The light and shade
of shadowed curves,
hidden places where
fingers search restlessly
for fresh points of touch,
there to inscribe the present
mysteries of our passion.

‘This is how it is,’
an inner voice explains,
‘You become so richly
entwined about.’

And there, that dear smell,
the swell and rub of flesh,
of our bodies’ confusion.
Whatever passes
into mind’s space
is pushed to the edge.
Empty yet all.

Invocation

this call to peace
does not use words we know
it is beyond language

we launch it
into the thin air of hope
where no echo lives

this invocation issues from our lips
our hands our movements
it is wholly transactional
this call to peace


Conflict and Resolution

it starts with uncertainty
continues with doubt
Can black be white
is day night?
We can make it so
and so it is
we say we write until
it becomes our faith
our truth our right

and so resolved
that black is white
and day is night
we soon forget
that others might
see it
differently

so to live in some accord
we have to temper
our resolve
(that day is night
that black is white)
and live within a twilight zone
a chiaroscuro world.


The Instrument of Peace

plucked from silence
the note of the guitar
resonates round its body
brought so close to the heart

held as a lover in our arms
the hands make harmony
sound out chords
for the singer’s song

Oh instrument of peace
hanging on the wall
of our simple home
play for us now


The Peaceful Mind**

a template of fingers
intersect each sounding string
and with every change of shape
fresh possibility ensues

those re-entrant tones held above
the resonance of open strings below
set up rich suspensions
peculiar with dissonance

gently struck arpeggios
revolve in patterned repetition
this loom-made garment of sound
to clothe the peaceful mind

I sew therefore I am. This is what women do she thought, even with the television on, muttering and flickering in the corner. But its turning on was but a reflex action to being alone when she came down stairs after reading to her child, and the sitting room empty of his presence. Only the cats occupied her chair where she now sat and sewed.

For once her sewing pile had his nightshirt, a tear at the bottom, a missing button. It was old, well-worn, of a light blue stripe. That was what he wore in bed, and, as he invariably read to her each night, she would slip her hand inside the shirt, across his stomach to a place she had discovered at the top of his pelvis that seemed to be there for her hand to rest. One night she had felt the tear and thought, I must mend this.

She knew something of the feminist canon: Rozsika Parker's Subversive Stitch lay browsed but unread on her bookshelf. The impact of the book was enough: that the relationship between women’s lives and embroidery had brought sewing out from the private world of female domesticity into the fine arts and created a breakthrough in art history and criticism. She remembered writing that somewhere in a student essay. But mending clothes was hardly fine art. And then she remembered Sashiko, the ‘little stabs’, that functional stitching of clothes in Japan.

They had met at the station for a 30-mile train journey to a nearby city. It was a blue-cold December day and they had felt warmed by seeing from the train window a covering of snow on the ploughed fields. She had worn her grey coat with the green lining and an indigo blue-pattern scarf, a swinging denim skirt and orange-patterned top. Tights and boots. He: she had forgotten. Funny that, remembering what she had worn, but for the man she was beginning to feel so hopelessly in love with, and by the end of that day, hold in her heart, seemingly, for evermore, she could not remember. His old brown jacket perhaps . . . No, she couldn’t be certain.

He had loved the exhibition. It was an unencountered world, though he had experienced Japan, but not, as he said (at length), the rural fastness of an offshore island where women were loggers and men were firemen. It was the simplicity of the stitch that captured his attention, the running white-cotton stitch on the blue indigo workware, occasionally a red thread on a decorative piece – a fireman’s tunic. This was stitching about mending, reinforcing a worn area by stitching on a new patch, and in doing so novel patterns evolved, so novel that this traditional stitch became an inspiration for Reiko Sudo, Hideko Takahshi, and the cutting edge textile designers of 20C Japan. It was reuse that made sense.

He had loved the names of the stitches: passes in the mountain, fishing nets, the interlaced circles of two birds in flight, woven bamboo, the seven treasures of Buddha.  She remembered the proximity of him, touching his arm to show, and sometimes just to touch his arm – yes, he was wearing that old brown coat. It was before they were lovers, but she was sure then they were in love, and it seemed impossible and quite wrong to be in this large gallery, flowing too and fro, apart then together, apart then together. She thought: he knows how I want to be when looking at such things; I need space. And she supposed he needed space too because the moment they entered the gallery he left her alone. But that coming together was, and remained ever after, a warm thing, and she remembered that day being a little aroused by it being so.

Later, they had walked a short way from the gallery to a tiny cottage-like bookshop he knew, a bookshop full of impossibly large books on art and architecture. He had something to find: The Crystal Chain Letters – architectural fantasies Bruno Taut and his circle by Ian Boyd Whyte. There had been her favourite  Mark Hearld cards and his collaged pictures in the window. She went upstairs and knelt on the wooden floor to take out the books on gardens on the lowest shelves. The winter sun had poured through a nearby window, warming her face till it glowed. But she was already glowing inside. And he came and knelt behind her. He rested his head on her shoulder and she had turned and put her arms around him. They had kissed, a delicate, exploratory, yet to be lovers kiss that had made her feel weaker than she already felt. She knew she would remember that moment, and she had, here on her chair years later, now in a different sitting room from the one she had returned to that evening without him, returning to her husband and children. And she had missed him beyond any measure and written to him the next day, a letter written in her head before she had slept, and then the following morning, with the children at school, she had lain on her bed and calmly touched herself to remember his kiss, their kiss.

After the painting by Dana Schutz

Notice the lid’s up on my piano,
to keep the strings dry.
Instead of a pool on the shiny black
hood the water just slides away.

It rains blue rain
here on the prairie,
big clouds, blue rain
coming down in arrows.

My hair’s a mess,
but I don’t care
bare-foot pianist me,
firm fingers on the keys,

you see I’m playing
Frederic Rzewski’s  
Winnsboro Blues,
those **** Cottonmill Blues,

Oh Lordy,

You know and I know,
I don’t have to tell,
Work for Tom Watson,
Got to work like hell.


*For James who likes his poetry with music

You sat for my camera
just the once
in a Mediterranean garden.
It was a haven of green
above a sunned-blue bay.

Unplanned it was.
We’d eaten lunch,
watching butterflies
flicker-perch and hover.

You’d tied your hair with a scarf
to keep the midday heat from your head,
a sun that brought your freckles to the fore
on bare arms, on your golden cheek.

Then, for a little while,
you left your public self elsewhere,
and my zoomed lens travelled close
as a lover’s kiss before waking.

And as you gazed at the daisied grass
a gentleness and grace descended
on your sun-shadowed face.

I took two pictures, only two.

These portraits I’ve not kept
with other ‘snaps’,
but far apart;  and possibly
close to the painter’s art
as I will ever get.

The portrait-call goes out.
I hesitate, I’m reticent, afraid
to share them with the public gaze.
They say so much, you see,  
of what I know you now to be:
the woman I’m privileged
to touch, to hold dear and close
to this wholly unmanageable heart.

When you visit this Nativity
you pass through room after room;
five centuries of painting
ablaze with colour
and the human form.

When it’s as far as you can go
from the melee of the constant crowd,
that Saturday we were rewarded
by a space empty, but for three paintings
and our silent selves.

Silenced by its wonder
my son caught its breath:
the smell of the studio in Arezzo
and perhaps the shadow of the artist
barely sighted, blind at the end.

The painter, so the Polish poet says,
who hid so thoroughly behind
his work that one cannot invent
a private life, his loves or friendships,
passion and grief. His being was his ouevre.

And these faces (from the street perhaps?)
marked in the mind’s memory
with the miracle before them.
And for me: the silent music of the angels,
a choir with lutes haunts and haunting

always.

In the clear light of morning, an October morning, at the beginning of this properly autumn month, he had felt sad: that he’d broken a promise to himself the afternoon before. It was her voice on the phone, and then that text. He had promised he would no longer write intimately, about their intimacy, remembering what has passed between them, which had so marked him. All it took was this flavour of her voice, a slowness in her diction, and he could not help himself: such a rush of images, of moments, sensations. He knew it was unwise to linger over any of these things because he felt sure she did not. That was no longer her way, if it ever had been her way, and he imagined that, with her accustomed kindness and generosity, she had quietly put such things aside. So on this gentle morning, he was upset that he had once again visited that box of treasures in the white room that he kept for her in his imagination house. This was not the route to happiness. He would throw away the key.

He needed consolation. Once he had turned to her letters, to catch that flavour of her, those things that surrounded her, a kind of aura that held within it her secret self. Now, there was a print above his desk that he loved (Spurn marks: seaweed #4), her origami bird, the print of a painting of an African woman and child given to him on his birthday (when he had first kissed her, tentatively on her left cheek,) and her dear photograph, dear because he knew he looked at it more times in a day than he could possibly admit to.

It needed to be a book, a passage he could read to remind him there were so many other joys in life alongside the joy he felt at the thought of her, a joy he felt he might never consummate. He took Ronald Blythe’s Word from Wormingford off the shelf and turned to the essay for the beginning of October. Ronnie had been watching the late September clouds, those armadas sailing across the skies. In a moment he was somewhere else, in a life he recognised so acutely, those East Anglian places of his early manhood. In this present time, in North Yorkshire, he would sit and watched such clouds from a bench above Filey Bay, clouds that David Hockney celebrated in his paintings of the Wolds.

Yesterday afternoon there had been a break in the weather after a week of mist and rain. It had found him gazing at a drama in the skies above the trees in his park. He had walked to the Rose Garden with its redundant conservatory and paired Pelicans atop its gateposts, where once he’d sat with his infant children as they’d slept. There were roses still, a little tattered, but colourful. Like Ronnie he had spent time cloud watching, until the geese from the nearby lake erupted into flight. Always a marvel of movement !

Blythe’s essays were always so rich in the sheer breadth and content of their meditations. There was always some new knowledge to be had, things to Google or better still ‘go to the book.’ This was when he loved what few books now remained from his library. He had Luke Howard’s essay on The Modification of Clouds. A Quaker, Howard was admired by Goethe (they corresponded) and Shelley, John Constable and John Ruskin (who used Howard’s cloud classifications in his Modern Painters). He then went to find Shelley’s The Cloud (and in so doing uncovered several books that he’d forgotten he owned). He read the last verse that once he had learnt by heart . . .

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die --
For after the rain, when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams,
Build up the blue dome of Air
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, live a ghost from the tomb,
I arise, and unbuild it again.

Hmm, he thought, such rhyme and rhythm. And, via Blythe recalling the Chinese, he then pictured the official from the emperor’s counting house bringing guests home after work to gaze at the cloudscapes over the Tai Mountains from his humble balcony. Nothing was to be said, an hour of silence was the convention. In a blink he remembered the autumn poem by Lai Bai where ‘floating clouds seem to have no end.’

I climb up high and look on the four seas,
Heaven and earth spreading out so far.
Frost blankets all the stuff of autumn,
The wind blows with the great desert's cold.
The eastward-flowing water is immense,
All the ten thousand things billow.
The white sun's passing brightness fades,
Floating clouds seem to have no end.
Swallows and sparrows nest in the wutong tree,
Yuan and luan birds perch among jujube thorns.
Now it's time to head on back again,
I flick my sword and sing Taking the Hard Road.

He had to take a deep breath not to think too deeply about The Clouds and Rain, that metaphor for the arts of the bedchamber. But Ronnie’s 500 words sent him back to Wormingford and the bedbound old lady he describes who spent her days watching the clouds.

As he closed the book he felt a little better, ready to face the day, and more important ready to place his thoughts in a right place, a comfortable and secure place, quiet and respectful, however much he might seek to possess each night her Lotus pond and make those flowers of fire blossom within

She said over the ether: ‘I’m eating a perfectly ripe fig. So nice, I’m going to have another’.

We’ve been here before he thought as he read her text. In a memory’s moment he was back at her dining room table with five figs in a small bowl. The table wore a blue cloth, and she a Scandinavian skirt with pockets. It was that time of year when the midday light can be so golden, so wonderful. He remembered her delight that he had ‘brought figs to her table’. He was so full to the brim with love for her on that autumn day that those figs had seemed so very right, more than appropriate; a perfect addition to their developing intimacy. She had not been wooed by figs before. He wasn’t sure she understood their significance, their ****** stance.  She hadn’t read The White Goddess. When pressed to explain he was tempted to tell her exactly what he understood a fig might suggest between lovers, and lovers they certainly were. She had cried out under his touch, had opened her mouth, her beautiful eyes, had cried out like no woman he had even begun to know. She was so extraordinarily passionate as he touched her. She moved with him and their bodies would kiss and stroke as though unbidden, of their own volition, ungovernable even. So when he touched the closest fig in the blue bowl on the lunchtime table it was a little like being touched by her in the greatest intimacy. The skin of the fig has this rub, it feels like the ******* of his passion, that she had so generously touched, had stroked, had known, had brought between the valley of her dear ******* that now, these several years gone and past, he still wondered at, that such a curve and fall and sensation in the hand and fingers could remain so wondrous, so magically beautiful.

He had responded in a text by writing: you sensuous woman . . .  And she in reply had said:  ‘Just pecking’. Does one really peck at figs? Surely not, he thought. She wrote: I meant peckish! Stupid predictive text. And he said: Surely one doesn’t eat figs because one is peckish. That’s what digestive biscuits are for.

And so it went on a little, this conversation over the ether. But all the while he was back in that sunlit room quite alone with her, before he should have been alone with her and feeling such passion, such a passion that its imprint still remained on his consciousness. He wondered if she really understood about this passion of his. It was beyond any possible fig known to man or woman. They were never figgish, only once and she had said it was not for her, and he had understood, and loved her all the more for such frankness in the face of passion. He was still feeling his way, hardly knowing how to deal with such passionate closeness, such desire to be close. How he loved her, he thought this again and again, again and now. He seemed to hold a whole litany of love inside him that he longed to sing out to her.

He was so grateful that she had interrupted those afternoon labours at his desk with her teasing words, and wondered whether she really did eat that second fig.

we’re spoilt you and I
when together
alone together
being our true selves
and true to ourselves
with only our past
the past of us together
to measure who we are

yesterday in London
I kept seeking your hand
in the press and teem
of the Saturday crowds
to feel the pulse of you
pulse in me as every step
taken every view shared
bound us together ever
deeper and beyond
passion’s deepest kiss
where words have flown
and thoughts are stilled
and now is suddenly
present everywhere

They sat like two birds roosting in a tall tree. Only the tall tree was a room where a fire had been made up, but was not yet alight. It was early autumn and a mild evening. She had not drawn the curtains because there was a still a little light left in the sky. She enjoyed watching the darkness gather before she would light the lamp to sew, to stitch. He had lit a candle on the small table by his chair in preparation for an evening’s reading. He was looking at her slight shape in the candlelight, looking at her small hands folded in her lap, then stroking the cat beside her, then touching her hair lightly; finally she opened her sewing basket.

He rose deliberately, shaking off the stiffness felt in his limbs from a day on their small-holding, and went to the bookshelf behind his chair. As the lamp was as yet unlit the rows of books slept in darkness. He felt their spines, many he knew, and many knew his touch, and as he moved his forefinger nail from book to book there was momentarily an irregularity, a surface he did not recognize. He pulled out the book and took it into the light: Inferno Dante Alighieri.

He thought he knew all his books, most he had read many times over. They were his dear friends, their dear friends because her books were there too. Their library made up a world of thought and imagination. He did not know Dante’s Inferno. He knew of it. He had read many an inscription from it. He had even learned a terzetto from the Paradiso, once, many years ago, in a different life than he led now:

Tu non se' in terra, sì come tu credi;
ma folgore, fuggendo il proprio sito,
non corse come tu ch'ad esso riedi".

You are not on the earth as you believe;
but lightning, flying from its own abode,
is less swift than you are, returning home."

Holding Inferno in his hands he realised the woman had now drained from her gaze the last dregs of the evening light, and seemed suddenly changed. She was wearing something other than he had thought she had worn previously. Her dress was silk, and long and cream and gold, and securing her hair, a thin golden band. Her shoes were slippers  . . . but she rose from her chair and their colour and texture were lost in the dark shadows that covered the floor. And he, he was changed too: a long green cloak, a toga-like cloak, some kind of cap on his head, his hair, his hair long and grey, and sandals on bare feet.

She lit the lamp and immediately they both saw the painting above the empty fireplace had changed, had been transformed, replaced by Henry Holiday’s masterpiece Dante and Beatrice. The painting shows the couple at the bridge of Santa Trinità in Florence. Beatrice deep in conversation with her friend Monna Vanna ignores Dante’s impassioned stare and stance.

The woman held the lamp to the painting. She knows this painting and remembers in an instant standing before it in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. That day, that lunchtime, she was in love, and her lover stood next to her. She was so in love, and her lover, she knew, adored her. She recognized Dante’s stance and stare because she had seen her lover stand and stare so. Many times. It had been a lunchtime assignation and she had worn all black with almost-pink shoes. And here, and now, they stood again, still lovers, but also the dearest friends, and for the rest of their lives they had so sworn.

He still held the Inferno in his hands, and it was as if commanded by a voice that wasn’t any recognizable voice but a silent message from beyond and afar. ‘Whatever you read will come to pass.’

And so opening the book at random he read, ‘We drew now closer . . .’

He turned to her and said these words aloud. He placed the book on his small table and brought his body in its unusual costume to stand facing this finely dressed woman who wore her fine clothes with the scent of roses mixed with some eastern aloed fragrance. He brought his hand to her pale cheek and noticed the gold ring on his finger and the finely manicured nails, hands that had not laboured today in the 12-acre pasture.

She opened her lips to speak and, rather breathlessly said:

"Le cose tutte quante
hanno ordine tra loro, e questo è forma
che l'universo a Dio fa simigliante.

"All things, among themselves,
possess an order; and this order is
the form that makes the universe like God.

She knew no Italian, a little German from singing Schubert lieder to his tentative fumblings on the parlor piano, but certainly no Italian.

She picked up the Inferno from his small table, and just as he had, opened a page at random and read:

‘We drew aside and found a space . . .’

And so they did, draw aside, and she, with the Inferno in her hand, led him out of their sitting room along the stone-flagged passage to their front door, and lifting the latch opened the door . . . onto daylight, a Florentine street. They were close to the Ponte Santa Trinità, but also to the church that bares its name, with its celebrated Sassetti Chapel brim-full with sumptuous frescos telling stories from the life of St Francis and considered Domenico Ghirlandaio's masterwork.


*To be continued . . .

Free Writing

How curious to be told
to write freely,
to ‘do’ free writing,
and then be given a subject!
That’s unfreeing my freedom.

Thank you, but
I don’t want to think
about this time last year.
As September was
September is,
brim-full of wondrous light
now flowing ‘cross this table
as I write – as freely as I can.

Nobody is going to tell me
to write freely and then
give me a subject, tell me
to write for two minutes
then give me five.


The Memorial Hall

There was a continuity of safeness
in these grounds that frame
this unfortunate building.
Memorable and unforgettable,
the ‘Mem’ Hall was a travesty
by Clough William Ellis.
All balustrades and pineapples,
his signature touch, chosen
it’s said (this architect that is)
because he designed the Bath Club pool
whose famous cup this swimming school
inevitably won year upon year.


Walking with Alice

Grey day this Sunday
And a morning walk
Through the estate
To the edge of fields,

You here to collect
The season’s fruits,
Not to eat,
But for the dyer’s vat.

And I, just to crunch
My boot on stubble
And cross the wide acres
Ready for the plough.


