Four Poems

Nostalgia

It's a night for nostalgia he said.
I felt I was missing something, some
echo of nights we must have shared
in separate alleyways, far off home

rain drew him back to, or clouds,
or the particular light behind rain.
I was nostalgic for words, last words
of a poem I would read on the train.

There was a power cut today. I lit
three candles, ate lamb and read
by candlelight. The beauty of it
was too lonely so I went to bed.

It rained then. In the daylight dark.
I lay there till I heard a click
and voices. When the lights came back
it was like a conjuring trick -

there they were, the animated creatures
of my life I had thought inanimate
objects. And I was the one conjured
out of their dream of a dark planet.


Gooseberries

Birds are chirping now rain has stopped, their songs
like the rain are silver. I hear the silence,
the music of panic, of loneliness.
Rain passes like unhappiness and birds
sing happily out of the same dull silver.
It is all the silvers of cloud and cold,
the white shine of illness. A friend lies dying
in hospital. The night I saw her there
we watched fireworks from her window, her window
filled with photos and dried flowers for real
flowers are infectious, fireworks at Christmas.
When two times meet, another friend says, stories
must end - by which he means, when day meets dusk,
the page must be marked, the book closed and children
while away their questions. I heard a story
of a child who, it was foretold, would die
when the leaves began to fall; when they did,
a sister, brother, sewed the leaves back on
but how the story ended wasn't told -
besides, the dying do not want our questions.
Today I bought a card with berries, currants,
each translucent as a heart like a small
wineglass with veins, rivers, held against light
to plot their directions. Each tiny coloured
globe marbled, jewelled. Produce of a garden.
The flurry of birdsong behind the curtain
has gone. Now and then the trill of a latecomer.
Every morning I wake alone. Today
I find the balm and bitterness. The sweetness
of pulp, pop of a taut skin, gooseberries
a friend on the phone tells me a hen used to
lay eggs under, two eggs you'd have to slide
on your belly to reach so prickly was
the bush, with hairs sun shone through on the berries
fine as the hairs on the back of a child's hand.
Twice a day two times meet. Between the two,
like a prayer between two palms, the bookmark,
the memory, is placed. When day meets night,
night meets day, we must hold our breath, delay
our need for answers, live with what comes next.


Sadness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness
                                                                Naomi Shihab Nye

With sadness there is something to rub against -
these, your words, for unhappiness is speechless.
Sad air breathes, at whatever altitude,
recirculating air. Rub it against glass

and the shape it takes is nothing but the melt
of breath. Follow it with your eyes along
the patterns of the curtains and it will trap you
in a leit-motif you can't escape. You're wrong.

When the world falls in around you, there are
no wounds to tend, holes to fill, no prop
of stubborn plaster; bodies are not dismembered.
I've measured the ceiling for the curtain's drop,

metres are where I left them. When the world
falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands you say. Like this?
this button? A grey that fell, just now, a trick

of heaven? No, it comes from my green pyjamas.
Happiness sews on buttons. Sadness looks for
sadness to couple with, not comfort. The minute
I lift my head from the page, my heart takes over.


Prelude

je n'ai jamais fait d'ouvrage, j'ai fait seulement
des essais on comptant toujours preluder

Leopardi teaches me that poems
are preludes of some kind, preludes to something
but what and for whom, the writer or reader?
The last line of a Galway Kinnell poem
I particularly like is something
about a hen yard and last night, the night
after I was re-reading the old man
and the hen yard poem on the train,
I dream of one - a chickenshit house, my house
and I scream at my daughter to clear out
the chickens she has brought in to tell me
- or so she denies - she'd rather be
her father's daughter. I dream also of him
whose right eye has shrunk and flutters its lid
when the white rolls and remember precisely
the moment I think what's wrong with his eye,
I don't remember it being so small?
like someone's whose name I forget adream
or awake. O'Hara says naming is
only the intention of making something
and of course the minute I name this person
anonymous two people stake their claim.
And is there any difference between
waking to grey or gold? For I dream, under
a sun that pours on my bed, red and gold
and white and blond are farmyard colours
that signify a white race. You'd never think
Persians - Iranians to you - would think
of themselves as white and pink till you stop
to ponder, as I did, getting off the train,
fumbling in a torn pocket lining for
a ticket I probably hadn't bought and
trying to steer a path through charging men
and young couples leaning into each other,
the word pink which, chalky as any colour
mixed with white, is faithless to the pink
I had in mind of dawn and sunset and so
turn to another language only to find
an adjective from the noun 'face' in Farsi -
soorati, though that wouldn't be the old
rose of a cheek in Hafez. I have never
read Hafez nor Saadi nor Ferdowsi
nor Rumi I would like the world to know
in my own language though it is not my own
nor found in it the colour of my own face.