Gregory Leadbetter

Poetry

1. / The Fetch

   

   

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   The dream that slammed the bedroom door

   but didn’t break the film of sleep

   to tell the time, or give me more

   than broken promises to keep

    

   to phantoms that were never there,

   woke me just enough to know

   that something was: the restless air,

   the waveform of a note too low

    

   to hear, a song to raise the dead.

   I listened, and began to speak

   as I am speaking now. My breath

    

   condensed. I saw it slowly take

   the outline of a child, afraid

   of the dark of which it was made.

2. / Imp

   

   

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   On the bad days, I shooed her mews away

   out of nothing but an absence of joy.

   I never installed a back-door flap for her,

   so she would patter all night to get in at the window

   while I lay wide-eyed and sleepless, pretending not to hear.

    

   I know it was a blessing

   when she landed like a fly on my forehead

   as I was trying to write,

   her cicada rustle scribbling in and out

   before the flick of my hand sent her to hide

   in the plumbing, where she whined for weeks

   until I found her, toad-shy and morning-blind

   in the kitchen sink. I held her, for the first time then,

   revived her with what has become her favourite wine.

    

   It has often been her game

   to go missing. It is where she thrives,

   as if she delights in being imagined –

   looked-for in the fading light,

   or at the beck of a buzzard’s call.

   In the garden, I would find her spraint,

   stinking of rotten fruit and putrid grain,

   the tang of iron and the fume of honeycomb.

   She would announce her return with a black-out

   bite through electrical cable, then creep in close, dab

   my eye with a spider-leg to see if I was awake.

    

   She could drive me mad

   with her cuckoo blink –

   then I remember how she would

   pull me out of the O of a dream

   when I couldn’t breathe

   and make me a day-bed from her sloughed skin.

   She would lap at whatever saltwater

   leaked from me. It wasn’t right

   for her to see me cry,

   but she would tongue my tears away,

   curl me a rabbit-fur snake

   for a pillow and blow through my ears.

   Her opalescent gaze could break

   the world-egg open

   over and over again.

    

   Tonight, I will leave out a bowl

   of blood and marrow to tempt her back,

   fall asleep on the sofa, wait

   for a child’s hand to touch my face.

3. / Dendrites and Axons IV

   

   

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   The limits not to love

   but what love can do: me struck dumb

   to find the fact of my love

   so wanting in its power to heal, the rage still to come.

    

   The dendrites and axons of love

   that bind you to the circuit of the world unravel,

   abandon all but love

   itself, stubborn and suffering as you buckle.

    

   I want more from love

   than love can give, but love does what it can

   with earth undone: love

   to riffle and raise the dust of the crumbled man.

4. / Personal Computing

   

   

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   I slot the rewound cassette into the deck:

     type LOAD, press PLAY►.

   The monitor flickers its glitch

     rainbow, begins to unscramble

   its data with a sound like a signal

     scratched from the depth of space.

   I am maybe nine years old,

     and you, Dad, can’t be far away.

   This is a Commodore 64,

     its console the colour of praline fondant,

   the second computer in the quiet

     revolution you brought to our home

   that for us had begun with the VIC-20:

     20KB of read-only memory,

   new words with their strange promise –

     the hope hard-wired in the dream

   of tech – and that, I think, is what

     you loved in these: the greater human

   good that we might make with them,

     the computer as a kind of friend

   to help our thinking grow.

     The next one you bought was the Amiga 500

   with 1MB and a built-in disc-drive

     and that felt like the future.

   The revolution got faster: after the Commodores

     you built your own, but eventually

   the Windows PC won out, leaving

     the house a clutter of computer

   archaeology. Look at us now.

     You and I might have discussed

   the quantum mechanics of dementia:

     how you can be here and not here

   at once. If I had kept those old

     computers, might they one day

   remake you from skin cells

     smudged from your thumb

   on the mould of your mouse –

     left-click your mind to life

   again? But it wouldn’t be you.

     The future has come and gone.

   I am still watching the flickering screen

     waiting for all we have lost to load.

    

5. / Statuary I

   

   

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   You become a miraculous thing

   when blood soaks through your stone

   eyes, slow as wax from the candle

   nearby that marks the melting years.

    

   Scabs of lichen bloom across

   the bone-stiff drapery of your clothes

   like mould on linen damp too long

   in the cold of a room without the sun.

    

   I have seen you move in candle-light –

   that trick in the flicker of a breath

   through flame that makes the livid

   brink of perfect stillness dance.

    

   Then, on days like this, you cry.

   I daren’t dab those tears away.

   I watch, instead – remember when

   your soft hand took hold of mine.

    

6. / Masts

   

   

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   The air is not itself today:

   it can no longer rest. The last

   free molecule has just been put to use.

    

   Our alpha-waves are butterfly-brained.

   Sleep, in any normal sense,

   has not been possible here for months.

    

   I carry an egg for safety now.

   I came too close the other day:

   it cooked in my pocket, good enough to eat.

    

7. / Two Lost Things

   

   

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   E.A.L. at four years old

    

   She dreamt of two lost things,

   their cobweb feathers soft to touch,

   perched, as if for food, or such

   thin fare as dreaming brings

   to wean two wisps with wings,

   the orphans of their clutch.

   Their song is nothing, and too much:

   silence twinned with that which sings.

    

   She does not name these darlings

   of the dark that came to land

   on her, light as fledglings,

   the spinning air’s awakenings.

   She comes to me to understand.