For Jeanette

Her last day in Amsterdam
and a brief break from the Powerbook;
she was playing the flâneur.
In the late afternoon
she came across this painting
in a window, in a gallery
at Van Ostadestraat 294.

She was transfixed.
The painting demanded her attention
and her time. After an hour
(and it was by then nearly dark)
she returned to her hotel
and cancelled her flight home.

For the next three days
she went back to the painting
in a window, in a gallery
in Van Ostadestraat 294.

She had begun to learn to look,
not glance, but look, to stand still
for an hour or more - and look.

She was rewarded by a world of detail
no glance could have brought forth.
She was transfixed.
She was transformed.


Red Point

Leaving the fishing station
to the cows on the beach
through each kissing gate
we passed, we kissed.
The steep road ahead
with the horse and the boy
hid our cabin home.
The sea channel,
the red sand,
the distant rain
glanced us by.


To my children**

You’re out there
Living famously
All the way down
And back again.
I do think of you
As birthdays pass
And Christmas letters
Demand attention.
You’re out there
To represent my way
Of baking bread,
Sailing the boat,
Walking too fast,
Winning at Go.
Whether in Qatar,
Kansas City or Deptford
You’re me in disguise.

for David on his birthday*

Above the noise and rush
of water in the gorge
this still pool
holds an expectation
of its river’s descent
down limestone-speckled
stone down-tumbling
to fill dark narrow space
with a commentary of turbulence

. . . and all the while
the arc of September’s sun
spotlights fern and stone
green grey pale-power white
water a mineral-brown
reflections everywhere:
our hard shadows sharp
against the sedimentary rock
skeletal fragments of life
from an oceanic past

19 September is the Chinese Festival of Mid-Autumn*

It’s Mid-autumn of the Bing Chen year
And I’ve been drinking happily all night.

I'm drunk
.
So I write this poem

to remember my brother, Zi You.

With a cup of wine in my hand,
I asked the blue sky
‘When will the moon be clear and bright?’

’In the heavens on this night,’ it said.

I wonder what season it is in heaven.

I'd like to ride homeward on the wind
Yet I fear the mansions of crystal and jade

are much too cold and far too high.
If I dance with my moonlit shadow,

It hardly seems a human world.

The moon comes round
Behind the red mansion,
Stoops to enter the carved wood doors,

Shining upon all sleeplessness,

it bears no grudge,
 oh why
Does the moon tend to be so full
when people are far apart and alone?

We feel sorrow, we feel joy.
Whether we’re near or distant
It makes no odds.
The moon may be dim or bright,
A crescent slice or round as a ball.
This imperfection has always
been there; since time began.


Tonight may we be blessed
with a life that’s long and true.
Though a thousand miles lie
between us, we can surely share
the beauty of this autumn moon -
together.

He would think of her
and be tempted,
tempted to pick up the mobile
from his ungovernable desk.

Navigating the backlit screens
he would find her name
and press to see her photo
that dialled the number,

and then that wait
for the ringing tone, that
wait while her phone rang
. . . and with a connection

she would say Hello you
And he’d know from
her voice if the time was
right or wrong;

she was busy,
preoccupied or
(and always wonderful
this) happy to hear him . . .

. . . and he would falter.
He really had nothing
to say he could say, so
much to say that he couldn’t,

and so he would witter:
chatter or babble pointlessly
or at unnecessary length.
So the dictionary said.

Such a sad business this.
Better by far to stick
to a letter than witter,
than witter, than witter.

I

They have a dusty coating
You can rub away with a finger’s pad
Leaving a small inky-skinned
Plum, wild, of dark blue hue
Found in hedgerows where
The blackthorn grows:
The sloe.

Pick in September
October even,
Its colour seemingly so at odds
With Autumn’s trends
Of brown and orange, red and gold
This prunus spinosa (or so it goes):
The sloe.

II

How this photo’s colours
spell autumn this dull
rain-threatening day we walked
almost empty fields so I could
crunch the stubbled wheat

and you might pocket sloes
to halt you said
that earnest kiss
or passion-promising
hug against the gate.

This morning is quite thoroughly golden. The light against the avenue of trees I pass day in day out has flattened any perspective of leaf and branch. Each tree stands like a cut-out from a magazine. The still rising sun is low in the sky and shadows are only slowly retracting, slowly firming up. It’s the first school day in the city and there’s a change of tone in sound from the streets. It’s as though that gentle getting up time since late July has become a must be getting up time. All those electric kettles turned on at seven rather than nine must add something to this settling cloud of noise. On my desk a photo: my once little children outside the home front door have posed for the annual start of the school year snapshot; my youngest in a summer dress, long hair brushed, standing tall with a bright smile; the boys bright-eyed, impatient to be off. That first day when all of them walked together through the park, under the lime trees, carefully across the busy main road, under the railway bridge, down to the end of the cul de sac and their school. The saying goodbyes, the hug in the playground, then away into the school day they run. And now I walk back a longer way around, into the park, but a circuit past the tennis courts, to the lake with its still fledgling geese, up the steep hill to the college by the golf course, to the little wood at the top from where one inevitably stops to take breath, and if you stand on this bench can see two miles away the traffic’s relentless movement on the motorway and a horizon of distant hills. The sky is summer blue and the leaves still a vivid green, but there is a presage of autumn in the air. With it comes the possibility of alone-time, time to think and plan and do what’s been curtailed - for what seemed an eternity of keeping busy: to make each day a holiday, a time to grow and rest, a time to rest and grow.

He had been away. Just a few days, but long enough to feel coming home was necessary. He carried with him so many thoughts and plans, and the inevitable list had already formed itself. But the list was for Monday morning. He would enjoy now what he could of Sunday.

Everything can feel so different on a Sunday. Travel by train had been a relaxed affair for once, a hundred miles cross-country from the open skies of the Fens to the conurbations of South Yorkshire. Today, there was no urgency or deliberation. Passengers were families, groups of friends, sensible singles going home after the weekend away. No suits. He seemed the only one not fixated by a smart phone, tablet or computer. So he got to see the autumn skies, the mountain ranges of clouds, the vast fields, the still-harvesting. But his thoughts were full to the brim of traveling the previous November when together they had made a similar journey (though in reverse) under similar skies. They had escaped for two days one night into a time of being wholly together, inseparably together, joined in that joy of companionship that elated him to recall it. He was overcome with weakness in his body and a jolt of passion combined: to think of her quiet beauty, the tilt of her head, the brush of her hair against his cheek. He longed for her now to be in the seat opposite and to stroke the back of her calf with his foot, hold her small hand across the table, gaze and gaze again at her profile as she, always alert to every flicker of change, took in the passing landscape.

But these thoughts gradually subsided and he found himself recalling a poem he had commissioned. It was a text for a verse anthem, that so very English form beloved by cathedral and collegiate choral directors of the 16th C (and just that weekend he had been in such a building where this music had its home). He had been reading The Five Proofs for the Existence of God from the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas, knowing this scholar to have been a cornerstone of the work of Umberto Eco, an author he admired. He had also set a poem that mentioned these Five Proofs, and had set this poem without knowing exactly what they were. He recalled its ending:

They sit by a lake where dead leaves
Float and apples lie on a table. She
ignores him and his folder of papers

but I found later the picture was called
‘In Love’, which coloured love sepia.
Later still, by the time I sat with you,

Watched your arm on the back of a chair
And your hand at rest while you told me
Of Aquinas and his proofs for the existence

Of God I realised love was not always
Sepia, that these hands held invisible
Keys, were pale because the mind was aflame.

He remembered then the challenge of reading Aquinas, this Dominican friar of the 13C. It had stretched him, and he thought of asking his wordsmith of thirty years, the mother of his daughters, to bring these arguments together in a poetic form for him to set to music. She had delivered such a poem and it took him some while to grasp it wholly. He wondered for a moment if he actually had grasped it. But there was this connection with the landscape he was passing through. She had mentioned this, and now he saw it for his own eyes. She had been to Ely for the day, to walk the length of the great Cathedral, to stare at and be amongst the visible past, the past of Aquinas. He remembered the first verse as only a composer can who has laboured over the scheme of words and rhythms:

The Argument from Motion

Everything in the world changes.
A meadow of skewbald horses grazes
Beneath a pair of flying swans
And the universe is different again.

And no sooner is potency reduced to act,
By a whisker’s twitch or a word,
A word, that potent gobbet of air
Than smiles and tears change places.

And everything has changed. Back
Go the tracks beyond seen convergence
To a great self-sufficient terminus
Which terminus we might call God.

And so it was in such a spirit of reflection that his journey passed. He had joined the Edinburgh express at Peterborough to travel north, and the landscape had subsided into a different caste, still rural, but different, the fields smaller, the horizon closer.

Alighting from the train in his home city on a Sunday afternoon the station and surrounding streets were quiet and the few people about were not walking purposefully, they strolled. He climbed the flights of stairs to his third floor studio, unlocked the door and immediately walked across the room to open the window. Seagulls were swooping and diving below him, feeding off the detritus of the previous night’s partying in the clubs and pubs that occupied the city centre, its main shopping area removed to a mall off kilter with the historic city and its public buildings. What shops there were stood empty, boarded up, permanently lease for sale.

Sitting at his desk he surveyed the paper trail of his work in progress. Once so organised, every sketch and plan properly labelled and paginated, he had regressed it seemed to filling pages of his favoured graph paper in a random fashion. Some idea for the probably distant future would find its way into the midst of present work, only (sometimes) a different ink showing this to be the case. Notes from a radio talk jostled with rhythmic abstracts. He realised this was perhaps indicative of his mental state, a state of transience, of uncertainty, a temporariness even.

He was probably too tired to work effectively now, just off the train, but the sense and the relative peacefulness that was Sunday was so seductive. He didn’t want to lose the potential this time afforded. This was why for so many years Sunday had often been such a productive day. If he went to meeting, if he cooked the tea, if he ironed the children’s school clothes for the week, there was this still space in the day. It represented a kind of ideal state in which to think and compose. Now these obligations were more flexible and different, Sunday had even more ‘still’ space, and it continued to cast its spell over him.

He put his latest sketches into a sequential form, editing on the computer then printing them out, listening acutely, wholly absorbed. Only a text message from his beloved (picking blackberries) brought him back to the time and day. There was a photo: a cluster of this dark, late summer fruit, ripe for picking framed against a tree and a white sky. Barely a week ago they had picked blackberries together with friends, children and dogs and he had watched her purposely pick this fruit without the awkwardness that so often accompanied bending over brambles. He wondered at her, constantly. How was this so? He imagined her now in her parents’ garden, a garden glowing in the late afternoon light, as she too would glow in that late-afternoon light . . . he bought himself back to the problem in hand. How to make the next move? There was a join to deal with. He was working with the seven metrics of traditional poetry as the basis for a rhythmic scheme. He was being tempted towards committing an idea to paper. He kept reminding himself of the music’s lie of the land, the effectiveness of it so far. It was still early days he thought to commit to something that would mark the piece out, produce a different quality, would declare the movement he was working on to be a certain shape.

And suddenly he was back on the train, looking at the passing landscape and the next verse of that Aquinas poem insisted itself upon him with its apt description and tantalising argument:

The Argument from Efficient Causality

We are crossing managed washlands.
Pochards so carefully coloured swim
Where cows ruminated last summer
In a landscape fruit of human agency.

And I think of the heavenly aboriginal
Agent of all our doings in this material
Playground of earth I can pick up,
Hold and crumble and cultivate

And air that is mine for the breathing
And the inhabited waters that cling
As if by magic to a sphere. What cause
Sustains the effects we live among?

For there is no smoke without fire
And as we sow, thus we reap. Nihil
Ex nihil, therefore something Is,
Some being we might call God.

So ‘nothing out of nothing, therefore something is’.  Outside in the city the Cathedral bells were ringing in Evensong. The sounds only audible on a Sunday when the traffic abated a little and the sounds in the street below were sporadic. He thought of going out into the Cathedral precinct and listening to the bells roll and rhythm their sequences, those Plain-Bob-Majors and Grand-Sire-Triples. But he knew that would further break the spell, the train of thought that lay about him.

He sketched the next section, confidently, and when he had finished felt he could do know more. There it was: a starting point for tomorrow. He could now go towards home, walk for a while in the park and enjoy the movements of the wind-tossed trees, the late roses, the geese on the lake. He would think about his various children in their various lives. He would think about the woman he loved, and would one day assuage what he knew was a loneliness he could not quench with any music, and though he tried daily with words, would not be assuaged.

This nearly autumn time
and a field set aside,
grassed green and partly shadowed.

Late afternoon, evening almost:
a confluence, a convergence
there of nature’s diagonals.

A house and home
hide under a darkened wood,

in the light trees stand *****
with leaves for a while yet

before those September storms
and wet October’s mists arrive.

For a moment
he held her in his arms,
and it still thrilled him
to feel the familiar places
on which his love for her
had moved, had been comforted.
And yet, she had moved away;
she had something else to do,
her mind far from the pleasure
of an embrace.

Retreating, he felt his body
in a different place
enmeshed with the length of her,
the cool loveliness of her skin
and, after much care and dedication
to the business of touch and stimulation,
she would become unto herself,
unto her body’s own desire.
But , it was not to be,
and he turned to his book,
to page 99.

He saw in his mind’s eye her standing before the mug. In a craft show, on a stall: ceramics. It had a blue about it comforting as a still lake in remote mountains. The glaze had that quality that made you want to stretch your hand towards it, and if not pick it up and touch it entire, at least stroke it with the fingers, feel where the potter’s fingers had formed its shape on the wheel. Everything else on the stall was as nothing; only the mug held her gaze, her desire now to own it, to take its yet to be measured weight between both hands. Imagining breakfast and she would fill it with coffee and bring the hot, rich liquid to her lips: nature’s miracle of taste and aroma so necessary as the right start to any day of work or creative thought. She resolved not to look at the price as she had already decided to buy it come what may. It was beautiful and useful, and she told herself it would replace some mass-produced mug currently filling her kitchen cupboard, a mug that needed relegating to the next yard sale. Eventually, she dreamed, her cupboard would be full of such beautiful mugs she had thus found, thus chosen.

There was nothing here, he thought looking in his kitchen cupboard, that begins to hold a candle to such beauty – a couple of plain white utilitarian cups and saucers. No mugs to speak of. There was real coffee freshly brewing in a jug on the MFI table next to a sadly pink vase of flowers and ferns brought from a moorside garden – for her imagined visit. The dark colour of the coffee and its fragrant aroma (an added spoonful of expresso) formed, he mused, a temporary bridge over the always-distance of their separation. He wondered how his favourite Chinese poet Li Po would have fashioned a poem that spoke of such things: his loved-one far away over the mountains taking her first morning tea, still in her night gown her bare feet on the scrubbed wooden floor, poised before the day as a delicate flower nodding in the wind, the air sweet breathing through the open blinds, the dew sparkling still on the thin grass of her late summer garden.

And so, loving her beyond any measure, any reason, he writes:

*I am jealous of this blue mug
Taking such pleasure
In filling the shape
Of your quiet hand.

Afar, away, apart, beyond distance
I can only dream to drink
From the same rim that touches
Your perfect lips, your darting tongue.

My name is Zhou Yuanten, but call me Eddie. I am a doctoral student at Xinjiang University –in the far, far west, but at Brunel to study this year. My English is good. I lived in Boston, Massachusetts for undergraduate years. I majored in piano at the New England C and then discovered I wanted to compose rather than play. So I go to MIT and soon I discover the English do it so differently, so I apply to Brunel. And at Brunel they then say of this place ‘you have to go.’ So here I am.

So surprising to be greeted in Chinese! And not just Nin Hao, we have a conversation! His accent is Northern Mandarin. He is writing a novel, he explains, about poets Zuo-Fen and Zuo-Si. We have 15 minutes conversation every day and I help him with his characters. Strange, to most of the class he is nobody, but to foreign students here we know him through his website and his software. I have even played his colours piece, The Goethe Triangle.

It is joy to be respected by a teacher and his sessions are like no other I’ve had here, and here I mean the UK. Oh, so laid-back, so lazy so many teachers. People lack energy here. They are dreamers and only think of themselves. He is full of energy and talks often about this Imogen of whom I never hear. Her father a great composer and she copied his music from when she was a girl – such beautiful calligraphy. Her father loved India and learned Sanskrit. He should have learned Mandarin; at least that is a living language. ‘Imo’, he says, ‘is my heroine, my mentor, the musician I most revere.’ He showed us her library and what was her studio in one of the old buildings here. He gives me this little book about her ten years in this place. A strange looking lady; there’s a photograph of her conducting Bach in the Great Hall. She looks like she is dancing.

This morning some are not here, but there are little notes on the desk with apologies perhaps. He leaves them untouched and we make chords again, and scales and arpeggios and Slonimsky’s famous melodic patterns. We write and write. He sings, we sing too. There is a horn and a cello with us today. They play and make jokes. They show us harmonics and tunings and bend our ears in new directions we do not expect. Those who complain about this course not being ‘advanced’ will eat their words; only I think some of those are not here.

As Chinese we hear sound in a different way I think. In our language tone is so important. To each word there are four tones that make meaning quite different. Chinese uses only about 400 syllables, compared to 4000 in English. So there are lots of syllables, like ****, that have multiple meanings. I tell him the story of the Lion-eating Poet, which he does not know!! I am writing this out for him, all 92 characters. Just one word **** but with four meanings – lion, ten, to make, to be. The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is the story of a poet (****) named **** who loves to eat lions (**** ****) goes to market (****) to buy ten (****) of them, takes them home to eat (****) and discovers they are made (****) of stone (****).

So I have no trouble hearing what others struggle to hear. We make pieces that are all about tone, and on a single note. Mark, the cellist, plays the opening of Lutoslawski’s Concerto – forty-two repetitions of a tenor ‘D’ a second apart. I had never heard this – a cadenza at the beginning of a concerto. Now we write a duo, on just one note. We write; they play. We are like many Mozarts trying to write only what we have already heard, making only one copy. I use the four tones and must teach the players the signs. I demonstrate and he says of the 1st tone – ‘Going to the Dentist, the 2nd – Climbing a ladder, the 3rd – ‘The Rollercoaster’, the 4th –‘Stepping on a pin’. We all do it!

And there are all these microtones. We listen to a moment of Ravel’s Bolero and pieces by Thomas Ades and Julian Anderson, then in detail (and with the score) to part of Duet for piano and orchestra by George Benjamin. This is spectral music. He is daring to introduce this – very difficult subject - this idea that a sound could be mimicked (? Is that the word – to impersonate?) by analysing it for the frequencies that make it up, and then getting instruments with similar acoustic properties to play the frequencies as pitches. So the need for microtones – goodbye equal temperament! Great in theory, difficult in practice.

This afternoon we are to study spectral composing using our computers. Until now we use our computers or smart phones to listen to extracts. He has this page of web links on his website for each session. Instead of listening through hi-fi we listen through our headphones. Better of course by far, no birds sounds or instruments playing next door. We can hear it again anytime. So there is software to download, Fourier analysis I suppose, he tries hard not to use any science or maths because there are some here who object, but they are fools. Even Bach knew of acoustics – designing the organs he played.

We finish this morning studying harmonic rhythm and this word tonality nobody seems quite able to describe. To him even the chromatic scale is tonality, and he shows in a duet for horn and cello how our ears take in tonality change. This is not about keys, but about groupings of pitches – anywhere – so a tonality can be spread across several octaves. So often, he says, composers are not aware of the tonalities they create, they don’t hear harmonic rhythm. They’re missing an opportunity! Sound can be coloured by awareness of what makes up a tonality. So understanding spectral music must help towards this. It is very liberating all this. If we take sound as a starting point rather than a system we can go anywhere.

