Anthony Lawrence Poems

My father could whistle up a fox
with the bent lid of a jam tin.
Pursing his lips, he would blow the cries
of a wounded hare into cold Glen Innes hills,
...

Get your compass and your sharpest knife ...
- John Gorka


Wind shear over mountain grass
does not spook the feeding animal,
...

When you are seven years old,
lying in the back of a station wagon
while your parents play night tennis;
when the knowledge that you are going
...

My darling turns to poetry at night.
What began as flirtation, an aside
Between abstract expression and first light

Now finds form as a silent, startled flight
Of commas on her face — a breath, a word ...    
My darling turns to poetry at night.

When rain inspires the night birds to create
Rhyme and formal verse, stanzas can be made
Between abstract expression and first light.

Her heartbeat is a metaphor, a late
Bloom of red flowers that refuse to fade.
My darling turns to poetry at night.

I watch her turn. I do not sleep. I wait
For symbols, for a sign that fear has died
Between abstract expression and first light.

Her dreams have night vision, and in her sight
Our bodies leave ghostprints on the bed.
My darling turns to poetry at night
Between abstract expression and first light.
...

The pines are dark, with a bleed of sea mist coming through
the brush-worked texture of the air
to settle over the headland, where plaques have been
wired to a fence -
memorials to those
who came to the end of themselves
and closer to the sea, in a low cloister
between ti-trees and flowering acacia
a woman and her children are burying a dog -
one holds a spade while others lower things
a leash, a bowl, into the ground
and some nights I hear the calls
of the common brown frogs
dying out in timed, communal distribution
under the breaking velvet heads of bulrushes
and while I don't always look for wonder
in what I see, as I know it's often best to walk
to let that line of cloud be cloud
not the memory of what I saw in Naples -
Christ under a veil of Carrera marble - I understand
that observation can be just another word
for full immersion, or for skimming the tight skin
of a thought, that it's transformative, or passive
and when I try to choose between
taking the air and taking what I need
to use for later, for working the rhythms
of breath and blood flow into verse, I mostly fail
in my resolve to leave a scene alone
knowing what a glance takes in
will be changing already as I think of it
the way coastal air unspools
from the needled stem of a pine, at dusk
and how offshore wind makes a tearing sound
along the crests of breakers, yet
when observation becomes obsessive
it can overburden the senses and lead
to a depression in the well-spring of a thought or action
so mostly I walk, noticing
how the eye-patch on a male fig bird
turns a deeper shade of red when he faces the sun
or simply that a bird has my attention
and I'll wait to see what happens next, which might involve
moving on, or ignoring an arrangement
I have made with myself
by which I mean I'll put aside concern
and caution, take my time, and learn.
...

Blondin (Jean François Gravelet), 1824-1897
Despite the legs, varicose like branches
veined with congealing sap,
the hands, gnarled and knotted with disuse,
I could still conjure a terrible height
from the verandah to the lawn,
do a softshoe along the railing
then walk the length of the drive,
pausing to dig the stones from my palms.
The life of an aerialist is no worse or less
potent because the body is grounding itself,
weighted to the marrow with decay.
It is only the tools of my high-risk trade
that have fallen to redundancy: the cable
on which I travelled above the falls
of North America, the long pole I held -
an eagle's slow dark flapping -
they are warping and unravelling in the shed.
My retirement from the windy meridians
of balance and applause has refined
a discipline displaced by youth for the brief
flirtations I made with death and acclamation.
I've not forgotten the surreal heliography
of a thousand upturned eyes and cameras,
or the collective gasp from a crowd of mouths
as I wheeled a barrow stacked with knives
towards Niagara's roaring vanishing-point.
Once the wind rocked the barrow violently,
and knives flashed like slender-bodied salmon
falling back from an unsuccessful spawning.
These days I walk the wire in the high
and silent air of meditation. I can twirl
a blue umbrella, or wheel a box of blades
above the falls for hours - the cheers
and the mist still around me as I rise
then step away into the shadow of an elm.
I've returned in recent years to stand alone
at night behind the safety rail.
They've lit the falls with spotlights,
now white thunder is a rainbow veil,
with Beethoven's Sixth coming awkwardly
like muted weeping through the spray.
I rarely discuss my time in the air.
Talk is a tripwire on memory's corroding line.
Though, when asked to remember
the most difficult walk I've made, I tell
a story about my father. One night he came
staggering home through the rain into death,
his heart and balance quartered. I met him
at the gate, then carried him inside.
He was breathing hard the words I would later
speak like prayer above the water and the crowds:
I've been trying for years
to heal the private wounds of my life.
...

The hands
that left their heat and shape on his back
when he entered her
now hold a slice of watermelon.

She eats the wet fruit slowly.

The mouth
that opened wide and red when she came
now opens wide and red.

She wipes her mouth
with the back of her hand
as she does after spitting the seed.
...