   ‘Look,’ she says, holding out her hand.

    

8. / Musician

   

   

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   That night plays back scratched vinyl,

   but here’s my fiddle.

    

   The lane led way out and I went

   though dark had spilt and shook the stars

   in black water where I walked,

   dressed for day and led by story,

   nothing more. The spirits I’d swilled

   warmed my blood, but the cold drank.

   I knew I didn’t have long before

   the blue moon stilled my flesh to crystal.

    

   I heard it come: the air at work,

   the medium lipping my ears and mouth,

   spittled fingers circling my skin

   to make it ring. I felt the bow

   I’d hung at my back grow taut

   and the raw strings of what you call

   my violin thrill for the kiss:

   they braced to meet and make a voice.

    

   And then I was there: the blind road

   emptied into a field, as if

   where I stepped a sudden breath

   had blown the earth to a sphere of glass.

   I met that world’s musician:

   a white moth alight within

   its whisper. One of us said

   play, and I did, and what it spoke

   I learned, even as it danced me

   to the bone in sound that shivered

   to a mute dawn. I woke under dew

   in open ground. I had no home.

    

   You don’t have to believe me, but I can tell

   your body heard. The song gets through.

   That’s how I got this tune on my tongue.

9. / Gramarye

   

   

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   I want speech that makes my skin

   more than the book I have made

   of its membrane

      silent as lips

      at the mouth

   that leans from the air

    

      and this is how

   that work in my flesh began:

   the desire that drew me like sap

   to its tip, where I hung by my voice

      from the whispering ash

      that grew in the garden

      it made of my death

   for runes cut by the tongue to touch

   every beginning that is to come

   to the egg from which I was born.

    

   I learned to know love by the names that I made

   and the names took bodies of their own

   that glistered with the dust of their home:

   unblinking at the strangeness of what I had done

   in piercing their silence, sending my voice

   to open as an iris under their sun:

   they pluck it from the pulsing earth and come.

    

   I have woken to moonlight leaking from the wound:

      the skin that I speak with

      fresh with the blood of its wish.

10. / Consistori del Gai Saber

    

    

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    for Philip Allott

     

    Tell those who come they have to find

    the sound of knowing for themselves,

    as I did, three hundred

    and seventy-seven moons ago.

    It is nothing so fixed as the earth

    at the centre of the spheres (which, mark me,

    is a truth that will loosen like a slip

    of the tongue) but the maker of fact, the spell

    that makes you a fiction, howbeit real.

    But I’m going too fast. It begins

    with overhearing the dead

    in the living. What else is a word

    but a ghost sent feeling its way,

    the centuries passed on your breath?

    And in this, the feat of surprise.

    When a stranger speaks and it sounds

    upon you a promise of being

    that it keeps as it touches the stem

    of your fate, something like a voice

    that you love. That is the invisible body

    of our wandering college, to which anyone

    can belong – if they choose. For me,

    born without money or precedent

    but yes, loved, and my weird strong enough,

    one dead dictador became my teacher.

    The music in words can be its own song.

    I imagine him lit by brandy and candle,

    the room drunk, for a moment, on language,

    and he half-aware that those who listen

    have not yet been born. Look for the signs

    that tell you the student has heard the dead

    and plays for them as they would for a friend.

    Look for signs that the dead have heard.

    This is not solemn: the violeta d’aur

    has to be earned, as does the ear

    of those who come after. They, like the language,

    deserve our best benefaction.

    Listen –

    the golden oriole is back, and arcs

    the air with his whistle. He is a joglar

    like me, the magus of this morning’s taroc.

    Look how the hard-at-work and the self-absorbed

    alike ignore the pageant of his arrival.

    But let’s not be doleful: there’s a joke

    in the tragic mask of their loss as old

    as laughter itself, just as a prude

    is the dupe of sex, and the sober

    are fools of reason. Unwilling clowns

    are clowns nonetheless – better to choose

    to play. Our students should have a stomach

    for paradox, and impatience only with the absence

    of love. We have the freedom of fallen

    beings. Think not of fresco devils

    nor huddled angels with blue-washed wings

    but their nameless painter at work in the temple

    of their imagining – the art in the thought

    of transfiguring – who wears the horned brow

    of an ecstasy older than Christendom.

    Forgive my heresy, but we who perform

    have a habit of asking to be

    forgiven in the very trespass of our voice.

    We belong to no class but our calling.

    Our ways are promiscuous as language,

    over which we raise the sign of Eros.

    When I speak it’s to kiss my absent

    lover, who may not even be human.

    I like a music that reaches where speech

    is forbidden unless it speaks in wonder.

    That is the beginning and the end

    of our learning. If you can hear my smile

    it’s because I savour the romance of knowledge,

    even the wound of its sounding.

    Listen: those spheres are moving.

    I have told you some secrets, maybe

    said too much. But I never forget

    my audience – nor those who might be

    overhearing. Come. Step through this curtain

    and into the sun. The world is young.

    I find what I learn from the oriole pleasing.

11. / Maskwork

    

    

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    To teach the mask I make

       to tell the truth, I wear it

       as my own: feel its weight tilt

    when it sees the first earthly thing

    it loves suffer in its infant being:

       one mask passes to another

       the face that it has learned.

    Still it makes no sound, even as

       its senses sow their trance

       where what would be its language grows.

    Only when my life has done its work

       and the mask knows more than I could say 

       without its visage – then

    I take it off. It wears my voice:

       the mask speaks.