Yesterday he asked me about a book he is reading. Did I know it? A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo. Of course I know this very funny book. He said he liked to think of music in the same way the character of the Chinese girl Z thinks about love.

“Love,” this English word: like other English words it has a tense. “Loved”, or “will love”, or “have loved.” All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exists in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is ài in pinyin. It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

And so it is with music. Music is a being, a situation, a circumstance. It holds past and future. It is wondrous, just like love.

It’s nearly two in the morning and the place is finally quiet. I can’t do early mornings like I reckon he does. Even a half-past nine start is difficult for me. So it has be this way round. I called Mum tonight and she was her wonderful, always supportive self, but I hear through the ‘you’ve done so well to get on this course’ stuff and imagine her at her desk working late with a pile of papers waiting to be considered for Chemistry Now, the journal she edits. I love her study and one day I shall have one myself, but with a piano and scores and recordings on floor to ceiling shelves . . . and poetry and art books. I have to have these he said when, as my tutorial came to a close, he apologised for not being able to lend me a book of poems he’d thought of. He had so many books and scores piled on the floor, his bed and on his table. He must have filled his car with them. And we talked about the necessity of reading and how words can form music. Pilar, she’s from Tel Haviv, was with me and I could tell she questioned this poetry business – he won’t meet with any of us on our own, all this fall out from the Michel Brewer business I suppose.

This idea that music is a poetic art seems exactly right to me. Nobody had ever pointed this out before. He said, ask yourself what books and scores would be on the shelves of a composer you love. Go on, choose a composer and imagine. Another fruitless exercise, whispered Pilar, who has been my shadow all week. I thought of Messiaen whose music has finally got to me – it was hearing that piece La Columbe. He asked Joanna MacGregor to play it for us. I was knocked sideways by this music, and what’s more it’s been there in my head ever since. I just wanted to get my hands on it. Those final two chords . . . So, thinking of Messiaen’s library I thought of the titles of his music that I’d come across. Field Guides to birds of course, lots of theology, Shakespeare (his father translated the Bard), the poetry and plays of the symbolists (I learnt this week that he’d been given the score of Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande for his twelfth birthday) . . . Yes, that library thing was a good exercise, a mind-expanding exercise. When I think of my books and the scores I own I’m ashamed . . . the last book I read? I tried to read something edifying on my Kindle on the train down, but gave up and read Will Self instead. I don’t know when I last read a score other than my own.

I discovered he was a poet. There’s an eBook collection mentioned on his website. Words for Music. Rather sweet to have a relative (wife / sister?)  as a collaborator. I downloaded it from Amazon and thought her poems were very straight and to the point. No mystery or abstraction, just plain words that sounded well together. His poetry mind you was a little different. Softer, gentler like he is.  In class he doesn’t say much, but if you question him on his own you inevitably get more than the answer you expect.  

There was this poem he’d set for chamber choir. It reads like captions for a series of photographs. It’s about a landscape, a walk in a winter landscape, a kind of secular stations of the cross, and it seems so very intimate, specially the last stanza.

Having climbed over
The plantation wall
Your freckled face
Pale with the touch
Of cold fingers
In the damp silence
Listening to each other breathe
The mist returns

He’s living in one of the estate houses, the last one in a row of six. It’s empty but for one bedroom which he’s turned into a study. I suppose he uses the kitchen and there’s probably a bedroom where he keeps his cases and clothes. In his study there is just a bed, a large table with a portable drawing board, a chair, a radio/CD, his guitar and there’s a notice board. He got out a couple of folding chairs for Pilar and I and pulled them up to the table.

Pilar said later his table and notice board were like a map of himself. It contained all these things that speak about who he is, this composer who is not in the textbooks and you can’t buy on CD. He didn’t give us the 4-page CV we got from our previous tutor. There was his blue, spiral-bound notebook, with its daily chord, a bunch of letters, books of course, pens and pencils, sheets of graph and manuscript paper filled with writing and drawings and music in different inks. There was a CD of the Hindemith Viola Sonatas and a box set of George Benjamin’s latest opera and some miniature scores – mostly Bach. A small vase of flowers was perilously placed at a corner . . . and pinned to his notice board, a blue origami bird.

But it was the photographs that fascinated me, some in small frames, others on his notice board, the board resting on the table and against the wall. There were black and white photos of small children, a mix of boys and girls, colour shots of seascapes and landscapes, a curious group of what appeared to be marks in the sand. There was a tiny white-washed cottage, and several of the same young woman. She is quite compelling to look at. She wears glasses, has very curly hair and a nice figure. She looks quiet and gentle too. In one photo she’s standing on a pebbly beach in a dress and black footless tights – I have a feeling it’s Aldeburgh. There’s a portrait too, a very close-up. She’s wearing a blue scarf round her hair. She has freckles, so then I knew she was probably the person in the poem . . .

I’ve thought of Joel a little this week, usually when I finally get to bed.  I shut my eyes and think of him kissing me after we’d been out to lunch before he left for Canada. We’d experimented a little, being intimate that is, but for me I’m not ready for all that just now; nice to be close to someone though, someone who struggles with being in a group as I do. I prefer the company of one, and for here Pilar will do, although she’s keen on the Norwegian, Jesper.

Today it was all about Pitch. To our surprise the session started with a really tough analysis of a duo by Elliott Carter, who taught here in the 1960s. He had brought all these sketches, from the Paul Sacher Archive, pages of them, all these rows and abstracts and workings out, then different attempts to write to the same section. You know, I’d never seen a composer’s workings out before. My teacher at uni had no time for what she called the value of process (what he calls poiesis). It was the finished piece that mattered, how you got there was irrelevant and entirely your business and no one else’s. So I had plenty of criticism but no help with process. It seems like this pre-composition, the preparing to compose is just so necessary, so important. Music is not, he said, radio in the head. You can’t just turn it on at will. You have to go out and find it, detect it, piece it together. It’s there, and you’ll know it when you find it.

So it’s really difficult now sitting here with the beginnings of a composition in front of me not to think about what was revealed today, and want to try it myself. And here was a composer who was willing to share what he did, what he knew others did, and was able to show us how it mattered. Those sheets on his desk – I realise now they were his pre-composition, part of the process, this building up of knowledge about the music you were going to write, only you had to find it first.

The analysis he put together of Carter’s Fantasy Duo was like nothing I’d experienced before because it was not sitting back and taking it, it was doing it. It became ours, and if you weren’t on your toes you’d look such a fool. Everything was done at breakneck speed. We had to sing all the material as it appeared on the board. He got us to pre-empt Carter’s own workings, speculate on how a passage might be formed. I realised that a piece could just go so many different ways, and Carter would, almost by a process of elimination choose one, stick to it, and then, as the process moved on, reject it! Then, the guys from the Composers Ensemble played it, and because we’d been so involved for nearly an hour in all this pre-composition, the experience of listening was like eating newly-baked bread.  There was a taste to it.

After the break we had to make our own duos for flute and clarinet with a four note series derived from the divisions of a tritone. It wasn’t so much a theme but a series of pitch objects and we relentlessly brainstormed its possibilities. We did all the usual things, but it was when we started to look beyond inversion and transposition. There is all this stuff from mathematical and symbolic formulas that I could see at last how compelling such working out, such investigation could be . . . and we’re only dealing with pitch! I loved the story he told about Alexander Goehr and his landlady’s piano, all this insistence on the internalizing of things, on the power of patterns (and unpatterns), and the benefit and value of musical memory, which he reckoned so many of us had already denied by only using computer systems to compose.

Keep the pen moving on the page, he said; don’t let your thoughts come to a standstill. If there isn’t a note there may be a word or even an object, a sketch, but do something. The time for dreaming or contemplation is when you are walking, washing up, cleaning the house, gardening. Walk the garden, go look at the river, and let the mind play. But at your desk you should work, and work means writing even though what you do may end in the bin. You will have something to show for all that thought and invention, that intense listening and imagining.

Today we shall have the naming of parts. How the opening of that poem by Henry Reed caught his present thoughts; that banal naming of parts of a soldier’s rifle set against the delicate colours and textures of the gardens outside the lecture room. *Japonica glistening like coral  . . . branches holding their silent eloquent gestures . . . bees fumbling the flowers. It was the wrong season for this so affecting poem – the spring was not being eased as here, in quite a different garden, summer was easing itself out towards autumn, but it caught him, as a poem sometimes would.

He had taken a detour through the gardens to the studio where in half an hour his students would gather. He intended to name the very parts of rhythm and help them become aware of their personal knowledge and relationship with this most fundamental of musical elements, the most connected with the body.

He had arranged to have a percussionist in on the class, a player he admired (he had to admit) for the way this musician had dealt with a once-witnessed on-stage accident that he’d brought it into his poem sequence Lemon on Pewter. They had been in Cambridge to celebrate her birthday and just off the train had hurried their way through the bicycled streets to the college where he had once taught, and to a lunchtime concert in a theatre where he had so often performed himself.

Smash! the percussionist wipes his hands and grabs another bottle before the music escapes checking his fingers for cuts and kicking the broken glass from his feet It was a brilliant though unplanned moment we all agreed and will remember this concert always for that particular accidental smile-inducing sharp intake of breath moment when with a Fanta bottle in each hand there was a joyful hit and scrape guiro-like on the serrated edges a no-holes barred full-on sounding out of glass on glass and you just loved it when he drank the juice and fluting blew across the bottle’s mouth

And having thought himself back to those twenty-four hours in Cambridge the delights of the morning garden aflame with colour and texture were as nothing beside his vivid memory of that so precious time with her. The images and the very physical moments of that interval away and together flooded over him, and he had to stop to close his eyes because the images and moments were so very real and he was trembling . . . what was it about their love that kept doing this to him? Just this morning he had sat on the edge of his bed, and in the still darkness his imagination seemed to bring her to him, the warmth and scent of her as she slept face down into a pillow, the touch of her hair in his face as he would bend over her to kiss her ear and move his hand across the contours of her body, but without touching, a kind of air-lovers movement, a kiss of no-touch. But today, he reminded himself, we have the naming of parts . . .

He was going to tackle not just rhythm but the role of percussion. There was a week’s work here. He had just one day. And the students had one day to create a short ‘poem for percussion’ to be performed and recorded at the end of the afternoon class. In his own music he considered the element of percussion as an ever-present challenge. He had only met it by adopting a very particular strategy. He regarded its presence in a score as a kind of continuo element and thus giving the player some freedom in the choice of instruments and execution. He wanted percussion to be ‘a part’ of equal stature with the rest of the musical texture and not a series of disparate accents, emphases and colours. In other words rhythm itself was his first consideration, and all the rest followed. He thought with amusement of his son playing Vaughan-Williams The Lark Ascending and the single stroke of a triangle that constituted his percussion part. For him, so few composers could ‘do it’ with percussion. He had assembled for today a booklet of extracts of those who could: Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale (inevitably), Berio’s Cummings songs, George Perle’s Sextet, Living Toys by Tom Ades, his own Flights for violin and percussionist. He felt diffident about the latter, but he had the video of those gliders and he’d play the second movement What is the Colour of the Wind?

In the studio the percussionist and a group of student helpers were assembling the ‘kits’ they’d agreed on. The loose-limbed movements of such players always fascinated him. It was as though whatever they might be doing they were still playing – driving a car? He suddenly thought he might not take a lift from a percussionist.

On the grand piano there was, thankfully, a large pile of the special manuscript paper he favoured when writing for percussion, an A3 sheet with wider stave lines. Standing at the piano he pulled a sheet from the pile and he got out his pen. He wrote on the shiny black lid with a fluency that surprised him: a toccata-like passage based on the binary rhythms he intended to introduce to his class. He’d thought about making this piece whilst lying in bed the previous night, before sleep had taken him into a series of comforting dreams. He knew he must be careful to avoid any awkward crossings of sticks.

The music was devoid of any accents or dynamics, indeed any performance instructions. It was solely rhythm. He then composed a passage that had no rhythm, only performance instructions, dynamics, articulations such as tremolo and trills and a play of accents, but no rhythmic symbols. He then went to the photocopier in the corridor and made a batch of copies of both scores. As the machine whirred away he thought he might call her before his class began, just to hear her soft voice say ‘hello’ in that dear way she so often said it, the way that seem to melt him, and had been his undoing . . .

When his class had assembled (and the percussionist and his students had disappeared pro tem) he began immediately, and without any formal introduction, to write the first four 4-bit binary rhythms on the chalkboard, and asked them to complete it. This mystified a few but most got the idea (and by now there was a generous sharing between members of the class), so soon each student had the sixteen rhythms in front of them.

‘Label these rhythms with symbols a to p’, he said, ‘and then write out the letters of your full name. If there’s a letter there that goes beyond p create another list from q to z. You can now generate a rhythmic sequence using what mathematicians call a function-machine. Nigel would be:

x x = x     x = = =      = x x =      = x x x      x = x x

Write your rhythm out and then score it for 4 drums – two congas, two bongos.’

His notion was always to keep his class relentlessly occupied. If a student finished a task ahead of others he or she would find further instructions had appeared on the flip chart board.  Audition –in your head - these rhythms at high speed, at a really quick tempo. Now slow them right down. Experiment with shifting tempos, download a metronome app on your smart phone, score the rhythms for three clapping performers, and so on.

And soon it was performance time and the difficulties and awkwardness of the following day were forgotten as nearly everyone made it out front to perform their binary rhythmic pieces, and perform them with much laughter, but with flair and élan also. The room rang with the clapping of hands.

The percussionist appeared and after a brief introduction – in which the Fanta bottle incident was mentioned - composer and performer played together *****’s Clapping Music before a welcome break was taken.

It always intrigued him how a group of people entering a room for the first time made decisions about where to sit. He stood quietly by a window to give the impression that he was looking out on a wilderness of garden that fell steeply away to a barrier of trees. But he was looking at them, all fifteen of them taking in their clothes, their movements, their manners, their voices (and the not-voices of the inevitably silent ones), their bags and computers. One of them approached him and, he smiling broadly and kindly, put his hand up as a signal as if to say ‘not just now, not yet, don’t worry’, or something like that.

This smile seemed to work, and he thought suddenly of the woman he loved saying ‘you have such a lovely smile; the lines around your eyes crinkle sweetly when you smile.’ And he was warmed by the thought of her dear nature and saw, as in a photo playing across his nervous mind, the whole of her lying on the daisied grass when, as ‘just’ lovers, they had visited this place for an opening, when he could hardly stop looking at her, always touching her gently in wonder at her particular beauty. In the garden they had read together from Alice Oswald’s Dart, the river itself just a short walk away . . .

Listen,
a
lark
spinning
around
one
note
splitting
and
mending
­it

As he finally turned towards his class and walked to a table in front of the long chalkboard, half a dozen hands went up. He had to do the smile again and use both hands, a damping down motion, to suggest this what not the time for questions – yet. He gathered his notebook and went to the grand piano. He leafed through his book, thick, blue spiral-bound with squared paper, and, imagining himself as Mitsuko Uchida starting Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto, fingers placed on the keys and then leaning his body forward to play just a single chord. He held the chord down a long time until the resonance had died away.

‘That’s my daily chord’, he said, ‘Now write yours.’

Again, more hands went up. He ignored them. He gave them a few minutes, before gesturing to a young woman at the back to come and play her chord. Beside the piano was a small table with a sheet of manuscript paper and a Post-It sticker that said, ‘Please write your chord and your name here’. And, having played her chord, she wrote out her chord and name – beautifully.

He knelt on the floor beside a young man (they were all young) at the front of the class. He liked to kneel when teaching, so he was the same height, or lower, as the person he as addressing. It was perhaps an affectation, but he did it never the less.

‘Tell me about that chord,’ he said, ‘A description please’.
‘I need to hear it again.’
‘OK’, there was a slight pause, ‘now let’s hear yours.’
‘I haven’t written one’, the reply had a slightly aggressive edge, a ‘why are you embarrassing me?’ edge.
‘OK’, he said gently, and waved an invitation to the girl next to him. She had no trouble in doing what was asked.

Next, he asked a tall, dark young man how many notes he had in his chord, and receiving the answer four, asked if he, the young man, would chose four voices to sing it. This proved rather controversial, but oh so revealing – as he knew it would be. Could these composers sing? It would appear not. There was a lot of uncertainty about how it could be done. Might they sound the notes out at the piano before singing (he had shaken his head vigorously)? But when they did, indeed performed it well and with conviction, he congratulated them warmly.

‘Hand your ‘chord’ to the person next to you on your right. Now add a second chord to the chord you have in front of you please.’

Several minutes later, the task done, he asked them to pass the chords back to their original owners. And so he continued adding fresh requirements and challenges. – score the chords for string quartet, for woodwind quartet (alto-flute, cor anglais, horn, baritone saxophone – ‘transposition hell !’ said one student), write the chords as jazz chord symbols, in tablature for guitar, with the correct pedal positions for harp.

Forty minutes later he felt he was gathering what he needed to know about this very disparate group of people. There were some, just a few, who refused to enter into the exercise. One slight girl with glasses and a blank face attempted to challenge him as to why such a meaningless exercise was being undertaken. She would have no part in it – and left the room. He simply said, ‘May I have your chord please?’ and, to his surprise, she agreed, and with some grace went to the table by the piano and wrote it out.

A blond Norwegian student said ‘May we discuss what we are doing? I am here to learn Advanced Composition. This does not seem to be Advanced Composition.’

‘Gladly’, he said, ‘in ten minutes when this exercise is concluded, and we have taken a short break.’ And so the exercise was concluded, and he said, ‘Let’s take 15 minutes break. Please leave your chords on the desk in front of you.’

With that announcement almost everyone got out their mobile phones, some leaving the room. He opened the windows on what now promised to be a warm, sunny day. He went then to each desk and photographed each chord sheet, to the surprise and amusement of those who had remained in the room. One declined to give him permission to do so. He shrugged his shoulders and went on to the next table. He could imagine something of the conversation outside. He’d been here before. He’d had students make formal complaints about ‘his methods’, how these approaches to ‘self-learning’ were degrading and embarrassing, belittling even. I’m still teaching he thought after 30 years, so there must be something in it. But he had witnessed in those thirty years a significant decline in musical techniques, much of which he laid at the feet of computer technology. He thought of this kind of group as a drawing class, doing something that was once common in art school, facing that empty page every morning, learning to make a mark and stand by it. He had asked for a chord, and as he looked at the results, played them in his head. Some had just written a text-book major chord, others something wildly impossible to hear, but just some revealed themselves as composers writing chords that demonstrated purpose and care. Though he could tell most of them didn’t get it, they would. By the end of the week they’d be writing chords like there was no tomorrow, beautiful, surprising, wholly inspiring, challenging, better chords than he would ever write. Now he had to help them towards that end, to help them understand that to be an  ‘advanced composer’ might be likened to being an ‘advanced motorist’ (he recalled from his childhood the little badges drivers once put proudly on their bumpers – when there were such things – now there’s a windscreen sticker). To become an advanced motorist meant learning to be continually aware of other motorists, the state of the road, what your own vehicle was doing, constantly looking and thinking ahead, refining the way you approached a roundabout, pulled up at a junction. He liked the idea of transferring that to music.

