Anne Stevenson

Equisetum, horsetail, railway weed Laid down in the unconscious of the hills; Three hundred million years still buried In this hair-soft surviving growth that kills Everything in the glorious garden except itself, That thrives on starvation, and distils Black diamonds, the carboniferous shelf — That was life before our animals, With trilobite and coelacanth, A stratum of compressed time that tells Truth without language and is the body store Of fire, heat, night without intervals — That becomes people's living only when strange air Fills out the folded lungs, the inert corpuscles. Into the mute dark, light crawls once more. * So the hills must be pillaged and cored. Such history as they hide must be hacked out Urgent as money, the buried black seams uncovered. Rows of stunted houses under the smoke, Soot black houses pressed back hard against pit By fog, by smoke, by a cobra hood of smouldering coke Swayed from the nest of ovens huddled opposite. Families, seven or ten to a household, Growing up, breathing it, becoming it. On winter mornings, grey capped men in the cold, Clatter of boots on tarmac, sharp and empty, First shift out in thick frost simple as gold On the sulphurous roofs, on the stilted gantry, Crossing to engine house and winding gear — Helmet, pick, lamp, tin bottle of tea. A Nan or Nora slave to each black grate. Washing on Monday, the water grimed in its well. Iron and clean on Tuesday, roll out and bake Each Wednesday (that sweet bituminous smell No child who grew up here forgets). Thursdays, the Union and the Methodist Circle; Fishday on Friday (fryday), a queue of kids, Thin, squabbling by the chippy. Resurfaced quarrels After pay day — hard drinking and broken heads. Wheels within wheels, an England of working Ezekiels. Between slag-heaps, coke-tarns and black sludgy leavings, Forges roaring and reddening, hot irons glowing like jewels. No more, no more. They've swept up the workings As if they were never meant to be part of memory. A once way of being. A dead place. Hard livings That won't return, grim tales forgot as soon as told, Streaming from the roofs in smoke from a lost century — A veil of breath in which to survive the cold. * When the mine's shut down, habits prolong the story, Habits and voices, till grandmothers' old ways pass, And the terraces fold into themselves, so black, ugly And unloved that all but the saved (success Has spared them, the angel of death-by-money) move away. The town's inhabited by alien, washed up innocents. Children and animals, people too poor to stay Anywhere else, stray, dazed, into this slum of Eden. the church is without saints or statuary. The memorial is a pick, a hammer, a shovel, given By the men of Harvey Seam and Victoria Seam. May Their good bones wake in the living seams of Heaven. He breaketh open a shaft away from where men sojourn. They are forgotten of the foot that passeth by.

(for Caroline Ireland) They were to have been a love gift, but when she slit the paper funnel, they both saw they were fake; false flowers he'd picked in haste from the store's display, handmade coloured stuff, stiff as crinoline. Instantly she thought of women's hands cutting in grimy light by a sweatshop window; rough plank tables strewn with cut-out flower heads: lily, iris, primula, scentless chrysanthemums, pistils rigged on wire in crowns of sponge-tipped stamens, sepals and petals perfect, perfectly immune to menaces from the garden. Why so wrong, so...flattening? Why not instead symbols of unchanging love? Yet pretty enough, she considered, arranging them in a vase with dry grass and last summer's hydrangeas whose deadness was still (how to put it?) alive, or maybe the other side of life. Two sides, really, of the same thing? She laughed a little, such ideas were embarrassing even when kept to oneself, but her train of thought carried her in its private tunnel through supper, and at bedtime, brushing her teeth, she happened to look up at the moon. Its sunlit face was turned, as always, in her direction. The full moon, she couldn't help thinking, though we see only half of it. It was an insight she decided she could share with him, but when he joined her and together they lay in the dark, there seemed no reason to say anything. The words, in any case, would be wrong, would escape or disfigure her meaning. Good was the syllable she murmured to him, fading into sleep. And just for a split second, teetering on the verge of it, she believed everything that had to be was understood.

Falling to sleep last night in a deep crevasse between one rough dream and another, I seemed, still awake, to be stranded on a stony path, and there the familiar enigma presented itself in the shape of a little trembling lamb. It was lying like a pearl in the trough between one Welsh slab and another, and it was crying. I looked around, as anyone would, for its mother. Nothing was there. What did I know about lambs? Should I pick it up? Carry it . . . where? What would I do if it were dying? The hand of my conscience fought with the claw of my fear. It wasn't so easy to imitate the Good Shepherd in that faded, framed Sunday School picture filtering now through the dream's daguerreotype. With the wind fallen and the moon swollen to the full, small, white doubles of the creature at my feet flared like candles in the creases of the night until it looked to be alive with newborn lambs. Where could they all have come from? A second look, and the bleating lambs were birds— kittiwakes nesting, clustered on a cliff face, fixing on me their dark accusing eyes. There was a kind of imperative not to touch them, yet to be of them, whatever they were— now lambs, now birds, now floating points of light— fireflies signaling how many lost New England summers? One form, now another; one configuration, now another. Like fossils locked deep in the folds of my brain, outliving a time by telling its story. Like stars.

In memory of two English poets, Matt Simpson and Michael Murphy, d. 2009 Teach-cheap, teach-cheap, teach-cheap, teach-cheap— Sparrows are plying their chisels in the summer ivy, Chipping the seconds spark by spark out of the hours. I read in each whistling chip the sun’s holography. My brain’s a film, I’m made of timed exposures, And pounding my ears and eyes with waves of light— These animate flakes, these pictures I call sight. But now you’re out of the picture, no one can keep Coherent sightings of you, except in language.

Whenever my father was left with nothing to do — waiting for someone to 'get ready', or facing the gap between graduate seminars and dull after-suppers in his study grading papers or writing a review — he played the piano. I think of him packing his lifespan carefully, like a good leather briefcase, each irritating chore wrapped in floating passages for the left hand and right hand by Chopin or difficult Schumann; nothing inside it ever rattled loose. Not rationalism, though you could cut your tongue on the blade of his reasonable logic. Only at the piano did he become the bowed, reverent, wholly absorbed Romantic. The theme of his heroic, unfinished piano sonata could have been Brahms. Boredom, or what he disapproved of as 'sitting around with your mouth open' oddly pursued him. He had small stamina. Whenever he succumbed to bouts of winter bronchitis, the house sank a little into its snowed-up garden, missing its musical swim-bladder. None of this suggests how natural he was. For years I thought fathers played the piano just as dogs barked and babies grew. We children ran in and out of the house, taking for granted that the 'Trout' or E flat Major Impromptu would be rippling around us. For him, I think, playing was solo flying, a bliss of removal, of being alone. Not happily always; never an escape, for he was affectionate, and the household hum he pretended to find trivial or ridiculous daily sustained him. When he talked about music, it was never of the lachrimae rerum that trembled from his drawn-out phrasing as raindrops phrase themselves along a wire; no, he defended movable doh or explained the amazing physics of the octave. We'd come in from school and find him cross-legged on the jungle of the floor, guts from one of his Steinways strewn about him. He always got the pieces back in place. I remember the yellow covers of Schirmer's Editions and the bound Peters Editions in the bookcase. When he defected to the cello in later years Grandmother,in excrucio, mildly exclaimed, 'Wasn't it lovely when Steve liked to play the piano.' Now I'm the grandmother listening to Steve at the piano. Lightly, in strains from Brahms-Haydn variations, his audible image returns to my humming ears.