(Chopin)
Chopin – again not seeking gain
but growing wings while on the wing –
alone is laying an exit path
from likelihood to truth.
Backyards, their picket fencing breached,
and tow-caulked huts –
two maples – at the third, abrupt,
the neighbourhood of Reitar Street.
All day these maples hear the children,
but when we light the lamps again,
and sew motifs on leaves like napkins,
they crumble in a fiery rain.
Then roaming, rounding, piercing – like
white pyramids, white bayonets,
over the street, in horse-chestnut tents,
music thunders at window height.
Bursting out of windows, Chopin
thunders, while below him, stirred
to straighten up the chestnuts’ candles,
last century regards the stars.
Now how it pounds in his sonata –
swinging a massive pendulum –
with study sessions, clefs, departures,
dreams, and never death in them.
All over again? From underneath
acacias, to be crushed beneath
Parisian carriages? Stagger, race,
like life’s own dangerous diligence?
And chase, peal, clang again, and flog
soft flesh to blood? Again
give birth to sobs, yet never cry –
only not die, not die?
One visit to the next – ride
by mailcoach in the damp of night,
overhearing graveyard tones
in wheels, foliage, bones?
At last –- like a recoiling girl
who by a miracle stops the tide
of pesterers in the dark – you’ll go still,
a grandpiano crucified?
*
So now a hundred years have gone
and in self-defence you brush white flowers,
and fling winged truth like stone
crashing onto common floors.
Again? – And, offering up to petals
the piano’s resonant ceremony,
you fall, with all the nineteenth century,
onto these ancient cobbles.
Translated by Angela Livingstone
Page(s) 114-115
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The