What he found disturbing was that there were a body of students who believed that a learning engagement with a professional composer, someone who made his living, sustained his life with his artistic practice, had to be a confrontation. The why preceded, and almost obliterated, the how.

In the discussion that followed the break this became all too clear. He let them speak, and hardly had to answer or intervene because almost immediately student countered student. There evolved an intriguing analysis of what the class had entered into, which he summarised on a flip chart. He knew he had some supporters, people who clearly realised something of the worth and interest of the exercises. He also had a number of detractors, some holding quasi-political agendas about ‘what composition was’. After 20 minutes or so he intervened and attempted a conclusion.

‘The first rule of teaching is to understand and be sympathetic to a student’s past experience and thus to their learning needs, which in almost every situation will be different and various. This means for a teacher holding to an idea of what might, in this case, constitute ‘an advanced composer’. I hold to such an idea. I’ve thought about this ‘idea’ quite deeply and my aim is to provide learning opportunities to let as many of you as possible be enriched by that idea. You are all composers, but there is no consensus about what being a composer is, what the ‘practice of composition’ is. There used to be, probably until the 1970s, but that is no more. ‘

‘You may think I was disrespectful in not wishing to engage in any debate from the outset. I had to find a way to understand your experience and your learning needs. In 40 minutes I learnt a great deal. My desire is that you all go away from each session knowing you have stretched your practice as composers, through some of the skills and activities that make up such a practice. You all know what they are, but I intend to add to these by taking excursions into other creative practices that I have studied and myself been enriched by. I also want to stretch you intellectually – as some of my teachers stretched me, and whose example still runs through all I do.

Over the next seven days you are to compose music for a remarkable ensemble of professional musicians. I see myself as helping you (if necessary) towards that goal, by setting up situations that may act as a critical net in which to catch any problems and difficulties. I know we are going to fight a little over some of my suggestions, the use of computer notation I’m sure will be one, but I have my reasons, and such reasons contribute towards what I see as you all developing a holistic view of composing music as both a skill and an art form. I also happen to believe, as Imogen Holst once said of Benjamin Britten, that composing music is a way of life . . .

With that he walked to the window and looked out across that wilderness of green now bathed in sunshine. He felt a presence by his shoulder. Turning he suddenly recognised standing before him a young man, bearded now, and yes, he knew who he was. At a symposium in Birmingham the previous summer he had talked warmly and openly to this composer and jazz pianist in a break between sessions, and just a few weeks previously in London after a concert this young man had approached him with a warm greeting. Empathy flowed between them and he was grateful as he shook his hand that this could be. She had been with him at that concert and he remembered afterwards trying to recall his name for her and where they’d met. She was holding his arm as they walked down Exhibition Road to their hotel and he was so full of her presence and her beauty no wonder his memory had failed him.

‘Brilliant,’ the young man said, ‘Thank you. Just so much to think about.’

And he could say nothing, suddenly exhausted by it all.

In the night it had been so dark he had been unable to see across the room. The uncurtained window was a thought, a remembrance. He had to feel his way across the room from the warm bed, and across the wooden floor his feet felt one of the two small rugs he knew were there. Finding the windowsill he looked out into sheer darkness, but then a glimmer of light flashed far away across the valley, and yes there was just the faintest trace of dawn, and it was so still. He opened the window and could hear a faint breath of wind moving the trees surrounding this estate house, a house empty but for him. Somewhere quiet, unpopulated by this pulsing, vibrant, unreal community he had joined the previous afternoon.

There was an owl distant, and he immediately thought of the poem Owl written just a few hundred yards away by a poet who had once lived on the estate. He imagined her writing it in a half hour captured from being a mother of small children, and of being a gardener and wife. Maybe she had her worktable in her bedroom, a small space wholly hers where she could form her thoughts into these jewels of words.

Owl

Last night at the joint of dawn,
an owl’s call opened the darkness

miles away, more than a world beyond this room
and immediately I was in the woods again,

poised, seeing my eyes seen,
hearing my listening heard
under a huge tree improvised by fear

dead brush falling then a star
straight through to God
founded and fixed the wood

then out, until it touched the town’s lights,
an owl elsewhere swelled and questioned
twice, like you light lean and strike
two matches in the wind.


He returned to bed and as he lay down to gather a little sleep before the early morning light summoned him to his desk, he thought about ‘the joint of dawn’. Only a poet could have found that word ‘joint’, the exactness and rightness of it. It gave him a sudden and prolonged moment of joy. That’s what the creative mind sought, the right word, a word that summoned up not just images – he knew exactly what the joint of dawn was as an image – but also a very particular emotional and experiential state, for him a whole history of early mornings sitting quietly with a cup of tea between his hands, looking out; or sometimes being out, in winter before dawn, walking to his studio, the old walk through the industrial estate, over the river, into that vast silent building, up the three flights of stairs by feel and long practice – the metal rims on each stair step a guard against a long fall – then to his room, and before turning on the light at his drawing board he would stand by the long windows whose sills held his shells and stones, a vase of flowers, a small collection of old (and blue) bottles, a framed photograph of his children, he would stand and see the joint of dawn begin as a crack in the sky and then open like a lid on a box, a box that held a faint morning light, a pre sun, a grey glimmering.

As he lay awake, but with eyes closed, he thought of a conversation they had had recently, he and the woman he loved, the woman who warmed his heart and whose image in so many different forms floated continually in his consciousness. The feel of her under his body pulling herself to the compass points of his passion, and in such a moment when time had become suspended, had found this release, this overflowingness that gave him now, alone in this dark bedroom, a joy he could barely contain, that it could be so and to which his own body now expressed in its own vivid and physical way.

This conversation – he sought to remember the circumstances. Maybe it was over the telephone. Many of their conversations had to be so. They lived apart, and even when they lived together for short periods they were not truly together. There was often the intervention of work, of present children, of heads full of lists of things to do.  This conversation was about a short story he had written and sent to her to read – she had supplied the title, curiously, and he had accepted it, the title, as a challenge. She said ‘I’m often unsettled by your stories, by not knowing what is ‘real’ and what is invented. I find it difficult to read what you write as fiction because I’m aware that some of what you write is based on memory, people you have known perhaps, and I have not’. He could tell from the examples she gave (that were really questions) that there was, perhaps, a particular unease when it came to women he had portrayed. He felt a little sad and uncomfortable that his answers did not seem to help, and he thought quietly for some time after about this problem. Of course, authors did this, they trawled their memories, and often and usually ‘characters’ (he had read) were composites. The character in question, a poet in her sixties called Sally, was one such, a composite. He had invented her he thought, but to her, his questioner, his loved one, she had assumed a reality. It was those intimate details he had supplied, those small things that (he felt) drew a fictional character to a reader. Had he known a Sally? How intimately had he known a Sally? Was this the sort of woman he would like to know, perhaps even fantasied about knowing? A woman who handled words well, poetically, that was plain, but unmarked by her age, though had large feet and moved without grace.

He loved to write letters to her, his loved one. He wanted, this morning, to write to her, but he didn’t want his letter to be another list of ‘I did this, then this, and I saw this, and this made me think of this poem (and here it is), or this picture, and I heard this music (and there attempt a description). He was selfish really. He didn’t want the letter skimmed through and discarded. He has written, he loves me, he is thinking about me so he writes knowing I like letters, but that’s it, and his letter, because they come so frequently, is just another mark on the drawing that will be the day; it carries little permanence with it. And sadly, he will occasionally (although he is improving) allow these little intimacies to fall into words, and that I find difficult, embarrassing. I suppose I want letters anyone could read, that I could leave about on the kitchen table.

So, just occasionally he would place himself in a story, and this is what he began to prepare as he lay in bed and the dawn lit this bare room, so minimally furnished, in this quiet and beautiful place where a ten-minute walk would bring him to the bank one of Tarka’s rivers, where from the kitchen window, looking north, he could see the Moor and even one of its signifying and majestic Tors.'

VIII

Glassy smooth
a mirror-sea
reflects a turbulent
cloudscape blending
white into grey

today far distant
the sea joins the sky
the sky absorbs the sea
into the one
the other disappears

and little movement
at the water’s edge . . .
the tide-uncovered land
lies exposed to harden
in the still air

IX

Despite the profusion
the messiness of it all
and with disorder everywhere
there is a precise vocabulary
for the nature and experience
of the coastal strip
the area caught between
land and sea.

Rocks littered
Sand pitted and patterned
Sea sounding breaking pulling-back
Sky an overarching complement to it all

and the necessary story of coming
and the ‘just being here’
and this path to the sea shore
strewn so with anticipation
with forward-facing dreams almost
urgent imaginings as we let go
of the constraints of the squared space
the vertical architecture of daily life

X

See how those we love are transformed
when the sea is their only boundary

a figure stands before a sand bar
in a crescent of water left by the tide
an affecting geometry of solitude

another gathers her body in a crouch
to come close to a speckled play of tiny shells
fragments thrown together by the morning’s tide

The beach is such unconfining space
where movement demands no direction


XI

this attentive looking
at what lies at the feet
or not
choosing to pass by
the curiously-formed
or not

but there is a measuredness
of step an accompanying intent
with that always-confidence
there may be something

so single out what can be held
in the fingers what can lie
entire in the neutral space
of your collection’s row

then later

with the pencil’s mark
the brush’s touch
in line and shade
and the tricks of chiaroscuro
an image will be secured
in mind and muscles’ memory

you will have drawn this form
into knowledge

It was their first time, their first time ever. Of course neither would admit to it, and neither knew, about the other that is, that they had never done this before. Life had sheltered them, and they had sheltered from life.

Their biographies put them in their sixties. Never mind the Guardian magazine proclaiming sixty to be the new fifty. Albert and Sally were resolutely sixty – ish. To be fair, neither looked their age, but then they had led such sheltered lives, hadn’t they. He had a mother, she had a father, and that pretty much wrapped it up. They had spent respective lives being their parents’ companions, then carers, and now, suddenly this. This intimacy, and it being their first time.

When their contemporaries were befriending and marrying and procreating, and home-making and care-giving and child-minding, and developing their first career, being forced to start a second, overseeing teenagers and suddenly being parents again, but grandparents this time – with evenings and some weekends allowed – Albert and Sally had spent their time writing. They wrote poetry in their respective spaces, at respective tables, in almost solitude, Sally against the onslaught of TV noise as her father became deaf. Albert had the refuge of his childhood bedroom and the table he’d studied at – O levels, A levels, a degree and a further degree, and a little later on that PhD. Poetry had been his friend, his constant companion, rarely fickle, always there when needed. If Albert met a nice-looking woman in the library and lost his heart to her, he would write verse to quench not so much desire of a physical nature, but a desire to meet and to know and to love, and to live the dream of being a published poet.

Oh Sally, such a treasure; a kind heart, a sweet nature, a lovely disposition. Confused at just seventeen when suddenly she seemed to mature, properly, when school friends had been through all that at thirteen. She was passed over, and then suddenly, her body became something she could hardly deal with, and shyness enveloped her because her mother would say such things . . . but, but she had her bookshelf, her grandfather’s, and his books (Keats and Wordsworth saved from the skip) and then her books. Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas (oh to have been Kaitlin, so wild and free and uninhibited and whose mother didn’t care), Stevie Smith, U.E. Fanthorpe, and then, having taken her OU degree, the lure of the small presses and the feminist canon, the subversive and the down-right weird.

Albert and Sally knew the comfort of settling ageing parents for the night and opening (and firmly closing) the respective doors of their own rooms, in Albert’s case his bedroom, with Sally, a box room in which her mother had once kept her sewing machine. Sally resolutely did not sew, nor did she knit. She wrote, constantly, in notebook after notebook, in old diaries, on discarded paper from the office of the charity she worked for. Always in conversation with herself as she moulded the poem, draft after draft after draft. And then? She went once to writers’ workshop at the local library, but never again. Who were these strange people who wrote only about themselves? Confessional poets. And she? Did she never write about herself? Well, occasionally, out of frustration sometimes, to remind herself she was a woman, who had not married, had not borne children, had only her father’s friends (who tried to force their unmarried sons on her). She did write a long sequence of poems (in bouts-rimés) about the man she imagined she would meet one day and how life might be, and of course would never be. No, Sally, mostly wrote about things, the mystery and beauty and wonder of things you could touch, see or hear, not imagine or feel for. She wrote about poppies in a field, penguins in a painting (Birmingham Art Gallery), the seashore (one glorious week in North Norfolk twenty years ago – and she could still close her eyes and be there on Holkham beach).  Publication? Her first collection went the rounds and was returned, or not, as is the wont of publishers. There was one comment: keep writing. She had kept writing.

Tide Marks

The sea had given its all to the land
and retreated to a far distant curve.
I stand where the waves once broke.

Only the marks remain of its coming,
its going. The underlying sand at my feet
is a desert of dunes seen from the air.

Beyond the wet strand lies, a vast mirror
to a sky laundered full of haze, full of blue,
rinsed distances and shining clouds.


When Albert entered his bedroom he drew the curtains, even on a summer’s evening when still light. He turned on his CD player choosing Mozart, or Bach, sometimes Debussy. Those three masters of the piano were his favoured companions in the act of writing. He would and did listen to other music, but he had to listen with attention, not have music ‘on’ as a background. That Mozart Rondo in A minor K511, usually the first piece he would listen to, was a recording of Andras Schiff from a concert at the Edinburgh Festival. You could hear the atmosphere of a capacity audience, such a quietness that the music seemed to feed and enter and then surround and become wondrous.

He’d had a history teacher in his VI form years who allowed him the run of his LP collection. It had been revelation after revelation, and that had been when the poetry began. They had listened to Tristan & Isolde into the early hours. It was late June, A levels over, a small celebration with Wagner, a bottle of champagne and a bowl of cherries. As the final disc ended they had sat in silence for – he could not remember how long, only from his deeply comfortable chair he had watched the sky turn and turn lighter over the tall pine trees outside. And then, his dear teacher, his one true friend, a young man only a few years out of Cambridge, rose and went to his record collection and chose The Third Symphony by Vaughan-Williams, his Pastoral Symphony, his farewell to those fallen in the Great War  – so many friends and music-makers. As the second movement began Albert wept, and left abruptly, without the thanks his teacher deserved. He went home, to the fury of his father who imagined Albert had been propositioned and assaulted by his kind teacher – and would personally see to it that he would never teach again. Albert was so shocked at this declaration he barely ever spoke to his father again. By eight o’clock that June morning he was a poet.

For Ralph

A sea voyage in the arms of Iseult
and now the bowl of cherries
is empty and the Perrier Jouet
just a stain on the glass.

Dawn is a mottled sky
resting above the dark pines.
Late June and roses glimmer
in a deep sea of green.

In the still near darkness,
and with the volume low,
we listen to an afterword:
a Pastoral Symphony for the fallen.

From its opening I know I belong
to this music and it belongs to me.
Wholly. It whelms me over
and my face is wet with tears.


There is so much to a name, Sally thought, Albert, a name from the Victorian era. In the 1950s whoever named their first born Albert? Now Sally, that was very fifties, comfortably post-war. It was a bright and breezy, summer holiday kind of name. Saying it made you smile (try it). But Light-foot (with a hyphen) she could do without, and had hoped to be without it one day. She was not light-footed despite being slim and well proportioned. Her feet were too big and she did not move gracefully. Clothes had always been such a nuisance; an indicator of uncertainty, of indecision. Clothes said who you were, and she was? a tallish woman who hid her still firm shape and good legs in loose tops and not quite right linen trousers (from M & S). Hair? Still a colour, not yet grey, she was a shale blond with grey eyes. She had felt Albert’s ‘look’ when they met in The Barton, when they had been gathered together like show dogs by the wonderful, bubbly (I know exactly what to wear – and say) Annabel. They had arrived at Totnes by the same train and had not given each other a second glance on the platform. Too apprehensive, scared really, of what was to come. But now, like show dogs, they looked each other over.

‘This is an experiment for us,’ said the festival director, ‘New voices, but from a generation so seldom represented here as ‘emerging’, don’t you think?’

You mean, thought Albert, it’s all a bit quaint this being published and winning prizes for the first time – in your sixties. Sally was somewhere else altogether, wondering if she really could bring off the vocal character of a Palestinian woman she was to give voice to in her poem about Ramallah.

Incredibly, Albert or Sally had never read their poems to an audience, and here they were, about to enter Dartington’s Great Hall, with its banners and vast fireplace, to read their work to ‘a capacity audience’ (according to Annabel – all the tickets went weeks ago). What were Carcanet thinking about asking them to be ‘visible’ at this seriously serious event? Annabel parroted on and on about who’d stood on this stage before them in previous years, and there was such interest in their work, both winning prizes The Forward and The Eliot. Yet these fledgling authors had remained stoically silent as approaches from literary journalists took them almost daily by surprise. Wanting to know their backstory. Why so long a wait for recognition? Neither had sought it. Neither had wanted it. Or rather they’d stopped hoping for it until . . . well that was a story all of its own, and not to be told here.

Curiosity had beckoned both of them to read each other’s work. Sally remembered Taking Heart arriving in its Amazon envelope. She brought it to her writing desk and carefully opened it.  On the back cover it said Albert Loosestrife is a lecturer in History at the University of Northumberland. Inside, there was a life, and Sally had learnt to read between the lines. Albert had seen Sally’s slim volume Surface and Depth in Blackwell’s. It seemed so slight, the poems so short, but when he got on the Metro to Whitesands Bay and opened the bag he read and became mesmerised.  Instead of going home he had walked down to the front, to his favourite bench with the lighthouse on his left and read it through, twice.

Standing in the dark hallway ready to be summoned to read Albert took out his running order from his jacket pocket, flawlessly typed on his Elite portable typewriter (a 21st birthday present from his mother). He saw the titles and wondered if his voice could give voice to these intensely personal poems: the horror of his mother’s illness and demise, his loneliness, his fear of being gay, the nastiness and bullying experienced in his minor university post, his observations of acquaintances and complete strangers, train rides to distant cities to ‘gather’ material, visit to galleries and museums, homages to authors, artists and composers he loved. His voice echoed in his head. Could he manage the microphone? Would the after-reading discussion be bearable? He looked at Sally thinking for a moment he could not be in better company. Her very name cheered him. Somehow names could do that. He imagined her walking on a beach with him, in conversation. Yes, he’d like that, and right now. He reckoned they might have much to share with each other, after they’d discussed poetry of course. He felt a warm glow and smiled his best smile as she in astonishing synchronicity smiled at him. The door opened and applause beckoned.

For Susan on her birthday*

At a distance they appear
so unexpectedly red,
a vivid vermillion strip
in a growing green field.

We walked up the farm track
to view a few stragglers
lost on their way to their
Red-Together meeting.
They were intensely red
with liquorice-black centres,
free from that dustiness
of poppies in swathes.

Alone,
and too red to be real,
their stalks too tall
ungainly, anorexic even.

En masse,
nodding variously,
a thousand-strong Red Army choir
chorusing their hearts out.

He suddenly felt a sadness that only a letter might lighten. Thoughts of her he carried variously in and from the spaces and places this hot day had taken him. The morning had been warmer than in previous days, and even at 6.0am there was a heaviness present carrying a threat of thunder and rain.

He knew she was not at her best in the leaden heat of this hemisphere, whilst enjoying the dry, brittle heat of Africa and beyond. He remembered a hot train journey and a busy day moving boxes into a studio space. They were fond memories because in such heat she took on a delicacy about her. He would perceive her features and movement to be finely drawn, and that perception revealed her profound beauty. Such recollections were foundations in his love for her.

