for Kay
1. Anna Karenina
Twenty six years since you inscribed
ownership, dated the title page
and made a thousand marks
on Tolstoy’s eight hundred.
I fan through, breathe
the neat scholarly intent
of your voracious pencil, its expectant
trawl for character.
You told me you read the whole thing
in three days. This still amazes me
and I want you to tell me again.
But ten minutes ago you dropped
"The War Against Cliché" by your side of the bed,
kissed me and fell asleep instantly.
So I turn on my side, wondering about
the books that couples keep of themselves,
the bold of early markings, the fading
pages, the confiding quiet of years.
2. The Brothers Karamazov
Mitya, I want only to judge you
at your own pleading estimate:
a blackguard but no thief; lover
of sweet gutter life, no parricide.
Downstairs, piled on the piano stool –
a dozen promises on paper.
Here with you, criminal of honest heart:
rainbow rolls of roubles, hopeless need for her.
*
5.09am
I lie back, try to think of nothing.
When will a train sound in the distance?
I feel now it would help.
I think you might be awake too.
I know you are awake.
How would I not know
after twenty years?
Trains in the distance,
rain on the windows;
these things were sweet
when melancholy was play.
Our hearts are not still,
our minds are not still.
5.29. The train I’ve been waiting for.
Not for lovers to listen to,
it’s just going some place;
the rain on the window
falling into your life.
3. Fathers and Sons
Ivan Sergeyevich, I think I may love you
for reasons that are not the best:
Pavel Petrovich is right – the early days of June
are the most beautiful of the year;
they are also the loveliest in which
to re-read your masterpiece.
I burnt slowly in the back garden,
turning the last seventy pages,
eyeing the lilac abuzz and blue,
finding Bazarov impossible to love.
Only now, by lamplight, can I enter
those grievous arguments of yours
with the young nihilist: your duelling,
loving, dying Yevgeny.
4. The Fiancée and Other Stories
Somewhere to be but hours to kill, I read
Chekhov all morning in the city cafés:
All those middles said Tolstoy,
no beginnings or ends.
*
A man of fifty poured the dregs
into his wife’s glass, watched the flow,
trickle and drip as she turned wordlessly
from him to gaze down the street.
A young woman leant across to her friend,
shook a sugar sachet into her cup
and with teasing, slow solemnity
placed one finger on her friend’s lips.
A shaven headed youth in a sharp suit
stared with no compromising softness
at the waitress mistaking his table.
That seemed an end, so I looked away.
I cannot locate the middle of my day.
It sparkled early like white wine
on a table outside, cloyed later
like a third unwanted coffee.
And the hours that were free
became hours of solitude with the ache
of miles in my feet. I reached the place,
got up on my hind legs and left.
Back to middles, all middles.
The train jerked and whipped my head awake
to the staring epiphany
of the title falling from my hands: "Three Years".
Three years, three years; we have been
in some kind of middle for three years.
I read on and on, willing
those ten hours away from you over;
then reached home and found you asleep;
my own eyes scorched-tired, seeing
back to the beginning, the beginning,
the beginning, this middle.
*
6.43am
The Student
The last story I read
by midsummer morning light.
Clarifying light. Saving light.
Birds and a tree breeze.
No clamouring words. You sleep on.
In every middle we are saved.
Words that could save were not spoken,
words that could sting were not spoken;
All is middle: we can move so many ways
from here. We move into our day.
And life seemed entrancing, wonderful
and endowed with sublime meaning.
*
9.18pm
What is lost
but not
because look
there it is
out there
where the children were
something that should
have been put away
but wasn’t
now benign
against the fence
and now
at dusk
on the table
our chairs
placed
mine for the sun
yours for the shade
your book left out there
mine left out there too
5. Late Auden
"Don’t bother with" it was the gist
our teachers felt no need to voice.
Three poets they put in front of us
were eating everyone else.
Now in my cave of duvet comfort,
I’ve been reading for a fortnight
your Selected from back to front.
One hundred poems, a good round
sufficiency, not a jagged seventy three
or one hundred and seven proclaiming
a standard of arbitrary exactness.
That’ll do says Mendelson, twisting
the grocer’s brown paper bag.
And it will do, as gratefully received
as the feeling I have you wouldn’t care
that I don’t understand all your words,
unfussed that I don’t spring out of bed
to find the dictionary
that waits for me tomorrow
in another room.
6. Elizabeth Bishop Complete Poems
Free,
this succession of midwinter mornings
from the need to rise before dawn,
I part the curtain on waking
just wide enough for reading light.
Impressed on my blank morning page,
your world of clarity,
and
meeting me
before a day’s fog of confusion,
your world of mystery.
Half a mile away
a cluster of bins have spilled
like a Rio tip over the supermarket car park
and closer to home, lies scattered
so much of what deafens me.
Here, in the book
a world in breaking light
and a beginning:
my own endless assent.
7. Cathedral
“Read everything Carver wrote. His death is hard to accept, but at least he lived.”
Salman Rushdie reviewing “A New Path to the Waterfall” Observer 24th September 1989
I don’t have that kind of supposing left in me.
We were born who we are.
I fall asleep to its sad music.
I wake to its sad music.
“Cathedral” was the one I missed
back then when nothing came cooler
than a coffee conversation
on Realism that was Dirty.
I love the blurby tags – ‘the tragedy
of ordinary lives’; ‘the unsparing eye’ –
nearly as much as the shiny covers
poking so well from my jacket.
“Cathedral” was the one I missed
back then on the stupid side of forty.
8. Tess of the d’Urbervilles
This morning we will consider Angel’s estimation of himself
Tess hangs.
This morning we will consider Hardy’s imagery of the natural world
Tess hangs.
This morning we will discuss Victorian notions of female purity
Tess hangs.
Today we will ponder Hardy’s love for his heroine
Tess hangs.
Today we will identify Pagan and Old Testament symbolism
Tess hangs.
At fifteen I missed all the points, couldn’t
answer or analyse
beyond a sudden stunned knowledge
for which, thirty years later, still
unable to see past the appalling resolve,
I have no name.
9. If This is a Man. The Truce
Walk downstairs with a soft tread, listen
to the boiling of the water, make a gift
of the cup.
Dress yourself with slow patience, listen
to the sound of each button finding
the buttonhole.
Set your place and chew your food, listen
for the blackbird singing with the spoon
in your bowl.
Walk out into the morning, listen
for approaching steps, level your eyes
and greet a man.
10. Test Match Diary 1953
Reading for escape. With the years
I come round to the idea
but find here the bookend
to all my shelves.
Miller consented to push back two maidens…
Hassett was playing with dainty ease.
John, your elegant accounts
of men at play
are sold, given or attic-stored;
this single volume remains at hand.
Today at 2 o’clock the truce will take effect
in Korea. How small this game is…
This little world,
root of all my word-love
Copyright © Adrian Buckner, 2010.
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