The Weather Wheel (6 page)

The air in the cemetery’s greener, thicker with scent.

Paths wind and twist and, whenever I come this way,

I wonder if I’ve lost my bearings, following tiger stripes

of sun between the graves. But here’s the station café.

A patient I know from the psychiatric ward waves,

smiling his dimpled, toothless smile, rubbing his forehead.

His voice, high-pitched, accented, carries even though

he’s talking to a woman at his table. I’m fond of him –

he inspires affection. The skin around his eyes, wrinkled,

rayed, has the softness of my father’s. He asks after Tom,

shows me the heel of his palm badly burned from the cooker.

‘It’s my mind that does this – God save me from accidents!’

He knows some Iranians, Azeris, just round the corner

at the snooker club. Whenever he goes in for a drink,

a Coca-Cola – and here he gestures, shrugging, meaning

it’s on the house – ‘it’s’, as Hassan says, ‘hospitable.’

When I see a hand first raised, then placed

on the heart, the head tilted towards the heart,

a greeting exchanged between a pedestrian

and a passing bus driver; when I see a woman

seated at a bus stop wave to a woman passenger

sitting behind me and, picturing them still,

look straight into trees, tears spring to my eyes

even though we’re stopped at Elephant & Castle.

All one way blows the wind in the trees but

which is the way to a staging post between

the Khalvatis now, scattered in the diaspora,

and our very first forebears who struck camp,

loaded their beasts, set their caravans against

a skyline, wind whipping the horses’ manes,

the fringes of their saddlecloths and shawls,

and moved as a whole tribe together?

It might be grey, it might be cold, who knows

what the weather’s like out there? Birds know,

so silent in the branches, animals in their lairs.

But I, my blinds drawn down, am blind to all

but my heart’s November, the second anniversary

of my mother’s death. Perhaps I can keep her in,

in the warmth of my rooms, fug of my flat rehung

with her paintings, her tapestried cushions strewn

on chairs and sofas, making them gardens, rosebeds.

I can sit there among them as she did, as we did,

oftentimes together. But where’s the sense in that?

Their velvet backs, rusts and fawns she kept face up

to stop the flowers fading, are already grimed from

propping my back, my head. I can become her instead.

Willingly become her in every meaning of the word.

Daughters who betray mothers are in turn betrayed.

Even this garden, a veritable Eden with a keyhole pool,

a white cockatoo glimpsed behind the bars of a cage,

a trailing orange lotus swaying shadows against a wall

and sun beginning to cast its warmth on rattan chairs,

is an orchard of sorts but with nothing wild about it

or left to chance, the body without the soul of an orchard.

An orchard’s soul should be ragged, ramshackle, dapple

throwing honeycombs of shade on soil, weather interstitial.

But every view’s an artwork. Trees laden with oranges

like Christmas trees with glass baubles, paired parakeets

as yellow and green as the orange trees, banana palms

sculptural, fronds sheared and scored,
cardones
, Magritte-like

– not cacti but as penile – black avocados in the background,

arbours within arbours, round every path another, offer

a series of small warm breaths: seclusion without solitude,

arrival without homecoming, a silence that rings in the ears.

We are illicit. We creep around shaded paths, spit pips

into flowering shrubs at the root, leave wet handprints

on poolside tiles where we crouch to rinse our fingers,

talk in the most inaudible of murmurs. A scruffy old hen

crows triumphantly as she lays, a great tit flits into view

and, on being glimpsed, scares; we are here and welcome

only if we whisper without voice, move without noise,

leave pipettes of blossom to float by on stagnant currents.

Even our thoughts intrude, being the wiliest of burglars.

Sleep too is a violation or so the parrots would have you think,

screeching warnings enough to wake the dead. Don’t breathe,

don’t listen, walk if you can on air. Every path is a dead end.

Under the arch, the wrought-iron gates are not only padlocked

but so entangled with lotus – an explosion of orange fireworks –

they seem locked in perpetuity while, passing in a street, blaring

through loudspeakers, gospel singers belt out ‘Oh Happy Day…’

Well, no wonder. This is the site of the Garden of the Hesperides.

These the Islands of the Blessed, the Fortunate Isles where,

Sertorius waxed, ‘the air was never extreme, which for rain

had a little silver dew, which of itself and without labour,

bore all pleasant fruit to their happy dwellers.’ Pleasant fruit

was had in plenty – reach up and twist the golden apple

which will drop into your hand, the banana from its own hand,

the
madroño
from its cluster. Oranges will rain down like

starlight through a telescope, a green and golden galaxy.

Near enough to spy cobwebs between their nodes, leaves,

drained of their sap, crack and burn at the tip – the more

brittle they grow, the weightier grow the oranges. By their song,

imagine the size of canaries, goldcrests, lovebirds, lorikeets,

their invisible throats and beaks smaller than pumpkin seeds.

