Call of Nature by Dennis Greig

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CALL OF NATURE

CHRIS RICE ————————————————————

Belfast Lapwing

CALL OF NATURE

CHRIS RICE

Belfast LAPWING

First Published by Lapwing Publications c/o 1, Ballysillan Drive Belfast BT14 8HQ lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com www.lapwingpoetry.com Copyright ÂŠ Christopher Rice 2013 Copyright cover image ÂŠ Richard Brooks 2013 All rights reserved The author has asserted her/his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Since before 1632 The Greig sept of the MacGregor Clan Has been printing and binding books

All Lapwing Publications are Printed and Hand-bound in Belfast Set in Times New Roman at the Winepress

ISBN 978-1-909252-33-2

CONTENTS CALL OF NATURE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ROADWORKS TEHRAN 1978 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - YOU DO NOT KNOW - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LOVE ACROSS EUROPE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - VANISHING YEAR - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BEDSIT BREAKFAST - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - DECOY - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - TWO BATHERS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - MASS POLITICS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - EL ALAMEIN - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PRESIDENTIAL PALACE, ALEXANDRIA, 1980 - - - MONTAZAH - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BIRTHDAY ON A BALCONY IN GLYM - - - - - - - - - ALEXANDRIA TRILOGY 1980 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LUNAR ARTISTRY - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - NOMAD - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BREAK OF SERVICE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE DOOR - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - GARDEN 1983 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BEING HUMAN - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - MY WORST MISTAKE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - GARDEN 1993 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - HANGOVER - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - IDENTITY - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - FIGHTER PILOT - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - WITHOUT WINGS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SURVIVING THE RECESSION - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PROCESS AND OUTCOME - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - REDSTART - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - WAXWING - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SKYLARK - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - KINGFISHER - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - CORMORANT - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - WADERS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LAST FLIGHT TO MUMBAI - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 23 24 25 27 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems or earlier versions were published: Acumen, The Honest Ulsterman, Iota, Kudos, The London Magazine, Oasis, Omens, Siting Fires, Smiths Knoll, Stand, The Stony Thursday Book, Strange Fruit/Limestone Kingfisher was joint-winner of the Friends of Richmond Park 50th Anniversary Poetry Competition, 2011

By the same author: Biography Audrey Hepburn (Penguin 2000) Anthology (editor) Classic Stories: Love (Penguin 2001)

CALL OF NATURE

CHRIS RICE

For Claire, Anna and Katie with love

Chris Rice

CALL OF NATURE By a lake where setting suns bob up and down like oranges, a driver gets down from his bus, dents the desert with his knees and with a holy yodel starts to pray. On the bus a small girl lifts a purple frock above her waist, hoists her elfin buttocks to the window, and irrigates the desert with an arc of twinkling rain. Inches from the man at prayer it settles like a necklace in the sand. Horrified, her mother swings two squawking chickens at her head. The driver looks up, mystified – Not a cloud in sight, and yet such orange rain.… The girl, her face eclipsed by clouds of angry feathered hair, smiles a small white butterfly that hovers briefly, shimmers like a white hole in the air. ‘There you are,’ it lullabies the moment with its whisper. ‘That’s all you need to know. Everything’s a miracle. Everything brings shame.’ Then she and her smile are gone, the bus moves on, and chickens mutter feebly with concussion.

Call of Nature

ROADWORKS TEHRAN 1978 Roadbuilders move to the rhythms of a coughing puppeteer. Crouching behind white blocks of stone only their bare feet are shaded. By a pile of sun-baked rubble a Mercedes camouflaged with mirrors is waiting. The idle chauffeur lights a cheroot from a rock. In the back seat a fat man wrapped in flags is coughing and praying. Strings tighten, roadbuilders lifted from this stone to that – excavate here, deposit there. Sweat like torn necklaces leaks and congeals with the same stagnant sparkle seen in the coughing man’s eye. Another cough. Strings tighten, the men jerk erect. An empty bulldozer roars. Packed in the white ribs of the unfinished road a steaming black swamp of charred tongues. ‘Cheap tarmac,’ the coughing man smiles. He can see the men gasping for words that won’t come.

Chris Rice

YOU DO NOT KNOW Suddenly the desert city’s glare makes you invisible, standing where the lips of trenches crumble, watching me. I have made you wait, drinking water from a tilting urn, or stopping to light cigarettes by guesswork. In this sun there’s no detection of the naked flame. Still, you walk with me through rubble; skirt, on tiptoe, burnt-out cars, lead me through a maze of barricades, even break a sandal-strap and, smiling, say it’s nothing. Neither of us knew it then: how, in nights to come, what we took for nothing was to smoulder and, eventually, blind.

