Cantata for Lynette Roberts

Lynette, the stars are kerned so far apart— Through a herniated zodiac I almost see your waled skylanes, your shocked Capricorn and Cancer. In the hundred and two years since you were born, and the sixteen since your heart failed, and the nearly sixty since you gave up poetry, it seems we can’t navigate by the same star chart. I’d like to think we were fated to work the same coracle: you steering with one hand, grasping your corner of the seine while I grasp mine; together sweeping the weirs. Lynette saw the sky made wide-waled corduroy by the flight paths of fighter jets. Corde du roi—“Cloth of the king.” (“A baseless assertion,” states the oed .) A fireman from the Midlands nfs said the raids on Swansea were worse than on Birmingham, where a ten-year-old Roy Fisher gaped at the garden where his cousins were slaughtered, and later wrote,It was like a burst pod filled with clay. Last night, Lynette, my son thought he saw his father in the jumbo jet roaring over Cherryhurst: the weather softer, flight paths altered. Three weeks now his father gone. • Insofar as Moses came to in a coracle, it wasn’t a Welsh one-off; it wasn’t a hapax of vessels. Insofar as it’s kind of a kiddie boat, not a kayak, not the royal barge the Makah sent William Blake, aka Johnny Depp, with into the northern Pacific; not even the Viking ship, its carved prow like an uncial; insofar as it is calico wrapped up in tar, insofar as it is swaddled willow whippets. • “Pastoral ding-dong is out ,” Lynette wrote, and no wonder— bombs hidden on the glossy knolls. In the sorrel. In the tormentil. I thought she was perhaps the closest I could get to my grandmother. While Lynette was writing “Displaced Persons”— Neither from the frosted leaf nor from The grey hard ground could they find Relief