Selected Poems E-Book

Mimi Khalvati

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 110

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Mimi Khalvati's Selected Poems draws on her three Carcanet collections, In White Ink (1991), Mirrorwork (1995) and Entries on Light (1997). It provides us with the essential Khalvati, from the ambitiously wrought early formal poems, full of Persian and personal shadows, through to the meditations in the long sequence Entries on Light. She brings into English poetry distinct formal and tonal elements of Persian and Islamic provenance. A mature eroticism marks her poems; also, a feeling for nature in all its varieties. She is partial to the long poem built out of distinct parts, the sequence or series, from Plant Care in her first book to Entries on Light itself.

Leseprobe

MIMI KHALVATI

SELECTED POEMS

Contents

Title Page

from IN WHITE INK (1991)

The Woman in the Wall

Stone of Patience

Family Footnotes

Shanklin Chine

Sick Boy

Blue Moon

The Bowl

Rubaiyat

Earls Court

In Lieu of a Postcard

Jasmine

Rice

Baba Mostafa

Haiku

from MIRRORWORK (1995)

from Mirrorwork

Vine-Leaves

What Seemed so Quiet

The North-Facing Garden

Writing in the Sun

Prayer

Needlework

from Interiors

Au Jardin du Luxembourg (detail)

Boy in a Photograph

Coma

Love

That Night at the Jazz Café

Apology

from A View of Courtyards

from ENTRIES ON LIGHT (1997)

Knocking on the door you open

Sunday. I woke from a raucous night

Today’s grey light

Scales are evenly weighed

Streetlamps threw battlements

The heavier, fuller, breast and body grow

Through me light drives on seawall

In the amber

The air is the hide of a white bull

I’m silenced in

I hear myself in the loudness of overbearing waves

Speak to me as shadows do

This book is a seagull whose wings you hold

I’m opening the door of shadow

One upper pane by a windchime

I’ve never been in a hurry

It’s all very well

Show, show me

: that sky and light and colour

I love all things in miniature

In that childhood time

Light’s taking a bath tonight

Dawn paves its own way

With finest needles

When sky paints itself

There’s no jewel we can think of

Moons come in all the colours

Why not mention the purple flower

One sky is a canvas for jets and vapour trails

Black fruit is sweet, white is sweeter

He’s tying up the gypsophila

And had we ever lived in my country

Winter’s strains

And in the sea’s blackness sank

When space is at its emptiest

Was it morning, night?

Curling her tail

His 18th. He likes Chinese

Staring up from his pram to the sky

New Year’s Eve

In this country

Here’s dusk to burrow in

All yellow has gone from the day

While the tulip threatens to lose one leaf

Darling, your message on the phone

Is it before or after the fiesta?

On a late summer’s day that draws to a close

First you invite me to tea under your appletree

Everywhere you see her

Don’t draw back

Light comes between us and our grief

Why does the aspen tremble

Boys have been throwing stones all day

Foreshortened, light claws out of the sea

On a diving-board

I have removed the scaffolding

So high up in a house

These homes in poems

For you, who are a large man

When, against a cloth

The gate has five bars

I’m reading with the light on

Times are – thinking about new wine

Like old red gold

An Iranian professor I know asked me

I’ve always grown in other people’s shade

… Human beings must be taught to love

Nothing can ruin the evening

It’s the eye of longing that I tire of

To be so dependent on sunlight

What is he looking for

It is said God created a peacock of light

Too much light is tiresome

Light’s sharpening knives of water

I’ve stored all the light I need

I loved you so much

Air’s utterly soft

And suppose I left behind

‘Going away’

Finally, in a cove

It can come from the simplest of things

Notes and Dedications for Entries on Light

Also by Mimi Khalvati

Copyright

from In White Ink

In women’s speech, as in their writing, that element which never stops resonating … is the song: first music from the first voice of love which is alive in every woman … A woman is never far from ‘mother’ … There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink.

