Andrew Motion

With acknowledgments to “Rain” by Cynthia Barnett Whether the rain on Mars was delicate or brutal whether it was blue or gray whether it fell on bare rocks that remained bare or on fertile ground that raised large forests of leafing trees it could not last. Mars froze eventually in the same duration that Venus by contrast bowed her burning head in noxious vapors and gas clouds. • On planet Earth meanwhile after half a billion years of continuous volcano-havoc meteor storms earthquakes               and lightning strikes vapor stored in the atmosphere eventually began falling. It soothed the fires. When the fires died it fell silently on the first outcrops of moss. On the tender grass with a sizzle. With more strenuous drumming on the resilient fronds of ferns. It became an orchestra of millions across the luxurious expanse of the tree canopy. • Then the sun wiped its forehead with long filmy fingers and beamed afresh. It worked through to creatures flourishing beneath the canopy and persuaded them to interrupt their work of scouring on all fours for delectable roots and berries. In the clarified light they stared at their hands. They saw the wrinkled fingertips that gave them a firm grip on slippery branches and vines gradually smooth      and soften. They rose in amazement onto their hind legs and crept from shelter across the dazzling savannah. • After a summer of twelve thousand years after the interruptions of ice after one particular inundation and the shadow of an ark darkening fish-shoals as they scooted over hills and valleys after the blaze of one civilization then another after the destruction of several experiments with law and order after the extinction of many beautiful languages rain by and large found its place in the scheme of things. It began to defeat its purpose on the private sky of umbrellas. It babbled through long green fields and melted into the seams of poetry. It larked in the puddle of its many names. Cobblers and chair legs and pipe stems. Frogs and jugs and beards. Cats and dogs. Men. • Although they are shaped like a parachute thanks to the air pressure beneath them raindrops                     explode on landing. Then the sun bears down again fitting his monocle into his eye. The glass flashes and burns. The rain sweats and evaporates into the ocean of its air. The ocean continues on its way continually overflowing here and there in quick little splashes or reckless floods and drenching. It is delicate or brutal. It is blue sometimes              and sometimes gray. Sometimes it falls on bare rocks at others                     it raises large forests of leafing trees.

By noon your breathing had changed from normal to shallow and panicky. That’s when the nurse said Nearly there now, in the gentle voice of a parent comforting a child used to failure, slipping her arms beneath your shoulders to hoist you up the pillows, then pressing a startling gauze pad under your jaw. Nearly there now. The whole world seemed to agree— as the late April sky deepened through the afternoon into high August blue, the vapour trails of two planes converged to sketch a cross on the brow of heaven. My brother Kit and I kept our backs turned to that except now and again. It was the room I wanted to see, because it contained your last example of everything: the broken metal window-catch that meant no fresh air; your toothbrush standing to attention in its plastic mug; the neutral pink walls flushed into definite pale red by sunlight rejoicing in the flowering cherry outside; your dressing-gown like a stranger within the wardrobe eavesdropping. That should have been a sign to warn us, but unhappiness made us brave, or do I mean cowardly, and Kit and I talked as if we were already quite certain you could no longer hear us, saying how easy you were to love, but how difficult always to satisfy and relax— how impossible to talk to, in fact, how expert with silence. You breathed more easily by the time we were done, although the thought you might have heard us after all, and our words be settling into your soft brain like stones onto the bed of a stream—that made our own breathing tighter. Then the nurse looked in:Nothing will change here for a while boys, and we ducked out like criminals. I was ordering two large gins in the pub half a mile off when my mobile rang. It was the hospital. You had died. I put my drink down, then thought again and finished it. Five minutes later we were back at the door of your room wondering whether to knock. Would everything we said be written on your face, like the white cross on the heavens? Of course not. It was written in us, where no one could find it except ourselves. Your own face was wiped entirely clean— and so, with your particular worries solved, and your sadness, I could see more clearly than ever how like mine it was, and therefore how my head will eventually look on the pillow when the wall opens behind me, and I depart with my failings.