Call of Nature

LOVE ACROSS EUROPE Your voice tiptoes across a continent of eggshells into my ear, filtering the web, each word of longing sharpened to a point on rocks of breath. Never say itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s true geography can drift between us. This Sunday morning your voice stopped a world when it seemed a grain of sand was about to destroy my heart.

Chris Rice

VANISHING YEAR Once there was a room. Now air like a structure of glass tubes twists around me, snatches stray sunlight, digests it, leaves it dripping like blood in a pool by the door – the spot you lingered on to say goodbye. You remembered in going the first time you came, carrying knitting, scattering space around you. In those days I’d bare my throat to the windows; I’d turn, see you there, no make-up, offering strawberries on a white plate. Perhaps then I decided to keep you, or it may have been just love of strawberries, I can’t say. Now I am a statue circled by wolf-like shadows, trapped in a web of glass vibrating still from the door you shut. The walls upped and went some time later. The door is fidgeting too. Just me, and the drip, drip of sunlight, the room, the year dissolving like a strawberry on my tongue.

Call of Nature

BEDSIT BREAKFAST Bread knife caked in margarine, silver dagger you are not. Fork, with your arthritic fingers webbed with grit and cinder, sorry to awaken you from dreams of lifting cherries to a Spanish film-star’s lips. And what’s this in the sink – a tortoise? Nothing but a soup bowl crazy-paved with winking cracks and smirks. Knives and forks and soup bowls – I gaze at them as, from a stretcher, I might gaze at tombs. But who am I to taunt? Up again, having dreamt of nothing – no, not even that – dreamt of howls I couldn’t hear and moons I couldn’t see. Vexed at knowing I belong so perfectly to this – Samuel Beckett landscapes everywhere I look, a life of no horizons but the ones that coil like barbed-wire at my feet – I vow, as I vow every day, if hunger can be trained to curl not as a question mark but whip, windows will think twice before they spill like marmalade their light across the burnt toast of another day.

Chris Rice

DECOY Every night I see them at my window, looking in, expecting invitations, raincoat collars slapping at their faces in the wind. Why not draw the curtains on them, pull my headphones on, move my chair to corners their accusing gaze can’t reach? I’d burn the wind that buffets them to ashes if I could, but leave this chair half-turned, half-facing noses pressed like snails against the glass? I wish they’d understand that, even though I have the key, the door is not within my power to open. I have to sit here, object of chill gazes I cannot return, because they know, as I do not, I’ve always been a decoy set to draw attention from myself, helplessly observed by those who live in my imagination wanting me to think I live in theirs.

Call of Nature

TWO BATHERS Two bathers turn their backs towards the lake, slip out of their shoes and summer dresses, webs of silk and lace unclipped, knickers flicked from bum to toe – naked now, but still they’re not quite ready. Thighs to be unscrewed and scalps unstitched, tendons to be severed, buttocks levered off, stomach tubes through puckered navels teased like eels and hung from twigs to dry, eyeballs wrapped in polythene, nipples plucked like berries, lips like molluscs left to drip and dribble on white rock, fingers tied with veins from ears in bundles … Finally, the landscape polka-dotted with discarded flesh, four lungs take the plunge and head like Mississippi steamboats for the middle of the lake, wheezing loudly, squirting foam, but sinking nonetheless. Still, there’s something feminine about the meat that’s left behind, about the way it festers with such elegance and grace, and peeping toms are chased away by jackals.

Chris Rice

MASS POLITICS Their heads are shaved, their eyes downcast. In ragged lines they stand. Two heads slide together, like continents plotting an earthquake. Light smoulders on the horizon, rising in cold, red clouds. The moon looks on with the dead eye of a herring. Fur-hatted soldiers return its gaze. A telephone rings. Gates open. A slow-motion shuffle and glide to the bath house, sealed windows. Oblivious to the jeweller and dentist, the uniformed photographer, the nurses in gas masks distributing soap, two heads drift apart, having planned to meet after the bath to play chess and perhaps talk a little politics.

Call of Nature

EL ALAMEIN You’re lucky you can’t see yourselves as we do. Your heroism’s safe; the guns that slaughtered you bask in museums. As if to die while others live to honour you isn’t really being dead at all. This could well be Carthage, even Troy, for all the horror that remains, until I read your epitaphs: Plymouth, Hayling Island, Hammersmith… You and I are far away from home. We know that darkness cannot be detained by high diplomacy. The sand that frills this turquoise sea is littered with your ghosts, lolling, never needing to see home again. And how long will it be till we, as confident as anglers as the line grows taut, are dragged in of a sudden, dazed and bleeding, to your world?