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

The Woman in the Wall

Why they walled her up seems academic.

They have their reasons. She was a woman

with a nursing child. Walled she was

and dying. But even when they surmised

there was nothing of her left but dust and ghost

at dawn, at dusk, at intervals

the breast recalled, wilful as the awe

that would govern village lives, her milk flowed.

And her child suckled at the wall, drew

the sweetness from the stone and grew

till the cracks knew only wind and weeds

and she was weaned. Centuries ago.

Stone of Patience

‘In the old days,’ she explained to a grandchild

bred in England, ‘in the old days in Persia

it was the custom to have a stone, a special stone

you would keep to talk to, tell your troubles to,

a stone we called, as they now call me, a stone of patience.’

No therapists then to field a question with another

but stones from dust where ladies’ fingers, cucumbers

curled in sun. Were the ones they used for gherkins

babies that would have grown, like piano tunes had we known

the bass beyond the first few bars? Or miniatures?

Some things I’m content to guess – colour in a crocus-tip,

is it gold or mauve? A girl or a boy … Patience

was so simple then, waiting for the clematis to open,

to purple on a wall, the bud to shoot out stamens,

the jet of milk to leave its rim like honey on the bee’s fur.

But patience when the cave is sealed, a boulder

at the door, is riled by the scent of hyacinth

in the blue behind the stone: a willow by the pool

where once she sat to trim a beard with kitchen scissors,

to tilt her hat at smiles, sleep, congratulations.

And a woman faced with a lover grabbing for his shoes

when women friends would have put themselves in hers

no longer knows what’s virtuous. Will anger

shift the boulder, buy her freedom and the earth’s?

Or patience like the earth’s be abused? Even nonchalance

can lead to courage, conception: a voice that says

oh come on darling, it’ll be alright, oh do let’s.

How many children were born from words such as these?

I know my own were, now learning to repeat them,

to outgrow a mother’s awe of consequence her body bears.

So now that midsummer, changing shape, has brought in

another season, the grape becoming raisin, hinting

in a nip at the sweetness of a clutch, one fast upon another;

now that the breeze is raising sighs from sheets

as she tries to learn again, this time for herself,

to fling caution to the winds or to borrow patience

from the stones in her own backyard where fruit

still hangs on someone else’s branch, don’t ask her

whose? as if it mattered. Say they won’t mind

as you reach for a leaf, for the branch, and pull it down.

Family Footnotes

My arms in the sink, I half-listen

as someone keeps me company.

She’s such a sweetiepie, isn’t she?

I pause and to my own surprise

realise, seeing her suddenly through the eyes

of guests, how small she seems;

like a robin redbreast perched with other

mothers I thank god aren’t mine.

My father cracks a joke on the transatlantic

line, misreading my alliances;

decades of regret still failing

to make her an easy butt.

But his laugh is warm bubble, a devil

to slip into, like the fold of his cheek

and the grey ring round his eye

my own before long will look through.

My children are with me as always, my son

even now sleeping under covers

I have no more to do with. He is always

loving. To say this, think this

seems suspect in a world such as ours.

How have we escaped it?

My daughter is about to bumble in the door,

late as usual, and be sweet to me,

nattering on as I clatter in the kitchen,

her breasts within an inch of my arm.

Nothing seems to rattle her – embarrassments

that floor me, still, at my age.

She is chock-a-block with courage;

fresh air on her cheeks like warpaint.

Pooled in this – this love – and this and this –

what has riddled me to long for more?

Shanklin Chine

It surfaces at moments, unlooked-for,

when the little crooked child appears

to bar your way: demanding no crooked

sixpence as she stands behind the stile

in her little gingham frock and the blood

she has in mind drawn behind her gaze.

Are you the guardian of the Chine?

(Perhaps she needs some recognition.)

Of course she never talks.

She only has the one face – dark and solemn,

the one stance – blackboard-set

and a wit as nimble as the Chine

stopping short at forgiveness

that could only come with time or power

or a body large enough to fit her brain.