Today he had decided to avoid that daily confrontation with the project that lay invisibly on his desk, locked up in his computer, though unsorted sheets of graph paper, populated with planning, were evident on his drawing board. This project was a ‘book’ of studies for an ensemble in Chicago whose performances were marked by such energy and virtuosity; the music was growing steadily, but he felt suspicious that it had been contrived. He hoped his precise positioning of pitch and rhythm would have brought forth a surface colouring and texture. It had not. He would often imagine symbols and words he could not yet define lying on a transparent sheet over the rather bland matter-of-fact notation of his scores. He had known only occasional moments of such graphic invention, and when they appear ‘right’, they enlivened and enhanced his work.

He had put aside today as a listening day, an opportunity to listen carefully to a group of new compositions presented in a series of broadcast concerts and available to re-audition over the Internet. Didn’t Van Gogh write to his brother about the need to rest during a period of intense creativity and spend a day copying another’s work? This was an equivalent to his ‘active listening’, listening with a pencil and paper, taking a shorthand of the music’s action and journey.

The first piece on his listening list was a four-minute composition for chorus and orchestra. He had been intrigued that the composer had set words by Richard Jeffries, a 19C author who had written children’s adventures about a parochial natural world and had become admired by today’s new nature writers. It was said Jeffries had instigated Henry Williamson’s closely observed prose. He had set about finding the words – hardly discernable in the rich sonic accumulation of voices and instruments in the broadcast performance. Eventually, thanks to a brief comment by the composer in his introduction and a line that leapt with clarity from the music (the butterfly floats in the light-laden air), found a passage in a book called A Study of My Heart.

Recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years it will still be only a moment. To the soul there is no past and no future; all is and will be ever, in now. For artificial purposes time is mutually agreed on, but is really no such thing. The shadow goes on upon the dial, the index moves round upon the clock, and what is the difference? None whatever. If the clock had never been set going, what would have been the difference? There may be time for the clock, the clock may make time for itself; there is none for me. . . . There is no separation-no past; eternity, the Now, is continuous. When all the stars have revolved they only produce Now again. The continuity of Now is for ever. So that it appears to me purely natural, and not super natural, that the soul whose temporary frame was interred in this mound should be existing as I sit on the sward. How infinitely deeper is thought than the million miles of the firmament!

The text chosen by the composer did not appear to follow the author’s words only weave a way in and around the paragraph, pulling out key words and phrases, creating a poem from the images. He could imagine doing this himself, making a poem of the text.

This business of time, and how it was to this author,  ‘all about me in the sunshine’, was the same for him. As he read it, he would think of the warm early morning light on the stone façade of the building across the road. He could turn away from his desk and see a quality of glowness that all but stopped his own thoughts of time. This quality of and in things that nature could bestow, even to the inanimate, held a wonder all its own.

And so he had listened several times to this bright, newly fashioned work, enjoying the sustained and acoustic beating of more than eighty voices (he thought) singing in close clusters. And with and against those clusters, were flurries and cascades of high woodwind, as though such figures were birds flocking into the sun on a summer’s sky. This music seemed to be about immanence, existing in the everything of itself, but unlike Jeffries’ reverie music was governed by time, and when finished, with an inconclusiveness that surprised him, would rarely, he felt, ever be performed again.

He had read to her in bed.

Ted Hughes and Dylan Thomas.

With the lights out he turned
to find her for once facing him,
curled into herself, her knees
drawn up to meet his embrace.  

It was so dark.

He said
          I haven’t made a poem for a while.
She reminded him that he had, several.

But not one that says I love you.
I do love you, he said.

And I you, she said,
kissing him
sweetly on the lips.

Goodnight.

VI

Several hours to the nearest coast
away for a night and day is all
our landlocked lives would allow.

That first time we arrived at night,
down the steepest hill to the road’s end,
to wind and rain, and a hardly visible sea.

Then up three steep stairs we climbed,
to that attic room where opening
its window on a November night

we sat in its deep-silled space
to see the waves seething below us,
waves vying for room in a bay

crowded with rolling forms
of water eager to break and fling out
foam and ****, spray and stone.

Later and despite the rain
we walked the length of a beach so dark
our shoes could hardly guide us home.

Always the incessant sounding sea.
High above a drama of moon and clouds
throwing jagged shadows on the wet sand.

Caught in this play of natural things
how could we not hold these images
ever closer to the imagination’s heart?

VII

I’ve come again
to my favourite place:
below the coarse grass landward,
above the wet sand seaward.

This zone of discovery,
my well-found land of treasure,
rich in bewildering textures.
Some of it I could do without,
but even the plastic is
beguilingly ornamental.

I carry with this bag of mine my third eye.
I will collect and even curate (in the field)
ephemeral exhibitions on suitable surfaces.
Never camera-shy these found objects.

Later, they may appear
on my studio table, or pinned
against the wall, then primed
with carborundum on
a collographic plate, stilled
into life for the purposes of art.

Whatever the object may be,
it carries my tide-mark,
a quality sign endorsing a choice
made on a deserted beach,
and proved to be right
when placed in my hand.
It registers rightful ownership.
Who knows, one day
it might embody something
more than an image of itself.

By this pool at the tide’s edge I’m happy to sit and wait. Just surrounding myself with natural things is enough for today: I am mesmerised with the to and fro of ripples.

Opening the cottage door I can be on the dune in a few steps; then I’m crossing the sand and soon stood standing at the water’s edge. Always returning, hour upon hour, I study the detail of diurnal change, my body’s clock making a difference to what I see, to what I feel. With bare toes in a still-cold sea, I cast off my cares like the sandals I left by the porch step. I have walked barefoot on the springy grass and the still-wet sand. I bring my imagination to bear on what is real.

With intent I watch these ripples. Who knows where they will turn, and when they will fold and flow? At every blink their confluence adjusts. Here is a ripple forming: moving backwards, shimmering forwards it plays with its own reflection. Suddenly, a jagged, infinitely thin line of light flickers out of nothing . . . and is gone.

Once on a different shore I filmed such ripples passing over indentations of sand, across underwater dunescapes washed by water and an ever-present wind. Watching this film, I could hardly believe that what I saw was what I’d seen. It held a continuity I’d craved to record, to fasten down with layerings of print on paper textured by tea and rust. Then with needle and thread, I would stitch a journey over and between these naturally sculptured forms. It would become a gentle vision of wonder - gathered from those shallow pools left by a retreating tide.

But now, let me be returned by the mind’s miracle to my tidal pool, sheltered round by rocky arms, its water rippling constantly from the pull and push of the tide. Sometimes, and beyond all reason, the ripples still themselves; they re-group. It is as if a sudden silence falls on this northern shore, and the tidescape before me holds its breath . . .

I am grounded by my own ignorance, he thought, and here, by the sheer complexity of things. This pebble at my feet seems the very centre of a radius  - of marks and pathways. Possibilities. It is a thing that connects itself with me. It is very early, before the sun has touched the horizon’s sky.

I recall a poem telling of the perfection of pebbles, their being equal to themselves, mindful of their limits, filled exactly with a pebbly meaning, with a scent which does not remind one of anything, does not frighten anything away, does not arouse desire, its ardour and coldness full of dignity.

I now remember another poem, portraying a pebble placed in a child’s hand, picked up on a pebble ridge. A pebble to place in the pocket where we finger it until it becomes warm. Its shape and certainty is firm and sure. It consoles us. And, as we change and decay, it remains lodged with us: a thing that contains nothing save the mystery of life.

And there is a long prose poem devoted to the pebble. It starts at the beginning of time itself with a condensed cosmogony, describing the formation of the first rock as an allegory of The Fall. It ventures through the expulsion of life, to cooling, to those large tectonic plates, and all the way down to the pebble itself, or, as the poet says, the "kind of stone that I can pick it up and turn it over in my hand". Time is everywhere in this poem: Stone as Time, where the great wheel of stone rolls ever on as plant life, animals, gases and liquids revolve quite rapidly in their cycles of dying. Take this as the poet’s view of humanity: to consider all things as unknown, and to begin again right from the beginning.

We need to take the side of things, he thought. Here, this pebble is time, and where this pebble lies, with its radii of marks, seems at the very centre of things. It was brought anonymously by the tide one stormy night to lie at our feet, and looks at us with *a calm and very clear eye.

I

here alone apart
I realise

we are marked by the tide’s turn

and that drawing back
long aching inhalations
intakes of more than breath:
the very filling of lungs
with white and various
sounds
of beach
of foreshore
floating
in the heavy air.

Its constantness,
everywhere  
together
its everywhere and together
oneness,
though with such difference
scoured into the sand
by weather’s hand
by the wind’s rough play.


II

Shield the eyes
against the glare
against the pressing wind
spinning down and past us
out of the light noon-distant high-sunned
light,
glancing the tips of bejewelled waves,
dancing, only to fall to translucent hollows,
   only to rise and follow
the wave before itself,
that, even now and finally,
breaks into a foamed lace,
a fragile flower spreading
across the sand and shore,
a coverlet for this bared flesh of land,
wet glossy shiny sun-lit wet,
yet drying beneath our gaze,
leaving the infinitely-tiny
grains of sand’s
dew to glisten,
to sparkle.


III**

No pathways here
after the entrance
of footprints splayed
down the slight dune
through the ammophila
down to the hard sand the littered stone.
Only up and down
across perhaps
to the sea - from the sea.

Otherwise it’s up:
to sunward windward,
out out along the jigged line
of surf meeting sand,
a self-similarity,
a symmetry breaking on the shore.

for Susan*

He stood there in the card shop
finding it hard to decide
between a Chinese rose,
a flock of starlings,
a river scene in summer . . .

They all had printed blank inside
upon their cellophane wrappers.

He felt blank inside
when it came to words.

How do you say
(after twenty-six years)
I love you,
with that tremor and thrill
he remembered when,
stopping the car
between Holt and the sea,
he had looked into those still
jade green eyes, and told her so.

So he choose Tropical Birds in a Landscape
Jan van Kessel the Elder (1628-79).

It was Chaucer’s Technicolor Dream.
 A Parliament of Fowles no less
who *welcome somer, with your sonne softe,
Wel han they cause for to gladen ofte,
Sith ech of hem recovered hath hys make
Ful blissful mowe they synge when they awake.

She sent it to me as a text message, that is an image of a quote in situ, a piece of interpretation in a gallery. Saturday morning and I was driving home from a week in a remote cottage on a mountain. I had stopped to take one last look at the sea, where I usually take one last look, and the phone bleeped. A text message, but no text.  Just a photo of some words. It made me smile, the impossibility of it. Epic poems and tapestry weaving. Of course there are connections, in that for centuries the epic subject has so often been the stuff of the tapestry weaver’s art. I say this glibly, but cannot name a particular tapestry where this might be so. Those vast Arthurian pieces by William Morris to pictures by Burne-Jones have an epic quality both in scale and in subject, but, to my shame, I can’t put a name to one.

These days the tapestry can be epic once more - in size and intention - thanks to the successful, moneyed contemporary artist and those communities of weavers at West Dean and at Edinburgh’s Dovecot. Think of Grayson Perry’s The Walthamstowe Tapestry, a vast 3 x 15 metres executed by Ghentian weavers, a veritable apocalyptic vision where ‘Everyman, spat out at birth in a pool of blood, is doomed and predestined to spend his life navigating a chaotic yet banal landscape of brands and consumerism’.  Gosh! Doesn’t that sound epic!

I was at the Dovecot a little while ago, but the public gallery was closed. The weavers were too busy finishing Victoria Crowe’s Large Tree Group to cope with visitors. You see, I do know a little about this world even though my tapestry weaving is the sum total of three weekends tuition, even though I have a very large loom once owned by Marta Rogoyska. It languishes next door in the room that was going to be where I was to weave, where I was going to become someone other than I am. This is what I feel - just sometimes - when I’m at my floor loom, if only for those brief spells when life languishes sufficiently for me be slow and calm enough to pick up the shuttles and find the right coloured yarns. But I digress. In fact putting together tapestry and epic poetry is a digression from the intention of the quote on the image from that text - (it was from a letter to Janey written in Iceland). Her husband, William Morris, reckoned one could (indeed should) be able to compose an epic poem and weave a tapestry.  

This notion, this idea that such a thing as being actively poetic and throwing a pick or two should go hand in hand, and, in Morris’ words, be a required skill (or ‘he’d better shut up’), seemed (and still does a day later) an absurdity. Would such a man (must be a man I suppose) ‘never do any good at all’ because he can’t weave and compose epic poetry simultaneously?  Clearly so.  But then Morris wove his tapestries very early in the morning - often on a loom in his bedroom. Janey, I imagine, as with ladies of her day - she wasn’t one, being a stableman’s daughter, but she became one reading fluently in French and Italian and playing Beethoven on the piano- she had her own bedroom.

Do you know there are nights when I wish for my own room, even when sleeping with the one I love, as so often I wake in the night, and I lie there afraid (because I love her dearly and care for her precious rest) to disturb her sleep with reading or making notes, both of which I do when I’m alone.
Yet how very seductive is the idea of joining my loved one in her own space, amongst her fallen clothes, her books and treasures, her archives and precious things, those many letters folded into her bedside bookcase, and the little black books full of tender poems and attempts at sketches her admirer has bequeathed her when distant and apart. Equally seductive is the possibility of the knock on the bedroom / workroom door, and there she’ll be there like the woman in Michael Donaghy’s poem, a poem I find every time I search for it in his Collected Works one of the most arousing and ravishing pieces of verse I know: it makes me smile and imagine.  . .  Her personal vanishing point, she said, came when she leant against his study door all warm and wet and whispered 'Paolo’. Only she’ll say something in a barely audible voice like ‘Can I disturb you?’ and with her sparkling smile come in, and bring with her two cats and the hint of a naked breast nestling in the gap of the fold of her yellow Chinese gown she holds close to herself - so when she kneels on my single bed this gown opens and her beauty falls before her, and I am wholly, utterly lost that such loveliness is and can be so . . .

When I see a beautiful house, as I did last Thursday, far in the distance by an estuary-side, sheltering beneath wooded hills, and moor and rock-coloured mountains, with its long veranda, painted white, I imagine. I imagine our imaginary home where, when our many children are not staying in the summer months and work is impossible, we will live our ‘together yet apart’ lives. And there will be the joy of work. I will be like Ben Nicholson in that Italian villa his father-in-law bought, and have my workroom / bedroom facing a stark hillside with nothing but a carpenter’s table to lay out my scores. Whilst she, like Winifred, will work at a tidy table in her bedroom, a vase of spring flowers against the window with the estuary and the mountains beyond. Yes, her bedroom, not his, though their bed, their wonderful wooden 19C Swiss bed of oak, occupies this room and yes, in his room there is just a single affair, but robust, that he would sleep on when lunch had been late and friends had called, or they had been out calling and he wanted to give her the premise of having to go back to work – to be alone - when in fact he was going to sleep and dream, but she? She would work into the warm afternoons with the barest breeze tickling her bare feet, her body moving with the remembrance of his caresses as she woke him that morning from his deep, dark slumber. ‘Your brown eyes’, he would whisper, ‘your dear brown eyes the colour of an autumn leaf damp with dew’. And she would surround him with kisses and touch of her firm, long body and (before she cut her plaits) let her course long hair flow back and forward across his chest. And she did this because she knew he would later need the loneliness of his own space, need to put her aside, whereas she loved the scent of him in the room in which she worked, with his discarded clothes, the neck-tie on the door hanger he only reluctantly wore.

Back to epic poetry and its possibility. Even on its own, as a single, focused activity it seems to me, unadventurous poet that I am, an impossibility. But then, had I lived in the 1860s, it would probably not have seemed so difficult. There was no Radio 4 blathering on, no bleeb of arriving texts on the mobile. There were servants to see to supper, a nanny to keep the children at bay. At Kelmscott there was glorious Gloucestershire silence - only the roll and squeak of the wagon in the road and the rooks roosting. So, in the early mornings Morris could kneel at his vertical loom and, with a Burne-Jones cartoon to follow set behind the warp. With his yarns ready to hand, it would be like a modern child’s painting by numbers, his mind would be free to explore the fairy domain, the Icelandic sagas, the Welsh Mabinogion, the Kalevara from Finland, and write (in his head) an epic poem. These were often elaborations and retellings in his epic verse style of Norse and Icelandic sagas with titles like Sigurd the Volsung. Paul Thompson once said of Morris  ‘his method was to think out a poem in his head while he was busy at some other work.  He would sit at an easel, charcoal or brush in hand, working away at a design while he muttered to himself, 'bumble-beeing' as his family called it; then, when he thought he had got the lines, he would get up from the easel, prowl round the room still muttering, returning occasionally to add a touch to the design; then suddenly he would dash to the table and write out twenty or so lines.  As his pen slowed down, he would be looking around, and in a moment would be at work on another design.  Later, Morris would look at what he had written, and if he did not like it he would put it aside and try again.  But this way of working meant that he never submitted a draft to the painful evaluation which poetry requires’.

Let’s try a little of Sigurd

There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old;
Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors;
Earls' wives were the weaving-women, queens' daughters strewed its floors,

And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast
The sails of the storm of battle down the bickering blast.
There dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great
Met the good days and the evil as they went the way of fate:
There the Gods were unforgotten, yea whiles they walked with men,

Though e'en in that world's beginning rose a murmur now and again
Of the midward time and the fading and the last of the latter days,
And the entering in of the terror, and the death of the People's Praise.

Oh dear. And to think he sustained such poetry for another 340 lines, and that’s just book 1 of 4. So what dear reader, dear sender of that text image encouraging me to weave and write, just what would epic poetry be now? Where must one go for inspiration? Somewhere in the realms of sci-fi, something after Star-Wars or Ninja Warriors. It could be post-apocalyptic, a tale of mutants and a world damaged by chemicals or economic melt-down. Maybe a rich adventure of travel on a distant planet (with Sigourney Weaver of course), featuring brave deeds and the selfless heroism of saving companions from deadly encounters with amazing animals, monsters even. Or is ‘epic’ something else, something altogether beyond the Pixar Studios or James Cameron’s imagination? Is the  ‘epic’ now the province of AI boldly generating the computer game in 4D?  

And the epic poem? People once bought and read such published romances as they now buy and engage with on-line games. This is where the epic now belongs. On the tablet, PlayStation3, the X-Box. But, but . . . Poetry is so alive and well as a performance phenomenon, and with that oh so vigorous and relentless beat. Hell, look who won the T.S.Eliot prize this year! Story-telling lives and there are tales to be told, even if they are set in housing estates and not the ice caves of the frozen planet Golp. Just think of children’s literature, so rich and often so wild. This is word invention that revisits unashamedly those myths and sagas Morris loved, but in a different guise, with different names, in worlds that still bring together the incredible geographies of mountains and deserts and wilderness places, with fortresses and walled cities, and the startling, still unknown, yet to be discovered ocean depths.

                                    And so let my tale begin . . . My epic poem.

                                                 THE SEAGASP OF ENNLI.
       A TALE IN VERSE OF EARTHQUAKE, ISLAND FASTNESS, MALEVOLENT SPIRITS,
                                                AND REDEMPTIVE LOVE.