Chris Rice

PRESIDENTIAL PALACE, ALEXANDRIA, 1980 A continent or so between the storming of an embassy in Kensington and you â&#x20AC;Ś It would have outraged you before but now, what price a war? The manner that you choose to live, a fugitive in lands where news is made but never told, forces you to make-believe in silence. Today you stroll to teach past soldiers old enough, perhaps, to remember running backwards chased by Star of David tanks. Now they flourish bayonets at cameras and win. At the gates to Qasr el Safa, men alight from limousines, flash important passes, swagger in. You mime a photo, smiling, for the sentry knows you now. His helmet and the palace roof are danced upon by stars. The concrete of his eyes is dabbed with mirrors. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s strange to feel serene in air already grooved for missiles yet to fly. Who knows what guns Napoleon once fired at where you stop to stare, or swords fell from the fists of men who died for Cleopatra? Between a yawning soldier and the entrance to the school you watch, transfixed, as butterflies scorch white the palace windows, and see in each a bullet gleaming in a distant gun. 17

Call of Nature

MONTAZAH In Montazah, above the palms, not even sparrows flutter without turning blue. If space could bleed Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve always known this would be its colour. In the mesmerising stillness of its radioactive hum, all I am is carried in the suitcase of my shadow. Everything is planted. Nothing moves but flies: fat as berries, orbiting the scalding, balding planet of my skull, as if it were already decomposing.

Chris Rice

BIRTHDAY ON A BALCONY IN GLYM At 31 you pass more time on balconies, criticising trams for being made of tin, bored with tickets, timetables and journeys. It’s harder now to live in cities you’ve not loved in, sleep with girls you’ve not slept with before. At 31 you’re young enough for orgies, even if you do spend more time neatly folding things that leave you bare.

Call of Nature

ALEXANDRIA TRILOGY 1980 Casino lit with strips of foam, white-winged waves, clouds of spray above the sea, a moon exploding… these things we discover, strangers not yet lovers focusing through haloes, decoding messages that finally say: Let us. It’s a short walk home. Shutters open, hot perfume of lust still lingers in the pores of glistening, lamp-lit skin, listless as two broken dolls – deadlier than alcohol this hunt, this kill, this offering, this bruising jolt, this cry for more, these lonelinesses quietly resumed.

Chris Rice

* Hold your breath. The night we loved in travels west, uncovers dunes of shadow curled between us, proving thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a frontier to the landscape of our bed. Sighing has become a song, a duet best composed alone, the magic note that saxophones plunging can release, the long low bellow of the mosque, shape emerging, haloed in the rising dust of dawn, and modern lovers pharaoh-robed with light.

Call of Nature

* All lives contain this minute. Some must think it torture, praying it will pass; others cling white-knuckled to its rim. I have spent it wisely. In the dark Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been quietly watching other peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s evenings growing dim. Possibly, this minute, fighters from Iraq bomb the city housing one I loved. On nights like this she used to come, spend moments with me, whisper everything she spent her other moments thinking of. But tonight the silence is deliberate; it neither rushes by nor hesitates. This minute has no message. It just lasts.

Chris Rice

LUNAR ARTISTRY She’s painting moons in silver on black paper. One by one the moons appear, only to be swallowed up by brushstrokes of black paint. Painting moons, erasing moons and painting moons again, until at dawn there’s nothing but blank paper. One night, when there is no moon, she says she’ll paint me too, erasing me and painting me until at dawn the paper will be blank but far from empty: all the evidence I need that I have crossed her sky.

Call of Nature

NOMAD I bask in orange sunlight on a bridge of white enamel, watch the northbound passages of ships that seem to glide across the land. Everything is still – a little eerie. Shadows sprout like black and violet flowers in the sand. Two men in the distance leave a rusty iron construction, head my way, their shadows long black bony fingers aimed at me. A small lake choked with reeds behind me rids itself of fishing boats. A boy strains to retrieve a sinking oar. A man sits cross-legged in the bow, coiling twine around a broken net. I’m shrinking fast. I span horizons on all sides. I’m in the middle of a vast arena yet feel somehow at its rim, peering over railings at a sandpit in whose centre I’m a dot. The land belongs to scorpions and those who walk barefoot among them. Nothing here belongs to me, which is why I call it home, finding beauty in the spray that others going somewhere leave behind.