Is there something I could give her?

Some blow to crack her ice,

human warmth to make her feel the same?

Genie of the Chine, she reappears at moments

when I am closest to waterways, underworlds,

little crooked streams through hemlock

and dandelion that end so prematurely –

though she is there, like Peter Pan,

or the barbed-wire children who bang tin cans

or the child you would have loved

like any mother, any father, had you been

an adult, not the child with no demands

for sixpences in puddings, pumpkins

on the table or any pumpkin pies gracing

homes that had you standing at their gates.

Genie of the Chine, she reappears

from time to time, when I am closest to myself.

Sick Boy

In the shallow, like a dog, between the sideboard

and the sound of breaking water,

his fear curls.

From the high road by the stove

whose smoke is scenting speed

outside his travel –

Swish! a figure stooping

in the corner rinses fruit

beyond the peel,

places three magic colours,

dots, a water-wand to name them

by a bowl of tangerines.

Under the covers it locks him in:

the rod, the rail, the storm.

Oh Mum. The sea.

Sand trails off the shells,

feet going down, the brambles’

pale green store.

Blue Moon

Sitting on a windowsill, swinging

her heels against the wall as the gymslips

circled round and Elvis sang Blue Moon,

she never thought one day to see her daughter,

barelegged, sitting crosslegged on saddlebags

that served as sofas, pulling on an ankle

as she nodded sagely, smiling, not denying –

you’ll never catch me dancing to the same old tunes;

while her brother, strewed along a futon,

grappled with his Sinclair, setting up

a programme we’d asked him to. Tomorrow

he would teach us how to use it but for now

he lay intent, pale, withdrawn, peripheral

in its cold white glare as we went up to our rooms:

rooms we once exchanged, like trust, or guilt,

each knowing hers would serve the other better

while the other’s, at least for now, would do.

The house is going on the market soon.

My son needs higher ceilings; and my daughter

sky for her own blue moon. You can’t blame her.

No woman wants to dance in her Mum’s old room.

The Bowl

The path begins to climb the hills that confine the lake-basin. The ascent is steep and joyless; but it is as nothing compared with the descent on the other side, which is long, precipitous, and inconceivably nasty. This is the famous Kotal-i-Pir-i-Zan, or Pass of the Old Woman.

Some writers have wondered at the origin of the name. I feel no such surprise … For, in Persia, if one aspired, by the aid of a local metaphor, to express anything that was peculiarly uninviting, timeworn, and repulsive, a Persian old woman would be the first and most forcible simile to suggest itself. I saw many hundreds of old women … in that country … and I crossed the Kotal-i-Pir-i-Zan, and I can honestly say that whatever derogatory or insulting remarks the most copious of vocabularies might be capable of expending upon the one, could be transferred, with equal justice, to the other.

… At the end of the valley the track … discloses a steep and hideous descent, known to fame, or infamy, as the Kotal-i-Dokhter, or Pass of the Maiden.

… As I descended the Daughter, and alternately compared and contrasted her features with those of the Old Woman, I fear that I irreverently paraphrased a wellknown line,

O matre laeda filia laedior!

George Nathaniel Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (1892)

i

The bowl is big and blue. A flash of leaf

along its rim is green, spring-green, lime

and herringbone. Across the glaze where fish swim,

over the loose-knit waves in hopscotch-black,

borders of fish-eye and cross-stitch, chestnut trees

throw shadows: candles, catafalques and barques

and lord knows what, what ghost of ancient seacraft,

what river-going name we give to shadows.

Inside the bowl where clay has long since crusted,

under the dust and loam, leaf forms lie

fossilized. They have come from mountain passes,

orchards where no water runs, stony tracks

with only threadbare shade for mares and mule foals.

They are named: cuneiform and ensiform,

spathulate and sagittate and their margins

are serrated, lapidary, lobed.

My book of botany is green: the gloss

of coachpaint, carriages, Babushka dolls,