Hello you poets
Gentle readers
Friends on the web
And from (mostly)
Across the pond
Yes POND.
My poem Pond.
Is it really that poor
This pond poem
That only 29 readers have
Read it so far?
That nobody likes it
That I can cope with
Though I felt
I’d caught something
Both special and good
even (perhaps) worthy
Of a little more attention
Than it got.
Obviously not!

for Alice*

seen from the terrace above
this rectangle of water
absorbs the variousness
of the late spring skies
changing incessantly
from folds of uncertain cloud
past brief appearances of blue
to the sudden closeness of rain

the preciseness of it
this rectangular pool
set in an oblong garden room
on a terrace the middle of three
that fall away to the valley’s end where
up and through and which a funnel of trees
climb to the tops the very heights today
severe against a modulating sky

yet in the camera’s eye
this horizontal mirror
is a painting fit
for Le Musée d’Orsay
a season’s accident no less in
light and growth and colour
where the chequered strings of
toads’ spawn and darting tiny fish
are brush strokes come alive

kneeling on the stone rim
as if in prayer afore
this reflecting space
attentive to what seems
between what is
this woman holds within
her perfect hand the pond
photographically framing
its image as it moves and stirs
across her gentle gaze

This run of days so ordinary
you wonder if the extraordinary
really happened.
What is this past
that so disturbs
your memory’s ride?
Back a fortnight,
you are still working out
the whole chain of it.

Sunday, and awake with the dawn,
cold April, late daffs.
Birds forsaking their chorus,
keep their heads down.
Not a twitter.

Lying awake,
she, in the final throes of sleep,
having practised breathing all night,
is playing dead lions.
Nothing stirs. Surely,
this is unfair such slumbering,
when you are so passion-poised.

Stretch your hand under the pillow
where you know her hand lies.
Place your hand so close so
close but not to touch – yet.

You are aroused with thoughts
of encounters (past rare wonderous
enveloping moments) when ******* press,
feet stroke calves, and fingers touch
where fingers should only touch in bed
(though you remember when,
elsewhere, such touching touched
and passion palpated shook the air).

She wakes and checks the clock.
How long have I to wake
before we join in love's brief  grasp?
Oh to be still, oh be still my love,
so I can drift and sort my thoughts?

Now she opens her arms to you,
and her own sweet self drops away
into a real and present pleasure.

He had sat at his desk with intent to write to her. And he had not. He had sat and let his mind wander. He wanted to write if only to capture something of her he had yet to capture. It was as though by trying to find words to describe her everyday self he discovered it was often extraordinary, and it filled him with more tenderness that he could reasonably deal with. The other day he had written her a letter. It was rather ordinary, full of unplanned thoughts and descriptions, a day-to-day letter, but he had written it by hand, taking care with the curl and mark of his pen on the little sheets of laser-copier paper he felt suited him best. Once he wrote expansively (though never to her) on large sheets of thick, fine paper with a calligraphic pen and Indian ink. Now he felt more comfortable with a fine roller-ball nib and a light touch, on paper of a dimension and quality that seemed appropriate to the size of his script.

Today, as he thought about the letter he might write, he had imagined her finding his most recent letter as she came home, a letter with his careful handwriting on the envelope. It would be lying on the doormat with the brown envelopes, the circulars, the bank statement and one of the many journals she subscribed to. There was a letter too from her ‘pen friend’, someone who had invited her to correspond having been so touched to find a late relative’s letters full of the minutiae of life, but properly described and not the ad hoc jottings of what now passes for communication on social media. So this friend, who was not then a friend but an acquaintance, had set out to recruit a group of like-minded people she might write to properly, in proper sentences – and had, it seemed, fixed on her. He had been a little jealous at first that she should write, and write properly to this ‘friend’ she hardly knew, and since then she had so very rarely written to him. He had so wanted her words, on paper and not just her end-of-the-day thoughts on the telephone. But he had soon got over this jealousy realising how valuable this letter, written once a fortnight, would be for her. An opportunity no less, of the kind and value he could no longer provide.

It had changed the way he had continued to write to her. He stopped the hand-written caress of a letter on paper and took up what he called the Ten-Minute Letter composed at the computer. Not an e-mail, but a proper letter as an attachment she could print out. Written each day just before he stopped for lunch, he set an alarm on his phone and wrote for ten minutes only until the sampled chimes of Big Ben struck. It was a challenge, and to meet it he would prepare his ‘daily subject’ in those transient moments between the demands of work and other people’s needs, as he walked to work or cooked supper. He felt that by doing this he would eradicate that falling into passionate contemplation, the downloading of his memory’s thoughts, his often-intense feelings and emotions. He thought she would prefer such brevity, as she now had so little time for reflection, except when travelling.

In imagining that picking up of his letter he sought to imagine further. Would she open it straight away? Would she put it at the bottom of the stairs on a pile of things to take up to her bedroom, and read before bed?  Occasionally there was  a little time stolen during the day when, before the necessity to go at her desk and ‘get on’, she would sit on her bed with her cats and be conscious of her physical self. She would think of him beside her, kneeling on the floor in one of those occasional preludes to their passionate moments she knew he so loved, when he was full of tenderness, and he would kiss and stroke her, their quiet voices caressing each other in the lamplight. He thought of her carefully pulling the envelope flap open without a tear (whereas he could hardly contain himself, when a letter did arrive, from pulling the envelope apart). And she would read his careful writing, his late afternoon thoughts written after a long day’s work, before returning to more time at his desk.

She would read quickly, rather impatiently sometimes. She had to ‘get on’, attack the list, get things done. But just occasionally he surprised her. He would catch her attention. There was some phrase, some reflection that made her feel warm and loved. He would make an observation about her, and she would feel treasured and honoured by his words and be grateful for the time he had put aside to write them. And then the letter would be returned to its envelope, placed on the bookshelf beside her bed, and she would feel secure that she was loved, and could then put all that away for now and ‘get on’. But just once in a while she would recall the pit-in-the-stomach thrill of his first letters, as letter by letter he declared himself, saying what he thought of her, what he felt for her. She was often overcome with his play of words and would touch herself to sustain those rich feelings that would gradually envelop her; that someone could care about her that much. And for a while she was transformed . . .

Today, as he continued to hold his pen away from composing that first sentence, he had wanted to return to writing of her and for her. It was his small gift, his almost once a day gift. With words he knew he was on safer ground. He struggled somewhat in his *******; he worried that he disappointed her with his awkwardness and never being sure if he was doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. Perhaps in reading his thoughts rather than responding to the messages of his physical self, she felt safer too. He wanted her to know something of the intensity that she brought to his ‘being aliveness’. He remembered a recent phone call when for once he seemed able to say pretty much what he meant. ‘I hope I don’t presume in saying,’ he had said, overtly formal as so often, ‘ that one of the reasons I think we are the companions we are is that we have so much in common; we love the same things, we share the same joys and pleasures.’ And she had agreed. He felt this was true, and he wanted to celebrate this somehow; but they were apart, being on the phone, and he could not. There was less and less time for the joy of coming together, of that celebration of being-together that had once seemed beyond magic and the stuff of dreams and fantasy. There was now the ever-present awareness of the clock, of having to do this, needing to do that, and at a certain time. Their life together was changing and he needed to rise to the challenge that this change would bring, no matter how busy and preoccupied she became. He would write, he thought, and tell her that he knew this would be so, that she should never be concerned for him if there wasn’t time. Hadn’t she said she loved him, this young woman who had once been so diffident about speaking such endearments? She had already given him so much that he never imagined he would ever receive. Perhaps not for always, he was so much older than her, but for a long time to come. He must acknowledge the receipt of such gifts, and let her know he loved her all the more for her industry, her ambition, her preoccupation, and the beautiful, gracious person she was.

To Antonia

Different things:
a book read,
this flower picked,
one kiss taken.

And things that delight:
in the library,
amidst a garden,
caught in love’s embrace.

And *my delight:
to keep control
and hold a sense
of rightness ruling
every action,
every thought,
every instance
met or made.

Let me look at all I see
that comes my way,
and with my eyes
make welcome;
no discrimination,
no diversion left
(or right) to comfort’s zone.

May all I touch, acquire, retain,
be honoured, rightly valued,
rightly owned, and used
well, and again.

It took him a week to master thought-diversion. He would leave home to walk to work and the moment the door was shut it was as though she followed him like a shadow on snow. If he wasn’t careful the ten-minute walk would be swallowed up in an imagined conversation. He had already allowed himself too many dark thoughts of tears and silences. He saw her befreckled by weeks in a light he had only read about. She would be a stranger for a while, a visitor from another world (until she gradually lost the glow on her skin and the smell of Africa became an elusive memory). He was frightened that he would be overwhelmed by her physical grace enriched by   southern summer and the weight of her experience, having so little to offer in return. So he practised thought diversion: as her shadow entered his consciousness he would divert his attention to China of the Third Century and what he would write next about Zuo Fen and her illustrious brother.

Sister and brother Zou gradually took on a fictional life. This he fuelled by reading poetry of the period and his daily beachcombing along the shores of the Internet. He built up an impressive bibliography for his next visit to the university library. Even in the Han Dynasty there was so much material to study, though much of it the stuff of secondary sources.

One morning he took down from his library shelf Max Loehr’s The Great Painters of China and immediately became seduced by the court images of Ku Kai’chih. This painter is the only artist of this period of Chinese antiquity to be represented today by extant copies. There was also a possible original, a handscroll in The British Museum. It is said Ku was the first portrait artist to give a psychological interpretation of the person portrayed. Before him there seems in portraiture to have been little differentiation in the characterization of figures. His images hold a wonder all their own.

As David looked at the book’s illustrative plates, showing details from The Admonitions of the Instructress to the Palace Ladies, the world of Zuo Fen began to reveal itself. A ‘palace lady’ she certainly was, and so possibly similar to the image before him: a concubine reclines in her bamboo screen and silk-curtained bed; her Lord sits respectively at right-angles to her and half-way down her bed. The artist has captured his feet deftly lifting themselves out of square-toed slippers, whilst Zuo Fen drapes one arm over the painted bamboo screen, her manner resolute and confident. Perhaps she has taken note of those admonitions of her instructress. Her Lord has turned his head to gaze at her directly and to listen. Restless hands hide beneath his gown.

        ‘Honoured Lord, as we have talked lately of flowing water and the symmetry of love I am reminded of the god and goddess of Xiang River’.
       ‘In the Nine Songs of Qu Yaun?’
       ‘Yes, my Lord. The opening verse has the Prince of Xiang say: You have not come; I wait with apprehension / And wonder who makes you prevaricate on your island / When I am so splendidly and perfectly attired in your honour?
       ‘Hmm. . . so you favour this new gown.’
       ‘It is finely made, but perhaps does not suit the light of this hour’.
       ‘Let the Yangzi River flow calmly, / I look for you, but you have not come.’
      ‘I gaze at the distance in a trance, /  Only to see the grey green waters run by.’
        ‘Honourable Companion, I fear you feel my mind lies elsewhere . ‘
       ‘I know you ride the cassia boat downstream.’
       ‘Indeed, my oar is of cassia and my rudder of orchid’.
        ‘I fancy that you build a house underwater, thatching it with a roof of lotus leaves . . .’
       ‘Well, if that is so, drop your sleeves into the Yangzi River and present the thin dress you wear to the bay of Li.’
       ‘I am in awe of my Lord’s recall of such verses . . . I love the Lady of Xiang’s description of the underwater house . . . with its curtains of fig leaves and screens of split basil.’
      ‘But will you send me all the spirits of Juiyi mountains to bring me to your side . . . will they come together as numerous as clouds?’
      ‘My Lord, my nose perspires . . .’
      ‘I offer my jade ring to the Yangzi River / and yield my jade pendant to the bay of Li. / I gather galingale fronds on an islet of fragrant grasses, / still hoping to present them to you. / If I leave, I might not have another chance. / So I’d rather stay here and linger a little longer.’
        ‘I gather the powerful roots of galingale / hoping to offer them to you who are still far away. / If I leave, I might not have another chance. / So I’d rather stay here and linger a little longer.’
      ‘Even though your nose perspires and your ******* harden . . .’
        ‘Kind Lord, you have taken the wrong role in the dialogue. Surely it is the Plain Girl who gives such advise to the Yellow Emperor.’
        ‘And I thought only men read the Sunujing . . .’
        ‘You forget I have a dear brother . . .’
       ‘With whom you have read the Sunujing! . . and no I have not forgotten . . . he sought permission to travel to the Tai mountains, some fool’s errand my minister states.’
         ‘He may surprise you on his return.’
        ‘Only you can surprise me now.’
       ‘My Lord, you know I lack such gifts . . . I hear your sandals dropping to the floor’.
      ‘I sail my boat ever closer to the wind / and the waves are
stirred like drifting snow.’
     ‘I can hear my beloved calling my name. / I shall hasten so that I can ride beside him.’


She seemed so child-like in that singular room of the garden annex. Her head had buried itself between the two pillows so only her ever-curling hair was visible. Opening a small portion of the curtains drawn across the blue metalled-framed French windows, he gazed at her sleeping in the dull light of just dawn. Outside a river-mist lay across the autumnal garden where they had walked yesterday before their tour of the estate. Unable to sleep he had sat in their hosts’ kitchen and mapped their guided walk in the rain, noting down his observations of this remote valley in a sprawling narrative. On the edge of moorland it was a world constrained and contained, with its brooding batchelor-owned farms and the silent legacy everywhere of a Victorian hagiographer and antiquarian. As he wrote and drew, snapshot-like images of her intervened unbidden. She both entranced and purposeful in a physical landscape she delighted in and knew how to read. Although longing to lie next to her he had sat gently for a moment on her bed, feeling the weight of her sleeping form move towards him as the mattress sagged, his bare feet cold on the stone floor. He placed his poem on the empty companion pillow, and returned through the chill of unheated rooms to the desert warmth of the Agared kitchen.


Lying in your arms
I am surprised to hear a voice
That seems in the right key
To sing what is in my heart.

After so many dark
inarticulate hours
I,  desperate
To express this love
That drowns me,
Suddenly come up for breath
(after floundering in
the cold water of night)
to find there were words
like little boats of paper
carrying a tea light,
a vivid yellow flame
on the black depths,
floating gently towards you . . .

Oh log of memory
record these sailing messages
So carefully placed, rehearsed,
Launched and found complete.

Knowing I must not talk of love,
Knowing no other word
(feeling the shape of your knee
with my right hand),
knowing this time will not
come again, I summon
to myself one last intimacy
before the diary of reason closes.

Zou Fen often wrote about herself as a rustic illiterate, country-born in a thatched hut, but given (inexplicably) the purple chamber at the Palace. As the daughter of a significant officer of the Imperial Court she appears to have developed a fictional persona to induce and taste the extremes of melancholy. Otherwise she is mind-travelling the natural world from her courtyard garden, observing in the growth of a tiny plant or the flight of distant bird, the whole pattern of nature. These things fill her rhapsodies and fu poems.

As a young man Zuo Si had wild flights of fantasy. He imagined himself as a warrior. In verse he recalls reading Precepts on the Art of War by Ssu-ma Jang Chu. With a scholar’s knife he writes of quelling the barbarian hordes (the Tibetans) in their incursions along the Yang-tze. When triumphant he would not accept the Emperor’s gift of a title and estate, but would retire to a cottage in the country. Then again, as a student scholar, he describes failure, penury and isolation ‘left stranded like a fish in a pond, without – he hasn’t a single penny in his account: within – not a peck of grain in the larder.’ He was never thus.

Like all good writers sister and brother Zou were the keenest observers. They took into and upon themselves what they saw and gathered from the lives of others, and so often their playful painted characters hide the truth of their real lives. David looks at his dishevelled poetry and wonders about its veracity. He always thought of Rachel as his first (and only) reader; but what if she were not? What would he write? What would his poems say?

*I lie on my back in her bed.
On her stomach, her arm on my chest,
She props herself against me
so that I see her face in close up.
She gazes
out of the window

I don’t think I have slept at all,
My own bed was so cold.
She warms me for a while.

All night
I’ve been thinking
what to say to her,
and now I am too weary
to speak.

I am in despair,
Yet I ache with joy
At having her so close.

I wish I knew who I was,
What I could be,
What I might become.

A voice tells me
that such intimacy
will not come again.

Honourable Younger Sister,

This village is a world of stone. Lanes, houses, courtyard walls, towers, pavilions, tables, benches are all hewn from ancient red rock. The stone streets are lustrous with the passage of feet and shine in the moonlight; tomorrow they will glisten in the morning rain. After six days on the path into the mountains I finally rest at this inn. Here I can buy light: to write in this loft whilst the house sleeps, though a dutiful daughter dozes against the foot of the stair-ladder to serve me should I require sustenance. Frightened by my ugliness I summoned up my sweetest voice for her and soon there was a shy smile and downcast eyes. These are long nights for the village poor, but few here as poor as those whose shelters I sought on the path. Tonight I miss the steaming breath and ceaseless rustle of the animals brought indoors for warmth and security. My travelling robes are already filthy, but my body remains clean. As soon as I depart each night’s shelter I search for a stream to strip and wash thoroughly in the ice-cold water.

Dear sister, we have both been taught that the function of letter-writing is to unburden the mind of its melancholy thoughts in the form of elegant colours; its purpose to state one’s feelings without reserve. My thoughts turn constantly on whether I have it in me to ‘summon the recluse’. Have I the stamina, the patience, the resolve to seek out these elusive souls? Such thoughts induce fear rather than melancholy, fear of failure.

Already my journey into these mountains has crossed the season of late autumn into that of early winter. I am told the russet-red leaves and pink berries of the Ash, the deceptive Rowan and speckled-leafed Lace set the mountainside alight as the sun rises into a clear sky. For me clouds hang all day in the steep valleys, and so hide the heights where the solitary ones are believed to live. They alone see with the dawn the mountain peaks aflame   It is only in the very late afternoon that the sun melts the clouds, breaks through, and enlivens the landscape, turning it gold, then amber, and a final dull red before the blue blackness of dusk descends. Beyond this village my sources tell me there is real wilderness, and paths are few. I am to be my own guide.

You and I are so adept at the play of words. Our honoured father encouraged us, and as custodian of the Imperial Archives he knew how words could be arranged to both conceal and reveal; we played with the characters as other children played with coloured stones. So with the poems we call “Chao Yin”, let us play with verb “Chao” as both to seek and to summon. Chu Hsi, a courtier of that prince of Huai-nan, was sent into the wilderness to summon an errant official back to his post. His poems speak of terrors of the mountains, their ‘murky depths sending shivers of fright’ of ‘the caves of leopards and tigers’, and of the deep forest where ‘a man climbs from fear’. The poetic form uses “Chao” as in the ancient ceremonial song “Chao ***”. This calls on a dead person’s soul to re-enter the body, so ‘a summoning of the soul’. In those times such poems argued against the recluse, the withdrawn one, and sought a return. Today there is this feeling abroad that we need to consort with the recluse, to taste his solitude. Does the solitary life speak of the ineffable Way? Or is it in the search for the solitary one that a moment of enlightenment may present itself? As the saying goes: ‘to travel one must surely uncover truth’. In my bones I feel ready to invert this old poetic form. I must summon the spirit of the recluse out of the mountain fastness, but not seek his return. I need to touch his ways, see evidence of his mountain life, for a while to walk his paths breathing the same air. In my heart I expect nothing but his absence. I foresee I may reach his shelter and find his gate ajar, though the embers of the hearth still warm. He will be on some distant peak gathering herbs. If on a precipitous path I was to turn a corner and find him before me I have no words prepared. For the moment it seems I am exploring an idea through this summoning and seeking, not a living, breathing body.