Chris Rice

BREAK OF SERVICE A tennis court among pine trees, a handkerchief of lawn in the Sahara, I watch the looping to and fro of lime-green balls above a net. A servant with black eyelids bows and takes my empty glass. Mediha, eyes the shape of almonds, colour of dark oak, focuses unblinking not on tennis but the space it occupies, the fumes of making love still strong upon her puzzled breath: ‘If it’s true there is no God and we’re just pods of flesh containing embryonic fossil, how can scoring points be so essential?’ Ah, Mediha, truly said – but watch. It’s break of service. I love the scent of pine sap on this roasting desert breeze, the way two athletes scurry in pursuit of bouncing spheres, the elegance of muscle and complexions of hot dusk …

Call of Nature

but if I am to sleep with her again, I have to share her scorn, her wonder at the cockroachesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; reluctance to devour. A distant thunder filters through the heat into applause. El Shafei wins and we, fair game for heaven knows what waiting archaeologist, tread the thin oasis soil towards a fan-cooled room. The scavengers of lust resume their prowling.

Chris Rice

THE DOOR 1) the mistrust with which the border guards treated the door I was carrying, which was surprising since I was taking it out, not bringing it in; to which I must add I was impressed with their muscular efficiency 2) the ease with which the other guards let the door through, despite much forking and see-sawing of eyebrows over laundry tickets they mistook for documents 3) the Swedish girl called Elena who accompanied me across the border to the town’s only hotel, emptied a bag of seashells onto my lap and asked me if I’d take her to the city 4) the misunderstanding when asked by the sandwich seller in an oatmeal robe if I was ‘ebrevi’, which I mistook for ‘afraid’; to which I replied ‘afraid of what? The war is over, surely?’ 5) the correction and humiliation when Elena, who knew the language, told me he was asking if I was Hebrew, not afraid; to which I answered no on both accounts 6) the ground to which I paid so much attention, its being full of craters, spilt cement and donkey shit which, inexplicably, smelt like plasticine 7) the goatherd and the woman like a fat banana wrapped in black, a sack of something on her head that I mistook for plasticine; to which I must add that Elena thought otherwise and protested at my classification of women according to shape 8) the labels that the goats had stapled to their ears, a relic of the recent occupation of this country by the muscular, efficient one that we’d just left 9) the beds of the small hotel all filled and Elena’s bed gone missing; at which she asked me frankly if she could sleep in mine 27

Call of Nature

10) the bargain that I struck with her: that she could, providing that she helped me lift the door from the back of the Land Rover and carry it up the stairs to my room; to which I must add that, if this seems ungallant, it was only because of my back 11) the instinct other people had for hiding microphones in walls and shouting into them all night, making sleep impossible; to which I must add this did not upset me because Elena and I spent all night making love 12) the early hours of the morning on the balcony discussing, in adolescent terms of what and why, this unforeseen eruption of desire, only to be deafened by an explosion of prayers; to which I must add no one had warned me that, on the wall beneath our balcony, there was a loudspeaker connected to the mosque 13) the irony of the fact that it was on my door (the hotel one, not the one we’d carried up) that a policeman knocked and raised his voice above the disharmonious howling of the mosque to complain about the noise coming from our room 14) the suspicion with which he looked at the door leaning against the wall and asked me what it was doing, seeing as it led nowhere 15) the indignation I felt when he advised us both to leave since he assumed we were ‘ebrevi’ and the weight of the door against the wall was a threat to the infrastructure of the hotel; to which I must add that he said this with the utmost courtesy and didn’t even ask to see our passports 16) the short time it took for us to take the door downstairs, and the beauty of the sunrise over palm-fringed beach and turquoise sea, despite the mist of brick dust that still remained from recent occupation by foreign armies and their muscular but inefficient attempt to cover the desert with concrete 28

Chris Rice

17) the concrete schools, the barbed wire, the piles of rubble, the clouds of cement dust, the smell of plasticine giving way to the stillness of sand, silica white striped with lemon yellow; to which I must add that these might well have been the colours of my concussion 18) the rattling of the seashells on Elena’s lap as she was sleeping, and of the door in the back against the sides of the car; to which I must add that I too felt like sleeping, for this was quieter than the hotel 19) the unbelievable grace of the Bedouin women who glided straight-backed, barefooted, across the sand, in robes of black trimmed and sashed in fluorescent shades of raspberry and lilac, gold and tangerine 20) the realisation that back home in England these colours would be considered brash and vulgar; to which I must add so would the colour of finches 21) the surprise at Elena’s reproach: she could not believe I should indulge in such romantic nonsense, judging women graceful by the colour of their hems and not by how they have to eke frail livings out of sand; to which I replied that so do Bedouin men 22) the dome of dust that signalled the approach of the city, the feebleness of the short twilight that wasn’t strong enough to mask its mustard-yellow glow 23) the inevitable question when we arrived in the city: why was I carrying a door across the desert? To which I replied that my mission in life was to re-enact great songs by Leonard Cohen and that this one was Famous Blue Raincoat; to which I must add that this was not entirely true 25) the goodbye kiss and exchange of addresses outside the Swedish Embassy, where a herd of camels awaiting slaughter chewed air philosophically 29