Open the door.
Enter.
Move to the desk.
Take the rubber stamp from its clip.
The stamp pad should be in the top drawer.
No?
Then slide the desk's roll-cover up,
paying close attention to the sound it makes.
There, beneath the stapler.
Test the pad with your finger.
What does that feel like?
Does your fingertip come away blue?
Look at this.
A doodle on the blotter.
What do you see?
Press the stamp to the pad.
Now to paper.
Will the name be legible, or will the rubber have perished,
leaving a blur of ink?
Can you read that?
Now, take the cigar box from the top of the desk.
White Owl.
A fine name for a cigar.
Open the box, but don't look inside.
Use your fingers for eyes.

Well?

Well,
the desk cover made a sound like a window being raised
before he vomited over the flowers.
The stamp pad felt like his cheek when I touched it,
fearful he might wake.
On the blotter I saw a man laid out in a motel room,
dead two days,
attended by angels washing drugs from his blood.
The name the stamp made was his.
Inside the cigar box?
Pencil shavings, rubber bands, buttons, a wedding ring
(I recognised the burred edge
that opened my face one night in the hall,
and the oval of onyx,
cold as a thumbnail on the tongue),
dead cockroaches, and a key.
There was something else that could have been a badge
or a medal, and something sharp that . . .
Someone's coming.
Quickly, over here, in the cupboard.
Be quiet and still
among the wreckage of my father's things.
...

When you are seven years old,
lying in the back of a station wagon
while your parents play night tennis;
when the knowledge that you are going
to die one day comes though
the rallies, players' voices,
and songs from a dashboard radio
left on like an audible night light;
you listen hard to the faultless
workings of your life: your heartbeat,
muffled under a blanket; your breath,
painting cone-shaped plumes on the glass.
You trade sleep for the ache
of a nameless concept, and feel
the margins of your days begin to close.
You are not prepared for this.
You leave the car and look beyond
the capped, swinging court lights,
blurred by an attendant rain of moths
and flying ants, and you search
the sky for meaning. Linking stars
and smears of low, transparent cloud,
you find a wound in the side
of an overripe fig; a lizard,
its position on a stone betrayed
only when it blinks. But then
a tennis ball clears the fence,
a player laughs, and your parents return,
smelling of sweat and cigarettes.
When they ask why you're up so late;
what you're doing outside the car;
you've not the words for what you know.
On the way home, you lie down
and stare at the backs of their heads,
which are dark, then silver
in the lights of an overtaking lorry.
Your father turns the radio off.
Your mother turns to look at him.
They do not speak. You touch yourself
under the blanket, carefully,
and forget about death for awhile.
When the backs of their heads
flare again, you promise yourself
you'll remember that moment;
and you do, thirty-two years later,
sitting up in bed, when your wife's face
is lit by a car pulling into the drive.
In the dark again, you sense her
glance at you. The glance returned,
you ask if she remembers
how old she was, or what she was doing
when her first thoughts of death arrived.
When she doesn't answer, you say
Star, fig, lizard, and wait for the lights
of another car to print
the shadows of your heads on the wall.
...

A cluster of ladybirds makes a detail
from a cob of charred or blighted corn.
Separated,
they enamel any surface
like waterbeads
containing a matchhead's reflected flare and death.

I part the leaves of the radish
and find carnage:
ladybirds, front legs
working into the sides of their heads
as if trying to prise tiny black helmets off,
the visors jammed with aphids
like stove-grills
wet ash has rendered useless.

Opening their wings, there are wings
beneath them:
an overcoat's tails
flipped back to reveal
the tails of another, smaller coat.

I take a ladybird from a leaf, imagining myself
as I did picking green and orange cicadas
like loud, vibrating fruit from trees when young:
insect-sized,

held aloft by a giant,
pincered roughly
until the fluids broke from my eyes.

I hold it, because holding is what humans feel
they need to do to living things.
When I open my hand, it ambles
like a freckled naturalist
over the moist topography of my palm,
and I remember
a concert in a tree-lined square in Granada
at dusk: a woman fisting the silver
bellflower of a French horn; swallows
becoming their own shadows;
a ladybird negotiating the hairs on my arm.

Have you ever pressed the rim of an acorn's cap
until the rim collapsed?
Perhaps it was
the last note from a clarinet
returning from the walls of a Gothic cathedral,
or swallows, angling for insects
like semi-quavers over the trees
that had distracted me . . .
I'd squeezed the beetle between finger and thumb -
my wet skin smelled of decay.

Here in the garden, vegetables
are being mined by green grubs
one stage from white, erratic flight.
The old-fashioned spray pump I steer
like the design for a blade-and-wingless aircraft
come to life,
is blowing pyrethrum
like burnt fuel over everything.
The grubs rise into death,
globes of milky fluid at the ends of their mouths;
the aphids mobilise, then fuse
into a wart-like mound, their sucking bodies
outnumbering the black and orange dead.
...