first you're sat on your dad's lap then your face is grey as the grave
you've used up the years you waited for in a cold wind
cold as the winter of your birth
you look around seeing nothing but second nature
mountains to south & east more geomorphology to north & west
the long deluge of silt precipitating through the body
2
my eldest sister & I took first communion at the convent
we left at six in the sacred spring morning trembling with family irritation in poplar leaves & fingers anticipation a speechless host
young women in white
the crass priest called me first as I was male
but a deeper music had swung in around & through me
all lacewinged
mystical &
glandular
3
our father now a compôt of All-Bran & opium
his stomach eating itself for years
a long sandbank accumulating along the west bank
strapped me to my schooling
I clenched my eyes & sailed through the lids to Palestine then southern seas
every baguette bought from a souk
I skimmed the Arabian Sea was hymned by the Mouths of the Ganges glided through the islands & straits of Borneo & Java
Sumatra affected my breathing
4
he perspired blood to teach me Latin
I sailed the South China Seas in my chair oblivious to learning objectives
or was paralysed by licks of magic:
she searched for heaven's light & groaned when then it found her
overwhelmed me capsizing in A minor
yet when I was overcome with emotion it was he who pretended to be too tired to go on
such grace
such embarrassed grace our father
5
I mainlined on music
& I mainlined on love
I tripped on genetically modified lines in the white house among the vines
they tell me there are holidays each year
Estelle & her little pink boots still wring me out
she was eighteen & I was twelve but part of my heart is still on her shelf
o she knew & once she asked me to dance with her in front of the world
I managed to spin right through the surface of France
one day I'll tell you about the cave paintings I made
6
my father fed up with din on the whistle taught me to play it then bought me a flute
& then all the bourgeois shenanigans - reading music theory song ensemble
guitar in the harmony & pain guitar in the dark
writing songs to her elbows & vines
her hair & high air
her feet:
what good is a world of guitars & flutes if I can't have you in your little pink boots?
7
you will be a doctor he said
I will be a Gluck a Haydn
my hair said standing up to be counted
I have seen my first full score
now I know what it is to spit a mouthful of Fitou against my hand on the cavern wall & feel the shape of my soul cohere out of sight as my body gently turns into the dust
8
in the revolution
I went for a walk in England where many poets bicker between hedges & libraries
but now I'm back & fiercely indignant music lessons have been disrupted in the most intolerable manner
what is one to do except talk about oneself ?
9
& so to Paris to study medicine
Alphonse took me to the cutting rooms in the Hospice de la Pitié
the floor a spongy bed of human off-cuts
small birds scrapping for beakfuls of lung rats sampling fragments of damp backbone
hacked-open heads invited me to a private view of my future
I was out through the open window & off up that road before you could say Jacques Robinson
Part Two
1
but I had to go back to the cutting room floor I rasped sawed inhaled decay slipped on innards
donated the root of an angel's wing to a famished rat with a critic's evacuated eyes
but then the Opéra!
it was like moving from rowing boats in the park
to the decks of majestic three-masters riding all the distant inner oceans
suddenly it was music to the power of itself
it was cosmic imagining & writing
unimaginable numbers
2
forcing the hacksaw through a stranger's cranium the next day I hummed a tune conducting with my eyebrows
the kindly gifts of destiny
I practically ran back to the opera & was chromatically damaged by a cor anglais crying the hymn that floated that very first communion
then I found the Conservatoire library was open to the public
the manuscripts of Gluck treasure like Shakespeare's notes
once my eyes & ears had played Gluck all pretence of medicine was rinsed down the sink
& I held up the triumphant hand of an artist
alone like Lear in the quiet & failing light
3
when convinced I wouldn't give up writing in the name of all that's holy my Catholic mother cursed me
back in Paris I survived on private lessons prune & raison sandwiches & an inexhaustable wealth of tone & light flowing into poetry & water
I lost weight & composed myself with luxurious orchestrations desperate pulses rippling in & out spreading upstream & downriver
don't confuse art with camouflaging yourself in landscape
that happens later up the crem down the pit
4
below a certain temperature there can be no reaction
one night as I conducted clouds
the sky kicked & split earthing through me
making me brilliant & dumb with shock
Harriet Smithson was Ophelia then Juliet
was Shakespeare writing much of my future
she singed & sang my surfaces stewed my innerness
every molecule touched by irreversible change
sleep escaped from strange nocturnal presence
tracking me across the room & world
another chorus of feelings
5
I trod the Paris streets like time
& through all that madness I can count the bouts of sleep
on the fingers of her left hand
collapsed in a dark field of corn on the edge of the city
worn out in any meadow under autumn sun
burrowed in snow banked up on the banks of the Seine
with my head on the table between my own knife & fork in the Café du Cardinal
not reassuring the waiters
6
& that sudden multiplication of dark matter within transformed for ever the gravities & orbits of my life I wrote back to Shakespeare & I wrote back to her the configuration of my inner river & the devastated landscape of my floating heart after the flood
leave it out on Tuesdays
7
the whole world
the empty bed
your absent river
8
I practically dragged Lesueur to Beethoven's 5th
he was so scared of giving an opinion
Christ he was so moved & disconcerted that at the end he went to put his hat on & couldn't find his head
9
worshipping Harriet from afar I didn't notice Camille breathing next to me teaching piano piano as I taught guitar to shadows