Call of Nature

26) the bandits of oblivion that ambushed me as, beneath a searing, cellophane sky, I headed south at breakneck speed on roads of potholed concrete; to which I must add that I sometimes seemed not to be moving at all 27) the suddenness with which I understood the simplicity of desire: plans reduced to hissing steam and everything is either flat or holed 28) the thrill of finally reaching home, of fixing my door in place, opening it, stepping through and shutting it behind me 29) the stunned discovery that the door fitted perfectly; to which I must add that my thoughts turned at once to the next stage of my venture: building the rest of my house

Chris Rice

GARDEN 1983 The garden seat needs Cuprinol, the kitchen door replacing, my writing desk must make way for a cot. I study potted stems for greenfly, trowel dry earth, the buff of unpaid gas-bill envelopes, but if my hands are pricked and bloody from the thorns of roses, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the rose I gratefully consider. Momentarily I pause, stop talking superstructures. In my arms your body roars. The rest recedes to murmur. A cat, its old womb full of rocks. Dead marigold of evening. How I love the jealousy of things past giving birth.

Call of Nature

BEING HUMAN The madness of the woman who feeds chaffinches with cake. She knows me not from Adam but my simple atmosphere I think confuses her and fills her mouth with sagas of her life. Did I know, for instance, that Phylis phoned from Leeds, that Felix sent a postcard from Madrid, that Gavin failed his A-Levels but found a job, apprentice to a cousin who makes coffins and toboggans, that Uncle Ben, incontinent, stuffed a bean inside his you-know-what to stop it leaking and spent a week in hospital because it sprouted roots, that Betty cannot kiss because her lips are paralysed? I did not know. How could I know? But beeswax tumbles from my ears, gravity uncoils the rope that binds me to myself and, remembering that I too live alone, I tell her of the Bobs and Neils and Leonards in my life until thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nothing of our lives to tell, just what they have to show: the emptiness of masonry, the stillness of a moat, the timelessness of humans crushed by hungers being human cannot fill.

Chris Rice

CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY At dawn in silk pyjamas, mole-skin slippers, he will wind up clocks, dozens of cream zeros set in oblong walnut cases, seconds thumped like golfballs at the wall, or else in small French porcelain on Adam mantelpieces, filling rooms like powder with their ticking. He will turn his back towards the windows, watch them in the mirror as they slowly fill like wine with morning light. Marvellous to think that, with the universe to aim at, light should choose to fall on him, robbed of, as are hours and years their power to dispossess, its power to blind. Hard to put his finger, hot with money, on precisely what went wrong. His children drive fast cars but have no children, the guard dogâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dying (cancer of the throat), the Austrian au pair has done a bunk with all the silver, swastikas of disinfectant stain the spiral stairs. Still, he waits as some might drink in bars at times of imminent invasion (orchestras of timepieces commemorating every hour in his impressive life), waiting for the hour no clock can measure, for the termite and the cockroach to awake, at last alerted to their task.

Call of Nature

MY WORST MISTAKE My worst mistake, I think, was what I said about the wind – how cockroaches and vinegar cared nothing for its rage – that we had much to learn from things that bombs could not destroy. But then again, I may be wrong – it might have been the tales I told about my father, how when he prayed I pictured Jesus moving to the blank side of his cross. Or was it just the careless way I gathered coins from wishing wells, stamped on moons in puddles, or vomited while singing ‘Silent Night’ on our first date? Or told you of my hatred for my mother (who cradled me in gloves when I was born) or boasted I could darken suns with shadows made of ink? On balance, though, I like to think it was the wind that did for me. I should have let it pass and then – who knows? – perhaps the other things would not have been mistakes.