Tomorrow I shall reconnoitre. My official hairpin and staff will command any audience, but for reliable answers, I am far from confident. There is always talk, rumours, sightings. The common people respect these beings as kindly mountain spirits and guardians of the wilderness. At the fork in a path, by the crossing place of a stream, corn, persimmons and millet are left for them. Such offerings will be replaced in time by the rarest mountain herbs, wild fruits, the skin of leopard or bear.

Your last letter spoke of ‘following my path into the mountains’. You have always defied convention, so it would be no surprise to find you here on my return, although I think your Lord would not sanction it. He would find such a request unfathomable. I am still perplexed at your situation, that you, the most homely of women should be so favoured, so adorned, and yet so free. It is that confidence you hold to yourself.  

To me, you have always been the essence of woman. What knowledge I possess of your kind comes from you alone. The infrequent gropings that occasionally present themselves I have only dismissed. An hour in your company smoothes and stills both soul and body. Your movements and gestures are always quiet and true, as are your woven words that sing in my memory on the path.

I read your letter
And savoured your words,
Your sorrowful songs of separation.
I can almost imagine your face before me
And I sigh and sob out of control.
When will we meet again
To amuse ourselves with prose and verse?
How can I tell you of my misery
Except with these woven words?

Have I remembered your poem correctly? I expected no response to my own lines on our separation. On the very morning of my departure your scroll arrived. I delayed to read it, delaying further to know your words: to carry them in my memory on my journey. In our respective verse we follow the way of tradition: the lonely woman in her room; the man travelling far from home. How many thousand poems describe this antithesis?

My life has always been sheltered by the expectations of scholarship, the requirements of official rank, and more recently acclaim due to my songs and poems. This journey begins a new page, as a seeker and summoner. Follow my path deeper into the mountains, be at my side when I rest, calm my fear of the heights and the depths of dark ravines, reveal to me the words to paint the scene. Know that I share with you everything that is to come, without reservation.

Remember the words of Lun Yu: ‘The good man delights in mountains. The wise man delights in water’. In these mountains the sound of water is present everywhere.

A stony spring rinses bits of jade
Minnows now and then emerge, and disappear.
Here what need of my silk-strung gujin? –
The mountain water has its own crystal song.

Your brother Zuo Si

My brother Zuo Si tells me I am well trained in the technique of writing, so well trained that when I come to put brush to paper I don’t have to punish myself with deep thoughts. See now how my hand flows to and fro and the characters appear.

I write a rhapsody for my Lord.

The philosopher Lu Ji says that whilst poetry traces emotion with delicacy, rhapsody embodies objects with light. My rhapsody is a bright star between Ts’an and Ch’en. On this bitter day I am describing the pine and cypress trees on the high peaks, where the first snows of winter cling hesitantly to their branches in the still air. I reflect on the emerald glow of their foliage in spring, their heavy fragrance in summer, the song of their branches in the autumn winds, their stillness in the desolation of winter.

I have a distant court in this vast palace. This suits my temperament and my literary disposition. I have the joy of my garden and the views of the Tai mountains.  I am a curiosity here. If I hold any of the arts of love I have little idea what they are. I do not spend my days plucking the dark hairs from my arms or deliberating over my wardrobe. It is understood that I am often unwell.

I aspire to arrange all things properly: to calm myself to write, to let my imagination sail on the open seas. My brother tells me I was chosen because of my stillness, observant gaze and gentle voice. If I am beautiful it is only because I absorb into myself the grace of the natural world I see about me. It is this self that dreams in my imagination. When I am with my Lord he touches my petalled mouth, inhales the distinct perfume of my nervousness, places his hand against my cheek and bids me speak.

I shift the thick blind to gaze at my garden. It waits for spring as I do. Winter only draws to itself past memories or desires for the future. It is too cold and damp to rest, to hibernate like the snake. It is easy to dream for a while, and being trained in the art of literature I can, with concentration, place myself anywhere.

Now, I am walking below the tall trunks of the cypress groves high on Linzi ridge. Looking down on the green river I absorb the aura of these great trees.

Now, I am kneeling at my desk, my feet wrapped in furs against the cold: I pour tea to warm the cup I hold in my writing hand.

Now, I ponder on the recluse Chi Songzi wandering amongst the highest pines to attain the Way. I follow his careful movements on the rocky path, his intense attention given to every live thing. I feel the different qualities of the breeze that lifts from the dark valley below.  My bare feet gather to themselves a miniature garden; soil, seeds, insects and grubs cling to my toes. Treading pine needles release a heady odure; above me the rock thrush chatter in the swaying branches.

The cold returns to my fingers and this vision retreats. This room is soon dark as the afternoon progresses. My maid has, during my oblivious state, left rice and vegetables. My rhapsody holds to its unfinished state with equanimity. I must of course fashion into its closing lines statements to please my Lord. The cypress tree trunks are steadfast like a man of wisdom or some such nonsense. This must wait for my attention on another day.

I am not like my brother who writes so slowly that his Rhapsody of the Capitals took up (it is said) ten years of his attention. My thoughts are agile and come to the page fully-formed. If I am calm (and well) a rhapsody may be finished in within my monthly cycle.  Much of this time is taken in dreaming, returning to images of my childhood, recalling conversations, remembering the thoughts and expressions of others. I read too the tales of travellers and poets. In summer my garden becomes a map of this world onto which I place and arrange my thoughts. As I tend my plants I tend these thoughts.

I now cover with a cloth the characters written in these past chilled hours and attend for a while to the business of palace life. An interview with my Lord’s second wife’s cousin – there has been a bereavement in her court and so a request to discuss a memorial ode. A scribe from the imperial archives demands I view a recent sequence of poems before it takes its place in Emperor Wu’s personal collection. I need to discuss the household accounts with my cook.

On my walnut chest a letter from Zuo Si: to read, to answer. His second gujin is wrapped in my bedclothes against the damp air. At night its delicate shape lies next to me. My left hand will caress its many silk strings, its long lacquered body, the smooth ivory of its pegs. Even in these winter months he is travelling, searching out those scholars and artists who have retreated from the official world of court and patronage to obscurity in remote places. After many years of work on the history of city life he is now writing poetry of seclusion and the wilderness. Famed through the Northern Kingdom his poetry and songs open every door, his work so often copied it is said to effect the price of paper.

My maid has already lit the butter lamp in my inner chamber, the protocol due to my position. I remove the clothes of the day, bathe briefly and dress in my court gown and rich furs. It is my duty to wait. By my side is the scroll of my Rhapsody on Thoughts of Separation. A recent favourite of my Lord’s, we have read this together in the stillness of the Tiger hours. The poem speaks with the voice of a young concubine newly separated from her home and family. She tells of her loneliness, her tears of anxiety, her ten thousand unremitting cares. Such words appear to stir my Lord . . .

after the painting by Mary Fedden

I kept seeing her around and about, but mostly on the beach. This is a small community and after five years or so I know who everyone is, except those who visit in the summer, though I am getting to know some of the regulars. I reckon she’s my age. When she looks at me in the store, and I look at her and smile, her smile tells me these things.

I have trouble with my hair. It’s thinned and doesn’t grow quite as it should. When I was pregnant and then nursing my children it was positively luxuriant. But later, and despite medical advice (and treatment I was unsure about and abandoned) it became an embarrassment, until he reassured me (just once) and I became an ‘adored woman’. He never ever spoke of it again and loved me so wholly and beautifully I had no reason for it to matter in his company, in his arms.

But seeing her, and often on the beach, more and more regularly, seeing her with her mane of strong dark brown hair flowing behind her in the wind, I felt a curious desire for such a wealth of hair. In fact, I began to feel something stir in me that was desire of a different kind. I can’t think I had ever looked at a woman in quite that way in any previous life. It was always men I sought, I wanted.

Her name is Sara, no h, just an A at the end. She said that when I eventually introduced myself. We were walking towards each other, barefoot both on that glistening skin of water the sea creates between the tides coming and going. It was about midday and I was, I was thinking and walking. I do this now. I don’t bring my sketchbook, I don’t look everywhere I can and more so, I have begun to retreat into my most private self. Perhaps it’s my age and so many years of feeling I had to be wholly attentive and active. Being in this remote place, almost permanently, has slowed me down, and I have begun to dream, to see beyond what I usually would have seen moment to moment. I’ve been re-reading the prose and poetry of Kathleen Raine, who understood this sea-swept place and was haunted by its ghosts, and who dreamed.

Never, never, again
This moment, never
These slow ripples
Across smooth water,
Never again these
Clouds white and grey
In sky crystalline
Blue as the tern’s cry
Shrill in the light air
Salt from the ocean,
Sweet from flowers

Oh yes,  ‘the sun that rose this morning from the sea will never return . . .’* I have become a watcher, no longer an observer. I put my camera away last winter and now hold moments in my memory. Here I can sketch. I can have all the time I need, and more. And I knew when I began to talk to Sara I wanted beyond anything else to sketch her, to know her line by line with the pen, and later bring the texture of her into paint.

Painting is where I am now. It’s direct, mesmeric, challenging, wholly absorbing. My needles and thread only deal with our clothes, my clever printing and collaging lies dormant in my studio, a studio I rarely enter now. I have a room upstairs in the loft that is all light and sky. There’s just an easel, a table, a chair, a small bookcase, a trolley-thing of paints and brushes. Even that’s too much. I always collected things around me. I brought so much in from outside and now I’m trying, trying to have as little as possible. This is where I will paint Sara. I’m already thinking this as we take the first tentative steps towards knowing one another. Names, where we live, (we both know). Partners, family, children? I have all this, but not here, only my companion, my love who caresses me with such care and attention. There are my cats and my hens. She has no one, or rather she talks of no one. She asks the questions and avoids giving answers. She just nods and doesn’t answer. Otherwise, she’s a straight yes / no person. She doesn’t feel she has to qualify anything.

We’re standing together. We’re intent on looking at each other. Words seem a little unnecessary because what we both want to do is look. ‘I can tell you paint’, she says, ‘It’s your finger nails’. My perfect nails and the pads of my fingers hold the evidence of a morning at my easel. ‘I have seen your work’, she says, ‘One could hardly not. You’re well known beyond these shores.’ I feel myself blushing slightly. I thought blushing had stopped with the menopause, not that it troubled me much, the menopause that is. Blushing though was a torturous part of my adolescence, but let’s not go into that.

‘Your husband,’ she says, ‘he’s up very early. I see him sometimes here, on the beach.’
‘Do you get up at five?’ I am surprised. My husband gets up before five.
‘Sleep is difficult sometimes. I walk a lot. I need to be out, and walk.’

Her face, her head is larger than mine. She is a larger woman altogether, bigger *****, long-legged, but with youthful ******* that seem taut and well-rounded under her brown frock, no, her brown dress. I only think frock because that’s what he says – ‘I love that frock.’ And he means usually whatever I am wearing now that’s old and rich in memories of his hands knowing me through a dress, sorry a frock, which remains for me (and possibly for him) the most sensuous of sensations, still. Au nature has its place, and I love the rub of his skin and body hair. But when we are lovers, and we are still lovers and usually when travelling, in hotel rooms or borrowed cottages, or visiting friends and dare I say it, staying with our various children. Last autumn in Venice, in this large, amazing marble-tiled room, with this huge bed, he undressed me in front of a window opening onto our own terrace, and I was beside myself with passion, desire, oh all those wonderful things. And for months afterwards I would return to that early evening, remembering the lights coming on all over the watered city as he kissed and stroked and brushed my body through my Gudrun Sjödén frock. I would replay, find again over and over, those exquisite moments of such joyful touching as he then undressed me, and with such care and tenderness I felt myself crying out. Well, he says I did. In one of his poems (for your eyes only, he had whispered) he admits to his own celebration of those moments again, again.

Sara’s dress is calf-length. There’s nothing else. As the breeze wraps itself around the loose-fitting brown cotton her naked figure is revealed inside itself. No ring, no jewellery, nothing to hold her hair now flowing behind her. She has positioned herself so it does; flow out behind her. This is so strange. Am I dreaming this? We have become silent and together look in silence at the sea. I can hear her short breathes. She turns to me with a smile and looks straight into my eyes – and says nothing – and then walks backward a few steps – still with her warm smile – turns and walks away.

I tell him I met Sara today and ask if he sees her on the beach in the early mornings. Yes, he has, in the distance, mostly. He has said good morning to her on a few occasions, but she has smiled and said nothing. Five o’clock is far too early to say anything, he says. She swims occasionally. I keep my distance, he says with a grin.

I tell him I would like to paint her. I should, he says, You should go and ask her, do it, get it done and out of your system. It’s time you stopped being afraid of the face, the portrait, the figurative. I’d give so much to have been able to paint you, he says ruefully, my darling, my dearest. And he strokes my arm, kisses my cheek, then, he slowly and carefully kneels down beside my chair, places his arm across the top of my thighs so when I bend to kiss him his bare forearm touches the edge of my *******. He puts his head in my lap, and I caress his ears, his quite white hair.

Sara’s door is open. She’s living in Ralph’s cottage, a summer-let habitable (just) in the nearly autumn time it is. I call, ‘Sara, it’s me’, thinking she’ll recognize my voice, not wishing to say my name. She appears at the door. ‘I have the kettle on, she says, ‘I had a feeling you might be by.’ Her accent is, like mine, un-regional, carefully articulated, a Welsh tinge perhaps. There’s an uplift and a slowness in some of the vowels. ‘You will come in’, she says, more a statement than a question. It’s rather dark inside. There’s a reading lamp on, but she has the chair, her chair, close by the window. There are letters being written. There are books. Not Ralph’s, but what she has brought with her. Normally, I would be hopelessly inquisitive, but I can’t stop myself looking at her, wondering even now, in these first few moments in this dark room, how I will position her to paint her form, her face, her nature. What will I paint? I look at her still-bare feet, her large hands.

And so, with mugs of tea, Indian tea I don’t drink, but here, as her guest I do, but without milk, we sit, I on the only other chair (from the kitchen) she on the floor. And she watches me look about, and look at her.

‘I’m rather done with talking, with polite conversation. That’s why I’m here to be done with all that for a while.’
‘I came to ask you to sit for me. To let me draw you, paint you even. You can be completely quiet. I won’t say a word. I’ve never, ever asked anyone to sit for me. I’m not that sort of painter. But when I saw you on the beach it was the first thing that came into my head.’
‘I should be flattered. Though I have sat for artists before, when I was a little younger,’ surprisingly she mentions two names I know, both women. ‘I know how to be still. But, those are days in a different life.’
‘I only want to paint you in the life you have now.’ And I realise then that what I want to paint was Sara’s ‘aloneness’. I think then I have never been truly alone since he came into my life and took any loneliness I had from me. Whenever we are apart, and still there are times, he writes to me the tenderest letters, the most touching poems, he quotes his Chinese favourites down the telephone. We always, always speak to each other before bed, even when we are on different continents and time-zones. He told me I was always his last thought before sleep. And I wonder if I would be his last thought . . .

‘Do you want to do this formally?, said Sara.
‘I don’t know. Yet. I’d like to draw you first, be with you for a little while, perhaps to walk. A little while at a time. Whatever might suit you.’
‘Would you pay me? I have little money. It would be useful.’
‘Of course’, I say this directly, having no idea about what one pays a model. He will know though. He knew Paula Rego and didn’t she have a female model? I think of those large full-length figures rendered in pastels. Her model’s name was Lila, who for more than 25 years, had sat for her, stood for her, crouched for her, hour after hour and day after day. I remember a newspaper piece that went something like this: since 1985 Lila has helped to give life, in paint, and pastel, and charcoal, to the characters in Paula Rego's head. Lila was all Paula Rego’s women.

‘Sara’, I said, ‘help me please. It’s taken more than a little courage to come to see you, to ask you. My husband says I should do this, finally get myself painting the person, the face, body, not as some exercise in a life class, but the real thing.’
‘Of course’, she says, ‘Let’s go and walk to the point.’

And we did. Not saying very much at all, but I suppose I did. She made me talk and gradually I laid my life out in front of her, and not the life she would have found in those glossy monographs and catalogue introductions, and God forbid, not in those media features and interviews that I suppose have made me a name I’d always dreamed of becoming, and now could do without.

‘I suppose you have a studio’, she said suddenly, ‘Is that where you’d want me to come?’
‘Yes, I have a studio. No, I don’t think I want you to come there. Not at first anyway.’ I was floundering. ‘ I’d like to draw you, paint you possibly on the beach, where we met, so there would be sea and sky and breeze blowing your hair.’
‘And a steamer out on the horizon belching smoke from its funnel and the sea blowing white horses and dancing about. I’d be right by the seastrand with waves and spray and foam, and under a greyish sky. Not a sunny day. A breezy day. In my brown dress, sitting on the sand by the tide marks, looking out to sea, looking at the steamer away in the distance, sitting with my left hand behind me holding myself up, and the shape of my legs akimbo bent slightly under my brown dress. How would that be?’
‘Perfect’, I said.

And it was.

in this between-time
after the day-work
before a partying-night
outside in the city-street
I window-stand
people pass

a rich-day collecting
the determination of things
that future-spell so
I am replete with possibility
conclusions safely-stored
filed-finally I fill
with you-thoughts

board-pinned your photo
to turn to but I daren’t
eyes-shut instead . . .
and there you are
only more so as this portrait
- an august-glorious day
garden-full with butterflies
the sea-sound distant-sounding
only more so -
this portrait expands
to show all your sudden-self

a pause in twilight-termoil
I grapple – should I
let this brown-inked pen
flow inscribe tell and paper-paint
knowing full-well you favour words
that do not spell out what’s in store
when the bedroom door
closes-shut on poets’ licence?

so being careful not to press
passion’s path beyond the bounds
of touching-tender kissing-close
when once I would barely-break-step
to think of not exposing such
geographies of gracefulness
unclothed revealed to savour-so
the breath-shortening rise
the eye-closing slow-release:

please know to write so
brought you close
when you were not . . .

my dear-joy
I still my pen
hold thoughts in check
trance-like knowing now
(and conscious now)
of  other ways
to tell-out spell-out
characters desire-dense
ambiguity-rich
flavoured-full
beyond-beyondness

As he walked through the maze of streets from the tube station he wondered just how long it had been since he had last visited this tall red-bricked house. For so many years it had been for him a pied à terre. Those years when the care of infant children dominated his days, when coming up to London for 48 hours seemed such a relief, an escape from the daily round that small people demand. Since his first visits twenty years ago the area bristled with new enterprise. An abandoned Victorian hospital had been turned into expensive apartments; small enterprising businesses had taken over what had been residential property of the pre-war years. Looking up he was conscious of imaginative conversions of roof and loft spaces. What had seemed a wide-ranging community of ages and incomes appeared to have disappeared. Only the Middle Eastern corner shops and restaurants gave back to the area something of its former character: a place where people worked and lived.

It was a tall thin house on four floors. Two rooms at most of each floor, but of a good-size. The ground floor was her London workshop, but as always the blinds were down. In fact, he realised, he’d never been invited into her working space. Over the years she’d come to the door a few times, but like many artists and craftspeople he knew, she fiercely guarded her working space. The door to her studio was never left open as he passed through the hallway to climb the three flights of stairs to her husband’s domain. There was never a chance of the barest peek inside.

Today, she was in New York, and from outside the front door he could hear her husband descend from his fourth floor eyrie. The door was flung open and they greeted each other with the fervour of a long absence of friends. It had been a long time, really too long. Their lives had changed inexplicably. One, living almost permanently in that Italian marvel of waterways and sea-reflected light, the other, still in the drab West Yorkshire city from where their first acquaintance had begun from an email correspondence.

