) this fleur de tonnerre,

for the power in its cressy leaves

and to bless you in your milking.

  

 

9

 

He kneels there beside his bed and begs

God to let him live to complete his

 

Ninth; it is the nineteenth century.

Mozart and Haydn look down and laugh

 

from clouds forty-one and a hundred-

and-four. But Beethoven's on the peak

 

he found and named and conquered, whose nine

faces taunted Mahler till he called

 

his next Das Lied von der Erde, then

went on to write his real Ninth and died.

 

Dvorák, too, reaching the New World, met

that new frontier. It's a trinity

 

of trinities. Man the full octave

before God. Perfection. Completion.

 

But there is Bruckner, stuck on his knees

at the end of the slow movement, yet

 

it's somehow right. Like the Unfinished

of Schubert, whose Ninth was completed

 

but overlooked until Schumann (who,

like his friend Brahms, only managed four)

 

resurrected it for our own age.

And as for us? The symphony is

 

an exotic now, yet in England

V.W. and Arnold fought wild

 

headwinds to make their Ninth. And what would

Sibelius have produced had he

 

passed beyond his perfect Seventh, through

that Eighth he struggled with thirty years,

 

and reached the final circle?  Finished,

it feeds the wood-burning stove. A cat,

 

whether you call it Brian or Leif

Segerstam, dies after the last life.

  

Wadi Halfa

 

We never made it to Wadi Halfa

 

but a dry hot wind from the name

touches me, and floaters begin to drift

 

nomadically into view on the edge of

travelling dreams, the ones by carriage

 

and track, or more opaquely in vitreous

humour through mirage and rock -  strange

 

tents from which we come forth by day

with dew on our skin. We did see

 

Abu Simbel, that film-set for a

captive audience of four, staring

 

out at Lake Nasser, their heads

full of nothing but Rameses; and heard

 

the cannoning of one craft against another

as we drifted home, encased in a miniature

 

funeral boat above the cataracts,

beneath the 'imperishable stars', where 'God

 

will make it simple'.  But Wadi Halfa

would be the thousand and second night

 

when light drains sacred power

out of Nubia to a dull, mapped

 

future existence, the final story,

new pylons for old.  We were content

 

with Agatha Christie at the First Cataract

or Kitchener's undrowned island, or over

 

hibiscus infusions in our flat to spell

that dry possibility of a place called

 

Wadi Halfa from the bright side

of the English dam.  It seemed a point

 

where mystery must have long been solved,

dissolved, beyond any reconstruction, where

 

Africa began, our story, and your source.