Chris Rice

GARDEN 1993 She leaves the parched aquarium of rooms cut into orange brick where adults loll and curtains move to breezes she can’t feel. Her small face hovers like a moon among my head-high roses, hair soaked black with shadow filling me with envy of her comb. She hums with bees and wants to hold their black and yellow furriness; she sways with stems and wants to be an ant so she can climb their thorns; disregarding everything I’ve taught her about gardens, mesmerized by music that is long dead in my ear, she prowls beneath a low, hot field of sky. Suddenly she sees me watching from my secret window, scaring her, reminding her this garden is not hers. Solitude erupts into a joyless, muddled frenzy – a savage dance, a stammering howl, a clawing at my big white roses with her small pink nails. Butterflies and bees and petals tumble and are trampled into white blood at her feet. Then, the massacre complete, she dances lightly as a sigh on lawns of thorns and bee-stings, and I must think of other things to grow for her bouquets.

Call of Nature

HANGOVER Too much light this morning but nothing to illuminate. Microbes armed with razors are canoeing through my veins. I tug the mad kite of my gaze towards the morning news: a Moslem schizophrenic kills his doctor with an axe, thinking he’s beheading Salman Rushdie; a wife donates an eyeball to her husband blind from birth who straightaway divorces her on seeing, for the first time, she is ugly. TV is no better. An orange man (a rock star or prime minister or something) is signing books at Waterstone’s and smiling (teeth like castle walls) that he has nothing to regret, least of all Iraq (‘It’s not as if we went in wearing swastikas’). I pull the plug and burn the paper, pain like goldfish circling the bone bowl of my skull, and in the light of burgundy that hoods my small pale garden, paint a grape and make it like a planet, solitary, somewhere out in space, no vine, no soil, no politics, no tariff on its juices, a perfect circle lit up from within. 36

Chris Rice

IDENTITY ‘Who are you?’ A stupid thing to say alone in bed, woken by a scuffling of solids in dark corners. Not quite a bump. More the sweeping up of violets with a broken toothbrush. ‘Who are you?’ I find myself hissing, the wild hairs on my lower arms bristling like oars. The clock delivers its array of gentle medium-pace tick-tocks. No problem. I can out-tick any clock I have to, any time. But this – the sweeping stops, becomes ball-bearings rolling … ‘Who are you?’ Three syllables. They do no justice to the panic they house. Still, I persevere however frail and useless are the tools of inquisition I possess. ‘Who are you – vertical semicircle, dot’. We lie awake, expecting answers. Every night. Everyone I know.

Call of Nature

FIGHTER PILOT Struggling for oxygen, the man who, on a Spitfire’s wing beneath a Burmese sky, looked into a camera and smiled a smile that cousins later said they saw in me; who on the beach at Hayling Island, taunted by his family about his bookworm son, took the book that I was reading, picked me up and, pipe in mouth, vowing he would not let go, dropped me in the sea; who – exhaling gales of air (though none of it is breath), fingers hooked like brambles to the edges of his sheet – offers, with a tremor in the splinters of his hand one final message: thumbs-up from the cockpit of a life he flew but never understood. I leave his bedside, knowing that I won’t be back until there’s just a crumpled parachute of sheets, a corrugated aerodrome still echoing to the stutter of propellers, a lost son at an empty window wondering how it feels to fly or swim.

Chris Rice

WITHOUT WINGS For Anna

She said, ‘It’s nice to stand with Daddy at the window in the dark,’ elbows resting on the sill, chin cupped in the pink star of her hand. I kissed her hair. She kissed her bedroom window. I wanted then to write about the mist her lips left on the glass but somehow, as I tucked her in and read her tales of Fillyjonks and Moomins, it slipped my mind completely until now. She’s travelling, but not on any journey I have sent her – sailing on real oceans, under threat, besieged by pirates, hurricanes and sharks, beyond the reach of not just Skype and email but a father’s kiss. I’m standing by a window empty-handed in the dark, thinking of a memory as fragile as a linnet, knowing that the more I try to coax it into singing, the more it ends up filling me with absence of its song.

Call of Nature

SURVIVING THE RECESSION A sandwich has just fallen from an oak tree – cheese and pickle, oatmeal with a perforated crust. Jake lifts it from the bracken, mutters, ‘Strange’. We lost our jobs a year ago at Hounslow social services. Neither of us mind too much. We’re not exactly what you call ambitious – I’ve been known to miss important trains because of waxwings – but the same injustices upset us (payouts for the thieving rich while poets slit their wrists because their benefits are cut – that sort of thing …) and see important messages in everything that doesn’t make much sense. ‘Call this thing an acorn?’ sniffing pickle, Jake complains. Drained by so much strangeness, we walk on, but on a whim I turn back to confirm it was a sandwich and it really was a tree. Affirmative, affirmative. But what now of that sound among the leaves like someone rattling a railing with a stick? ‘What’s the matter?’ Jake calls back. ‘Later,’ I reply. Not that I like secrecy, but we have duties to attend to: families we cannot feed, loans to be negotiated, bills we cannot pay … but oh, what stories we can tell of sandwiches that fall from trees, of jackdaws sipping Starbucks coffee, beaks on laptops tapping out CVs.