They had far too much to say to one another - on a hundred subjects. Of course the current project dominated, but as coffee (and a bowl of figs and mandarin oranges) was arranged, and they had moved almost immediately he arrived in the attic studio to the minimalist kitchen two floors below, questions were thrown out about partners and children, his activities, and sadly, his recent illness (the stairs had seemed much steeper than he remembered and he was a little breathless when he reached the top). As a guest he answered with a brevity that surprised him. Usually he found such questions needed roundabout answers to feel satisfactory - but he was learning to answer more directly, and being brief, suddenly thought of her and her always-direct questions. She wanted to know something, get something straight, so she asked  - straight - with no ‘going about things’ first. He wanted to get on with the business at hand, the business that preoccupied him, almost to the exclusion of everything else, for the last two days.

When they were settled in what was J’s working space ten years ago now he was immediately conscious that although the custom-made furniture had remained the Yamaha MIDI grand piano and the rack of samplers were elsewhere, along with most of the scores and books. The vast collection of CDs was still there, and so too the pictures and photographs. But there was one painting that was new to this attic room, a Cézanne. He was taken aback for a moment because it looked so like the real thing he’d seen in a museum just weeks before. He thought of the film Notting Hill when William Thacker questions the provenance of the Chagall ‘violin-playing goat’. The size of this Cézanne seemed accurate and it was placed in a similar rather ornate frame to what he knew had framed the museum original. It was placed on right-hand wall as he had entered the room, but some way from the pair of windows that ran almost the length of this studio. The view across the rooftops took in the Tower of London, a mile or so distant. If he turned the office chair in which he was sitting just slightly he could see it easily whilst still paying attention to J. The painting’s play of colours and composition compelled him to stare, as if he had never seen the painting before. But he had, and he remembered that his first sight of it had marked his memory.

He had been alone. He had arrived at the gallery just 15 minutes before it was due to close for the day.  He’d been told about this wonderful must-see octagonal room where around the walls you could view a particularly fine and comprehensive collection of Impressionist paintings. All the great artists were represented. One of Van Gogh’s many Olive Trees, two studies of domestic interiors by Vuillard, some dancing Degas, two magnificent Gaugins, a Seurat field of flowers, a Singer-Sergeant portrait, two Monets - one of a pair of haystacks in a blaze of high-summer light. He had been able to stay in that room just 10 minutes before he was politely asked to leave by an overweight attendant, but afterwards it was as if he knew the contents intimately. But of all these treasures it was Les Grands Arbres by Cézanne that had captured his imagination. He was to find it later and inevitably on the Internet and had it printed and pinned to his notice board. He consulted his own book of Cézanne’s letters and discovered it was a late work and one of several of the same scene. This version, it was said, was unfinished. He disagreed. Those unpainted patches he’d interpreted as pools of dappled light, and no expert was going to convince him otherwise! And here it was again. In an attic studio J. only frequented occasionally when necessity brought him to London.

When the coffee and fruit had been consumed it was time to eat more substantially, for he knew they would work late into the night, despite a whole day tomorrow to be given over to their discussions. J. was full of nervous energy and during the walk to a nearby Iraqi restaurant didn’t waver in his flow of conversation about the project. It was as though he knew he must eat, but no longer had the patience to take the kind of necessary break having a meal offered. His guest, his old friend, his now-being-consulted expert and former associate, was beginning to reel from the overload of ‘difficulties’ that were being put before him. In fact, he was already close to suggesting that it would be in J’s interest if, when they returned to the attic studio, they agreed to draw up an agenda for tomorrow so there could be some semblance of order to their discussions. He found himself wishing for her presence at the meal, her calm lovely smile he knew would charm J. out of his focused self and lighten the rush and tension that infused their current dialogue. But she was elsewhere, at home with her children and her own and many preoccupations, though it was easy to imagine how much, at least for a little while, she might enjoy meeting someone new, someone she’d heard much about, someone really rather exotic and (it must be said) commanding and handsome. He would probably charm her as much as he knew she would charm J.

J. was all and more beyond his guest’s thought-description. He had an intensity and a confidence that came from being in company with intense, confident and, it had to be said, very wealthy individuals. His origins, his beginnings his guest and old friend could only guess at, because they’d never discussed it. The time was probably past for such questions. But his guest had his own ideas, he surmised from a chanced remark that his roots were not amongst the affluent. He had been a free-jazz musician from Poland who’d made waves in the German jazz scene and married the daughter of an arts journalist who happened to be the wife of the CEO of a seriously significant media empire. This happy association enabled him to get off the road and devote himself to educating himself as a composer of avant-garde art music - which he desired and which he had achieved. His guest remembered J’s passion for the music of Luigi Nono (curiously, a former resident of the city in which J. now lived) and Helmut Lachenmann, then hardly known in the UK. J. was already composing, and with an infinite slowness and care that his guest marvelled at. He was painstakingly creating intricate and timbrally experimental string quartets as well as devising music for theatre and experimental film. But over the past fifteen years J. had become increasingly more obsessed with devising software from which his musical ideas might emanate. And it had been to his guest that, all that time ago, J. had turned to find a generous guide into this world of algorithms and complex mathematics, a composer himself who had already been seduced by the promise of new musical fields of possibility that desktop computer technology offered.

In so many ways, when it came to the hard edge of devising solutions to the digital generation of music, J. was now leagues ahead of his former tutor, whose skills in this area were once in the ascendant but had declined in inverse proportion to J’s, as he wished to spend more time composing and less time investigating the means through which he might compose. So the guest was acting now as a kind of Devil’s Advocate, able to ask those awkward disarming questions creative people don’t wish to hear too loudly and too often.

And so it turned out during the next few hours as J. got out some expensive cigars and brandy, which his guest, inhabiting a different body seemingly, now declined in favour of bottled water and dry biscuits. His guest, who had been up since 5.0am, finally suggested that, if he was to be any use on the morrow, bed was necessary. But when he got in amongst the Egyptian cotton sheets and the goose down duvet, sleep was impossible. He tried thinking of her, their last walk together by the sea, breakfast à deux before he left, other things that seemed beautiful and tender by turn . . . But it was no good. He wouldn’t sleep.

The house could have been as silent as the excellent double-glazing allowed. Only the windows of the attic studio next door to his bedroom were open to the night, to clear the room of the smoke of several cigars. He was conscious of that continuous flow of traffic and machine noise that he knew would only subside for a brief hour or so around 4.0am. So he went into the studio and pulled up a chair in front of the painting by Cézanne, in front of this painting of a woodland scene. There were two intertwining arboreal forms, trees of course, but their trunks and branches appeared to suggest the kind of cubist shapes he recognized from Braque. These two forms pulled the viewer towards a single slim and more distant tree backlit by sunlight of a late afternoon. There was a suggestion, in the further distance, of the shapes of the hills and mountains that had so preoccupied the artist. But in the foreground, there on the floor of this woodland glade, were all the colours of autumn set against the still greens of summer. It seemed wholly wrong, yet wholly right. It was as comforting and restful a painting as he could ever remember viewing. Even if he shut his eyes he could wander about the picture in sheer delight. And now he focused on the play of brush strokes of this painting in oils, the way the edge and border of one colour touched against another. Surprisingly, imagined sounds of this woodland scene entered his reverie - a late afternoon in a late summer not yet autumn. He was Olivier Messiaen en vacances with his perpetual notebook recording the magical birdsong in this luminous place. Here, even in this reproduction, lay the joy of entering into a painting. Jeanette Winterson’s plea to look at length at paintings, and then look again passed through his thoughts. How right that seemed. How very difficult to achieve. But that night he sat comfortably in J’s attic and let Cézanne deliver the artist’s promise of a world beyond nature, a world that is not about constant change and tension, but rests in a stillness all its own.

It’s curious this looking business, looking at something you almost recognize as being what it says on the small white card next to the exhibit. Sand Marks. And these marks hang on linen-lengths two metres long by 40 cm wide. You don’t look at sand face-forward standing up with light pouring through the surface on which the marks are made. That feels unusual. The five linen-lengths are keeping each other company. A set of sand marks, marks in the sand. No. Marks from and of the sand. And why, She thought? What is this supposed to be about? Is this what art is? Grabbing images from under the feet. Their  making engineered, conditions in place to shape and colour, fold and crease, to hold and position rightly. Hmm, She reflected, and thought of her daughter as a child, sitting on the sand of some annual Scottish beach. She would watch her soon to be two-year-old moving beach sand and stones around with her hands, seeing tiny dunes and valleys and routes appear, and making marks. Yes, that would be it. All that watching, that as she grew up became observing and collecting and storing away as images caught in a moment and placed in the mind’s diary, then often lingered over later (as only children can) defining her personal curation of things natural.

Here she is now, her mother thought, all these years on collecting and revealing such sand marks onto ordered frozen surfaces. Would these collectively be an installation she wondered? How She quietly distrusted that word. It was part of a vocabulary She felt She might do without. When She looked at these ecru linen cloths printed and manipulated variously She saw her daughter’s beautiful (always beautiful) hands entering sand, making marks in the fabric of the beach – as a child – now as an adult. There seemed no difference. Just this summer She had watched her daughter mesmerized at the sea’s edge, seeing the sand marks wander, bend and twist below shallow water, just as these hanging cloths seemed to do in her gaze. There was movement in stillness. Her daughter would wait with her camera to capture just the moment when light and ripple came together in a previously imagined moment: a perfect moment she longed to seize. Then later, up on the computer’s flat, backlit screen, it would be shown like a moth caught in a net and pinned behind glass.

In this light-filled gallery, a gallery filled with the reflected light of the sea just a minute’s walk away, this often sombre contemplative work became light of weight and texture, lost its sombre colours, those non-colour shades of grey and canvas, earth and mud, and seemed to float, bathed in light, the colours washed and fresh, alive. It was a revelation that it should be so, and She knew She would carry this view of her daughter’s linen pieces ever after – changing her view of what she’d seen as a steady stream of similar often sombre images representing ‘a body of work’ – another term She disliked and felt was not part of her world of seeing. She thought, ‘I garden, but I don’t do ‘work’ in the garden. What grows under my care and attention somehow has to be and flows through and past me. I don’t own my work in any way. It’s not for sale as something of me. It has no price tag. Work is cleaning the house or dealing with minutes of a meeting.’

There were in this light-filled gallery other pieces to look at. Her artists’ books in a glass cabinet were quietly covered in lichen green board, some closed, others opened to reveal more captured marks, stains and prints. Open to touch and view She warmed to a pair of her daughter’s sketchbooks, delighting in turning their pages carefully, so carefully as not to shake up the often delicate flowing marks on the paper. She imagined – as She herself had drawn once - her daughter’s intense concentration drawing these wider scenes – across the sea to the horizon where a turmoil of weather took place in the changing incessant cloudscapes.

There was other ‘work’ too, other artists’ efforts taking inspiration from landscape. Strange too, to call these pieces ‘work’. Such a term seemed to give their collective creative industry authority and stature She wasn’t always sure they necessarily had. Much of it seemed more play than work. It was so often playful.

Her daughter, meanwhile, was deep in conversation with the gallery’s exhibition officer. Whereas She dipped in and out of this conversation, her thoughts revolved, grass hopping. She remembered hearing her husband speak of his concern about their daughter’s management of this still-fledgling career. A right concern about how family and career would be handled as recognition and opportunity developed. She shared this concern, but seeing her daughter glow at being in the very swim of this art making and showing did not for a moment want that glow to disappear. She knew she would manage, she had always managed and been resourceful, careful, and, She had to admit this, brave. Her condition of being a single-parent She, as her mother, had almost grown accustomed to; She felt She knew a thing or two about finding happiness and the warmth of companionship.

Those linen-length pieces hanging there seemed to intersect such thoughts. She found herself looking at her daughter’s partner who was carefully sketching the linen quintet. He had said to her once that he sketched (badly) to enable him to focus intently on an object, to learn from it. If you sketched something you gave it time, and came to know it as line-by-line, shade-by-shade, the image formed and your relationship to it. He was always careful in talking to her, and even when he began to tread across ground that She hadn’t travelled, he was so sensitive to her feelings. He liked to explain, to tell out his enthusiasm for books he’d read, for music he loved, for her daughter he so adored. She could see that plainly, his adoration, his wonder at her. He had wrapped this young woman round and round with his adoration, and this clearly gave him such joy.

It was getting on. Lunch beckoned. There was a signalling that this hour or so of viewing would gradually fall away. The exhibition officer said her goodbyes. Food was mentioned. She would give one last glance at the Sand Marks perhaps. The linen-lengths still hung there luminous in the vivid, brilliant, but cold light of this early April day. After lunch they would walk to the sea under the powder blue skies and feel that this too was part of such a glad day, a day She would take to her memory as full of the restful pleasure her daughter so often gave her. This dear girl – how often had She heard her partner use that word ‘dear’, knowing he addressed his letters to her with ‘dearest’. It was wonderful that it could be so, that her daughter was so loved. She wanted, suddenly, to throw her arms around them both, and let them know, without any words, that she loved them too.

Fukiko had woken before her accustomed time. She was alone and would have prefered to sleep, and sleep on until Narumi had lit the brazier in her room and brought tea. But she had woken, and was aware that outside the world had changed. The world, her world of Yukiguni, where the mulberry fibres for paper-making were laid out in the snow-bleached fields. Her world where men from the cities sought the kind of woman she was, a woman uncultured in the ways of geisha, but possessing a freedom no city-bred geisha could possess. She had been schooled by an aunt, was accomplished as a performer on the samisen and though her voice was thin, it held a quality of understanding, it had a fine texture, though thin. And yes, this morning a change had come over the world outside her small house that looked over Hikachi Lake, that looked towards the southern flank of the Central Mountains where during the previous day and night the snows from across the seas had fallen on the landscape. She imagined the roofs of the monastery across the lake were heavily white, and as she sought the image in her mind’s eye so the large brass bell of the temple sounded, no, it throbbed across what she knew would now be hard-frozen water.

I am floating she thought, like the snowflakes I glimpsed in the reflected lamplight when last night I opened the shutters for a moment before bed, before sleep and descent into my dreams. For days now she had been dreaming like never before. She seemed to enter a dreamstate; she would then wake purposefully; she would then fall instantly into quite a different world; over and over this seemed to happen until she found herself wondering if she was dreaming within a dream; she would become aroused, her skin glowing with the ministrations of hidden hands and fingers; she would feel that presence on her upper thighs, a kind of perspiration born of that ****** sensation that, when awake, would sometimes steel upon her.

The coming of the deep snows before spring was always a delight, an excitement carried her from childhood. The way its coming turned daily life upside down. She would enjoy choosing her very warmest garments, the bringing together of layers, her rabbit-skin mantle perhaps, a bright warm scarf over her hair, which she would not today ‘put up’ but allow to flow comfortably next to and down her back, then the hood only if the snow and the wind persisted. She could tell from the warmth of her bed that this was not so, that outside there was a stillness. Even the birds were subdued. Only the brass bell broke the stillness born of this deep snow of spring.

She heard Narumi rise, heard her **** in her chamber ***, heard her roll her bedding away, heard her bring the stove into life and fill her mistress’ brazier with the few precious coals brought across the mountains. There would be tea soon, and this young girl, appointed by her aunt to her charge, would appear to kneel beside Fukiko and give the morning blessing her mother had given Narumi since infancy. Then, she would say, ‘Madam, the snow is deep this morning. We are bound in snow today. Our path has disappeared.’ Still a child’s voice, and still a child at thirteen winters, such a slight girl. And she would retire to the warmth of the kitchen and Fukiko’s cat who was not allowed into her mistress’ presence unless requested.

Fukiko could feel the warmth from the brazier. It was as comforting as the thought of the silent snowscape outside. Gathering her cloak around her, kneeling on the covers of her bed, she held the bowl of tea in her hands, letting its warmth caress her fingers. Standing up, she stroked herself as though to bring her body awake - her flanks, the front of her thighs, her stomach, her slight *******, the long curve of her bottom and then the back of her thighs, her right hand stroking her left arm, her left arm stroking her right arm from shoulder to fingers. She was awake, and placing her feet on the cold matting found her night cloak of deepest blue with the ornamental sash of red and white. She would open the shutter and gaze out into this fresh world of snow and light.

It seemed quite miraculous that a covering of snow could so change this view across the lake to the monastery and its attendant village and then to the mountains beyond. She had once seen a woodcut of this scene, in snow, and had been mesmerised by what it revealed. Despite her status, her profession, such as it was, any ambition she might have harboured to dwell in a city, evaporated at this vista, this snow country scene. It was as though she was living in a story book where she could imagine herself as a concubine of some favoured lord, even better, a princess groomed for a fine marriage, a marriage she knew she would be unlikely to experience. There was one, a land-owner beyond Huchin whose business brought him past her domain, who, widowed and childless, had been advised to seek her presence. And she had been charmed by his shyness, his lack of experience with such as the woman she was, or thought she had to be. And it was often that she would find herself thinking of his presence, and imagining her body melting to his careful touch.

Suddenly, out on the lake figures moved. Was the hard frost of the last week really able to sustain figures on the ice? The brothers from the monastery were tentatively moving too and fro, they were suketo, skating. She would summon Narumi. Her girl should see this sight. The brothers in their crimson robes moving to and fro across the ice, their robes flowing. ‘Narumi’, Fukiko said, ‘a sight so rare. Come and look, the monks are skating.’

So Fukiko and Narumi opened wide the shutters and let in the whole landscape, the lake, the monastery, the snow-roofed village, the mountains beyond into the room. The snowlight dazzled, the hard cold air rushed into the warm room filling its very corners with an enervating freshness. Narumi knelt beside the brazier in her best purple cloak, her hair already pinned for the day, her eyes wide at the sight of these figures dancing with movement on the ice. Although cold, Fukiko would not pull herself away from this play of forms, this wholly pleasurable sight. Just below her window her camellia bushes were in bud, almost budding, their dark redness, bloodlike, enhanced by the vivid snow white. And then the bamboo, snow on the bamboo, as though carefully layered on the fragile stems and branches. This morning no wind and a period of snow falling that had laid flake upon flake upon flake giving the bamboo a wholly different form and weight and body. Its stems bent as though in supplication, as though in prayer to bless the landscape of this snow country.

One must bend
In the floating world -
Snow on bamboo

Kaga no Chivo (1701-55)

Sometimes I think
I must be done with singing,
singing you this rich song,
this song of what
the poets call love unbound
(unhinged more like
as it brings me apart
at the seams) and there,
in an undressed state, it
blows through me and I know
I am neither myself nor
what I might recognize
as myself : instead this solitary man
waiting on her next word,
her favoured look, a light
touch to the shoulder,
which says there is this
flowing between us, a passion
for that detail, those small things
able to make big things possible,
obtainable.

And so this singing can never be done
because it can only be like this now,
never done with, always more waiting
as for a future wind, no matter how well
it might be forecast, we’ll rediscover it
afresh and laugh and smile bigger
smiles than we did at its first breath.

This is what love does to friendship
and the knowledge of the other,
always more to learn,
always more to see and know,
a cascade, yes a cascading
from one to the other
as sand in the hand
to a lower hand
and then reversed.
And so what we see
as morning greets us
severally, but so often apart
and from different windows,
is a coming together
in a joined thought – our morning
is this, or this, or this even.
and so we hold morningness
out to each other like the gift it is,
until later when, reassured that
we are really, really
in each other’s arms,
we feel the truth of it
deep in ourselves.