The length of life remaining to be lived can feel infinitesimal

and interminable too. Not every poet longs for immortality.

Periquito and I have the garden to ourselves.

Periquito has the shade and I the rising sun,

fierce as Periquito’s fierce. ‘Dominion’ as in

‘Multiply and have dominion over all the creatures

of the earth’ has, in Hebrew, another meaning:

‘understanding’. But Periquito talks Canarian,

a parrot dialect thereof which, all ears though I am,

signifies nothing but sound and fury. Periquito

has the aviary birds to chorus him. They twitter

like background water, he on one end and I

on the other of a diagonal across the morning.

Released from his cage he teeters along a parapet,

a white quiff, a waddle and limp. Nothing to say

for himself now that he’s free. Later they’ll call,

‘Periquito, hola hola’
and ‘
Hola
’ he’ll answer

as clearly as a boy, albino, hiding in the bushes.

He whistles once, crosses from one citrus tree

to another along a hammock bridge, raises his quiff,

tests a twig with his beak, one foot held quivering.

In a sleek white tailcoat, his dress shirt ruffled,

he skids up a rope, waving a hand, claws curled,

attentive as a child in a playpen to the movements

of all and sundry.
Diario de Avisos
, freshly laid,

collects his droppings. Lord of the green canopy,

he swings below the hammock ties, perches in a cleft

to peer towards the sound of a generator whirring,

taps his left hand on the branch excitedly and twice

raises two white wings, once to declare himself an angel

and once for balance as he grows ever more excited,

hanging by his beak alone, doing chin-ups, sipping water,

shaking diamonds in a spray around him, at the approach

of Señora coming and going about her daily bustlings.

Here they come, the insects, feasting off the money plant

under the drago tree whose bloodsap and attendant cures

gave the Guanches health and longevity. My mother was

ninety-two when she died, last and oldest of three siblings.

Her family history died with her, none of it lives in my

or my children’s memory. We are yesterday’s people,

provisional, adaptable, borrowing and assimilating.

The Guanches were said to have been exiled by Trajan

whose captains cut off their tongues, put them in ships

laden with animals and seed and forcibly settled them

in the Canaries. Silbo Gomero, their whistling language,

has survived to this day along with municipal place names,

gofio
, their staple bread, and mummies – light as scrolls

with skin thinner and softer than our best kid gloves –

that lined their burial caves. But the Guanche themselves,

decimated, enslaved, were erased from memory and texts.

On three dry pumpkins, some little white pebbles,

timples, a very small drago tambourine, a blonde flute

with a hollow reed and four pipes with green stems

and knobbly joints of barley, how sweetly they played

endechas
: ‘What does it matter if they take and bring

milk, water and bread, if Agarfa will not look at me?’

And while they played and sang songs of love and death,

the old Gomera people, bearers of wisdom and knowledge,

who kept their mysteries to themselves and never divulged

the sacred site of their necropolis, the mysterious words

pronounced when sowing seed or how their ancestors,

the indigenous people of these islands, came to be here,

saying only that a higher being had brought them, left them,

then wiped them from memory, while the old native songs

played on, the elders wept and rocked, leaning on their sticks

with the same, same veined hands as the mummy of Madrid’s.

It’s the childlike geometry of the square –

the octagonal bandstand in the centre, the ring

of café tables and chairs around it, the outer ring

of bifurcating trunks, their packed suitcases of leaves,

benches, balconies, windows that ask to be counted –

that calls to mind set squares, rulers, compasses

and a head bent over a see-through protractor,

an angle of time arrested in the impalpable air.

The scene is as mild as a nativity and beyond this

simple geometry, immense, immeasurable mountains,

a stormy Atlantic you can hear at night, snoring

like a sleeping leviathan. I would like a small life.

I would like a son who takes both my hands in his

and, walking backwards, inches me towards the end

of a cobbled street where a door opens and a daughter,

taking my hands from his, helps me over the doorstep.

Sun sinks behind the massif before it blazes, fires off

shadow through the balustrade. The square is a great ship

floating, rising and sinking on sun and shadow, a ship

in harbour. We stroll the decks, let wind rest in our sails.

But I know nothing of ships, wanting my feet on earth.

My mother’s ashes under the cherry trees, her house

occupied by someone else. I never go there, just as she

will never sit in a café, holding her handbag close on her lap,

her scarf, her hair in place. Memory would fill her smile

as she swayed her head from side to side and breathed

sweet exhalations of regret. Peremptorily, she’d ask

for an ashtray, offer me cake. I loved forever being a child

at my mother’s side, the captain of my ship whose railings

I peered over. All her absences are final now. Like wind

they’ve run in together. Now they form a wake; a house

I am more than welcome in, a wheel I must learn to steer.