Chris Rice

PROCESS AND OUTCOME ‘Longer hours and smaller pensions if you want to keep your jobs. Targets will be smart or will be no target at all. Micromanagement’s the key. What cannot be measured can’t exist. Rulers measure nothing in this college but themselves…’ On my phone, beneath the desk, a photo of my dog in profile, ginger-eared and laughing. Staring out at nothing, she sees it everywhere. The more she laughs, the more I see it too. ‘Make sure that at all times there’s a name tag clipped to your lapel – without one you’re invisible. Note it is our policy to celebrate all difference. Mandatory retraining if you don’t …’ Munching biscuits, sipping bottled water, I close my eyes and listen to the scribbling of rain on misted windows, a woodpecker across the carpark laughing in the trees. ‘Before you start the engine, you must provide a detailed plan of where which foot is pressed upon which pedal. You will not be penalised for driving off a bridge, just so long as you can prove procedure’s been observed…’ A laugh erupts. The room goes quiet. The Dalek at the whiteboard swivels, pauses, looks at me. ‘Sorry, nature calls,’ I say. I leave my nametag on the desk. This makes me invisible.

Call of Nature

‘If we are to qualify for increased public funding, half of every lesson should be spent on Health & Safety. Fewer classrooms, more computers. By the way, in June we shall be numbering the stairs…’ By the time I reach the trees the woodpecker has gone, but somewhere, in the treetops doodled silvery with rain, echoes of its fairground chuckle linger.

Chris Rice

REDSTART They say that in the ’fifties in a village near King’s Lynn, a man was injured catching eels and every day, until he died, sat by a cobwebbed window in a wheelchair watching birds. By his death he’d spotted every species known to British ornithology – every species but the capercaillie and the smew. Unlike him, I’d never seen a redstart. I went, this spring, to Derwentwater (guidebooks say they nest ‘in hundreds’ on its western shore), spent a week there dressed up as a tree. Nuthatches inspected me, blue and yellow feathered mice thinking I was made of ants, running up and down the tree that, master of disguise, I had become. Tits and goldcrests tangoed in my branches, ravens yawned while blackcaps warbled excerpts from Puccini, moorhens plodded, curlews piped and kestrels swooped and hovered, but redstarts ‘in their hundreds’? One week later, suitcase packed, plotting dark revenge on books that lie, I wandered to the window for a last look at the hills and, framed there in a tiny square of latticed glass, as if hand-painted, on a tilting gatepost, a flickering of flame and charcoal somehow filled with bird: a redstart singing solo just for me. Since that day I too have spent my life by cobwebbed windows – no camouflage or guidebooks needed now. All I need to think of is that eel catcher from Norfolk, the wisest man who ever lived, who understood that everything of value one day settles by a window on a piece of wood and sings.

Call of Nature

WAXWING You look filled with fruit, flushed and swollen like an uncle after Christmas dinner, musketballs of orange berries rolling down your throat, and yet you are a dandy little fellow with your pantovillain make-up, your feathers splashed with sauce and pudding dipped in cold champagne. People, slanting, mackintoshed and hooded, hurry by. One or two perhaps toss muttered glances, I don’t know. I’m being mesmerized by miracles unfolding overhead. Waxwings – six or seven of them – swoop head-high between the buses on the London Road, bugling for stragglers like you. One last chandelier of fruit, you spring as from a catapult, rise, as if controlled by wires, between vanilla towers of brick and, wings a-blur and wobbling, as if about to jettison the fat pink luggage of yourself, fly until you’re nothing but a dimple in the London sky that ripples with the muffled thump of pulses driving you like moths not to a lantern but a sea that lies in ambush, waiting for its feast of fruit to drop exhausted to the iced saliva of its lips, stripping sky of you as you once stripped our trees of berries.