28 June 1914 Although an assassin has tried and failed to blow him to pieces earlier this morning, Archduke Ferdinand has let it be known he will very soon complete his journey as planned along the quay in Sarajevo. For a moment, however, he has paused to recover his composure at the window of a private room in the Town Hall, after finding the blood of his aide-de-camp spattered over the manuscript of the speech he was previously unable to complete. And indeed, the prospect of an Austrian brewery in the distance is reassuring, likewise the handsome bulk of the barracks filled with several thousand soldiers of the fatherland. This is how those who survive today will remember him: a man thinking his thoughts until his wife has finished her duties— the Countess Chotek, with her pinched yet puddingy features, to whom he will whisper shortly, ‘Sophie, live for our children’, although she will not hear. As for his own memories: the Head of the local Tourist Bureau has now arrived and taken it upon himself to suggest the Archduke might be happy to recall the fact that only last week he bagged his three thousandth stag. Was this, the Head dares to enquire, with the double-barrelled Mannlicher made for him especially— the same weapon he used to dispatch two thousand one hundred and fifty game birds in a single day, and sixty boars in a hunt led by the Kaiser? These are remarkable achievements the Head continues, on the same level as the improvement the Archduke has suggested in the hunting of hare, by which the beaters, forming themselves into a wedge-shape, squeeze those notoriously elusive creatures towards a particular spot where he can exceed the tally of every other gun. In the silence that follows it is not obvious whether the Archduke has heard the question. He has heard it. He is more interested, however, in what these questions bring to mind: an almost infinite number of woodcock, pigeon, quail, pheasant and partridge, wild boars bristling flank to flank, mallard and teal and geese dangling from the antlers of stags, layer and layer of rabbits and other creatures that are mere vermin— a haul that he predicts will increase once the business of today has been completed.

General Petraeus, when the death-count of American troops in Iraq was close to 3,800 , said ‘The truth is you never do get used to losses. There is a kind of bad news vessel with holes, and sometimes it drains, then it fills up, then it empties again’— leaving, in this particular case, the residue of a long story involving one soldier who, in the course of his street patrol, tweaked the antenna on the TV in a bar hoping for baseball, but found instead the snowy picture of men in a circle talking, all apparently angry and perhaps Jihadists. They turned out to be reciting poetry. ‘My life’, said the interpreter, ‘is like a bag of flour thrown through wind into empty thorn bushes’. Then ‘No, no’, he said, correcting himself. ‘Like dust in the wind. Like a hopeless man.’

I am downstairs early looking for something to do when I find my father on his knees at the fireplace in the sitting-room sweeping ash from around and beneath the grate with the soft brown hand-brush he keeps especially for this. Has he been here all night waiting to catch me out? So far as I can tell I have done nothing wrong. I think so again when he calls my name without turning round; he must have seen me with the eyes in the back of his head. ‘What’s the matter old boy? Couldn’t sleep?’ His voice is kinder than I expect, as though he knows we have in common a sadness I do not feel yet. I skate towards him in my grey socks over the polished boards of the sitting-room, negotiating the rugs with their patterns of almost-dragons. He still does not turn round. He is concentrating now on arranging a stack of kindling on crumpled newspaper in the fire basket, pressing small lumps of coal carefully between the sticks as though he is decorating a cake. Then he spurts a match, and chucks it on any old how, before spreading a fresh sheet of newspaper over the whole mouth of the fireplace to make the flames take hold. Why this fresh sheet does not also catch alight I cannot think. The flames are very close. I can see them and hear them raging through yesterday’s cartoon of President Kennedy and President Khrushchev racing towards each other in their motorcars both shouting I’m sure he’s going to stop first! But there’s no need to worry. Everything is just as my father wants it to be, and in due time, when the fire is burning nicely, he whisks the newspaper clear, folds it under his arm, and picks up the dustpan with the debris of the night before. Has he just spoken to me again? I do not think so. I do not know. I was thinking how neat he is. I was asking myself: will I be like this? How will I manage? After that he chooses a log from the wicker wood-basket to balance on the coals, and admires his handiwork. When the time comes to follow him, glide, glide over the polished floor, he leads the way to the dustbins. A breath of ash pours continuously over his shoulder from the pan he carries before him like a man bearing a gift in a picture of a man bearing a gift.

Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief and anger in the very place, whoever comes to climb these narrow stairs, discovers how the bookcase slides aside, then walks through shadow into sunlit room, can never help but break her secrecy again. Just listening is a kind of guilt: the Westerkirk repeats itself outside, as if all time worked round towards her fear, and made each stroke die down on guarded streets. Imagine it— four years of whispering, and loneliness, and plotting, day by day, the Allied line in Europe with a yellow chalk. What hope she had for ordinary love and interest survives her here, displayed above the bed as pictures of her family; some actors; fashions chosen by Princess Elizabeth. And those who stoop to see them find not only patience missing its reward, but one enduring wish for chances like my own: to leave as simply as I do, and walk at ease up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch a silent barge come clear of bridges settling their reflections in the blue canal.