Chris Rice

SKYLARK Nothing could be simpler or more beautiful, smoothing rock to pebble with your dancing pulse of song, a tufted ounce of valve and membrane rising until nothing but a comma in the bible of the sky, not a word of which makes sense without you. All the more exquisite for your being no celebrity: unlike us, who don’t know what to do with beauty not locked into dungeons of design. Every skylark wins first prize – a lesson in the pointlessness of needing to be special, how ordinary perfect can become. An avalanche of beads and pearls and liquid bouncing, splashing: a sound that words like ‘song’ and ‘music’ (words I’ve used already and immediately regret) don’t come near to taming, every note a tidal wave of Shakespeare sonnets, Latin bells, surrealist manifestos filtered through a syrinx which, in Pavarotti, would reduce the Albert Hall to rubble. A pouch of feathers, nib of beak that fills the sky that drains my eyes of everything but blue, postponing, for a while at least, that speck of grit above the cairn about to be a falcon, the cloth of sooty nothingness about to cover me.

Call of Nature

KINGFISHER

you don’t fool me, you orange-breasted buddha with your harpoon kiss, pirate monk in meditation on your willow twig, bobbing like a boat upon a sea of winter air, watching snowflakes melting in the stream. I too can be tranquil if it means I come to know tranquillity’s reward. A downward shimmer, dart and splash of feathers Caribbean blue, and one more silver minnow leaves the world, sucked along your harpoon tunnel down to minnow paradise, down to where old comrades must be waiting … tranquil on your willow twig, orangebreasted buddha, meditating quietly with your Rolls Royce killer brain, thinking minnow, dreaming Moby Dick.

Chris Rice

CORMORANT a shadow with a mineral glow sits atop a wooden pillar in the Thames, facing upstream with a tilt of pterodactyl head, eyeing up a silver fish of dying winter sky. A snake of neck slides upwards from the basket of his shoulders, the black doors of his wings swing open wide. There he stands, a crucifix of feathers, a signal for the sermon to begin: ‘I have travelled oceans to be with you. Prophets have announced my second coming, I assume. Follow me and I will make you fishers not of men but fish. No Judas will approach my cheek, no silver coins betray me – I am the light, I am the way, I am the Son of Dodo.’ Golden eels of lamplight ripple mutely at his feet, elsewhere darkness piles like dust around him. Nothing – no reaction, just the hum of traffic on the bridge, the scornful booing of an owl, the whisper of a gull’s wing here and there. He shrugs and preens the hinges of his outstretched wings, as if to say there is no rush – messiahs have eternities to play with – then kicks away his pulpit and spills like liquid into the invisible. Silence sits behind him like a stone.

Call of Nature

WADERS Molly stands erect and stubborn, guarding me from North Sea winds that whip up sand but cannot shake the stillness from her tail. The sun goes down. The wind creaks like the hinges on a dungeon door. Gulls collide with darkness, sprinkle it with fingernail-on-blackboard squeals of protest then fall quiet. Molly runs in circles, barks, then tilts her head as, in the wind, she hears a curlew flying, piping its lament (if desolation has a song, the curlewâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s voice can sing it). I call to her. She charges at the sea, scattering the waders who, abandoning embroidery, fill the sky like powder with their fluttering. Let her think she has invented stars.

Chris Rice

LAST FLIGHT TO MUMBAI For Katie

I drop you at the airport with your good degree, economies collapsing, Arctic weather on the way. We hug. A snowflake settles in your hair. You stagger to the terminal, a tortoise in your backpack shell. Old Deer Park. I listen for the sound of something flying, hearing only Molly licking snowflakes big as petals from her nose. Then I hear a muffled sound, a steady roar of engines. I wave at cloud, not knowing if itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s you. After that, just silence. Butterflies and pillow feathers fluttering to ground. One last tambourine of footprints, Mollyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on the lead. I walk her home, deafened by the emptiness and quietness of the sky, thinking of a little girl in red, a red toboggan. Nothing more will fly today. Nothing but the gulls, though some of them, on second thoughts, could easily be crows.

Call of Nature

Chris Rice

Call of Nature

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L A P W I N G PUB L I C A T I O N S

CHRIS RICE

Chris Rice was a founder member of the Pembridge Poetry group in the mid 1970s with Robert Greacen, Matthew Sweeney and Tim Dooley, and his poems appeared in many literary magazines, including London Magazine, Stand and The Honest Ulsterman. In the late 1980s, however, the muse deserted him and was not to return for twenty years. Since starting writing again in 2010, his work has appeared in The London Magazine, Acumen and Smiths Knoll. He was also, in 2011, joint-winner of the Friends of Richmond Park 50th Anniversary Poetry Prize. He has lived and worked in Iran and Egypt, and now lives in London, teaching English and adapting classic and modern fiction for foreign students.

The Lapwing is a bird, in Irish lore - so it has been written indicative of hope. Printed by Kestrel Print Hand-bound at the Winepress, Ireland

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