Photograph of You Walking on a Frozen Lake

I worry about you walking on ice.
Cities lie in the depths.
Every so often a house will rise to the surface.
The crimes it holds will seep across the lake.

Let’s not dwell on it, you say.
The traveller is surrounded by his moustache.
He stands in snow like a cloud.
His ears twitch silver.
His nostrils steam.
Visitors dig deep into their bags
and pull out their smiles. And
who’s to tell where shame is kept?

There are times when hiding is necessary,
especially in language.
Again and again I lose my way.
You can’t know but again and again
you bring me back with kindness.
You wave as you walk across
the icy blind-field of memory.

Remember the triplets who looked like Stalin
walking in unison between the station and the college?
They carried identical briefcases,
wore identical raincoats buttoned high.
They took lunch at exactly the same time,
sat on separate benches in the park,
ate some of their sandwiches, fed some to birds.
It was only later we learned people who worked nearby
did call them The Stalin Triplets.
They shared a mysterious office
in a small building behind the college.
They spoke to no one except each other
and only when separated from anyone who might listen.
Nobody knew the sound of their voices,
nor the language they spoke.

We cannot know where the edge is
or what is underneath.
I squander time considering that and this –
how it is said that Van Gogh,
when he doubted himself,
to avoid wasting paint
he could barely afford, stuck strands
of different coloured wool to a canvas.
Of course, we are told many things.

And if we want peace and independence
money must arrive from somewhere.
I ask them
What you do want me to write? OK,
Stunning Alpine peaks rise above crystalline blue waters.
There you are then.

And the literary types gather to pat backs
and, over terrine of wild parrot
followed by medallions of roast unicorn
on a blanket of fried termites, quote Marvell:
See how the arched earth does here
Rise in a perfect hemisphere.

Once I met a war criminal in a house with high walls.
A hermitage where people forgot who they were.
There were maps of lands that changed shape.
Later I stood on the balcony of my hotel room
high over the city of strangers. Rain began.
Inside, I sat in the chair and watched it fall.

And way back it was a Saturday and you lay on the floor,
turning over the pages of a road map,
a route plotted in pencil.
You and your boyfriend were planning a bike ride.
I think it’s about two-hundred-and-fifty miles, you said.
You went out and bought
sit-up-and-beg bikes with baskets on the front
for sandwiches and flasks,
and proper old-fashioned bells
and a sensible number of gears.
You put on bicycle clips,
did up your duffle coats against the wind,
took to the road one sunny morning
and never came back.

Some guard stones,
tighten their grip on the past.
We can care for people we don’t see, you know.
The clattering out there,
on the main road out of town.
It’s not a road sweeper, it’s a tank.

I remember you reading Kafka, twisting
a strand of your hair around your middle finger.
I remember you lying against my shoulder as we watched TV.

We threw the ball between us on the beach.
The echoes of our laughter brought avalanches crashing into the water.

Success is not good for us.
I don’t need the approval of company.
Do not remember me.
Everywhere I went, I sat and I watched.
A woman said I had dead eyes and walked away.
I was pleased. Sometimes you need luck.

This volatile earth. We know the stories of mountains, how
some forced themselves out of the earth as molten rock,
some settled in water and were washed together and hardened by tides.
Other pressures, other heat, as the earth spun and twisted, pushed the surface
into new shapes and gradually dried into a red desert.
And coalfields came from the mud of swamps
where trees grew, died and rotted down.
And then ice.
And out of it, somehow, all of us
with our ideas and madnesses and memories.

Burn the bits of old cedar. Let’s keep warm.
What makes us try to think back?
I hear an echo in the sky that might be you saying
We were stopped at the border because our papers were not in order.

Of course they weren’t. They never would have been.
You were too kind to understand.

I have this place now. It is enough.

Wind drums the window
brings rain from the dark mountain.
You cannot come back.

Wars move around, move on, hide.
And then the vague, inarticulate rage rises again.
Whatever we will become moves on and hides for a while
behind a clutter of smiles.

And I look at you again.
A woman walking on ice trapped in a photograph.
Pinned, unable to emerge as yourself.
You are what is captured, what I interpret.
You cannot help me find a truth, cannot move.
Even a shift of an eye or a hand might help.
I don’t ask for a word.
But there is nothing more than the photograph can show,
however much I claim to remember.

What is it they want to bury beneath stones?
I was ill for a long time, says an old man I’ve not seen before,
not even in a mirror.
Come outside, let’s watch the sky.
In a town, five thousand were slaughtered.
They burned it to cinders.
We can still feel the heat a hundred years on.
Even through the frost we know it’s there.

A wanderer found a shelter closed.
Nobody to staff it.
He curled on the floor of a public toilet.
He froze to death.
I don’t know his name.
He was a human being.

Out there in the places we can never see again –
in the truck-stop at the edge of the snow
the old man has been sitting at the counter a thousand years.
He eats his plate of chicken slowly,
watches everyone who comes in.

It was a less complicated time, a friendlier time.
You read Siddhartha curled up in the old armchair.

Now in the town they’re holding a collection for refugees.

Shame crouches in the low stones of the church.

Your boyfriend was very probably shot.
Did they kill you too?
Or did you hide in a room and one terrible night, hang yourself?

Did I hear you singing? I thought I did.
Rainbows multiply across the evening sky.
Please let me sleep through the night.

Raindrops on the shoulders of your thick red coat.

The barn window at dusk unleashes an owl.

This is the place where mists rest,
where deer stroll unseen.

Suddenly an axe echoes.
I’ve lived here all my life.
No you haven’t! Do you really not remember?

I find a sheep with its head stuck in a wire fence.
It’s twisting around, slowly garotting itself.
I grab hold of it, keep it still with my legs,
prise the wires away from its neck.

Ask for nothing and nothing will be refused you.
I learned early there are shadows that will hide us.
The war criminal is respected for his decency.
He owns a small business, innocuous but lucrative.
A wholesale paper merchant, I heard.

When, in the night, you feel us spinning around the sun,
grip the soft ground with your toes, steady yourself against trees.

Sunlight on the wisps and strands of a silver birch after rain.
A man, thinner than he used to be, walks past with a briefcase.
His rain-coat is grubby.
What happened to his brothers?
They used to be called The Stalin Triplets.
They worked in a small office behind the college.
Didn’t they?

The north wind sweeps rain through the woods.
The high bare branches of ash and maple,
oak and apple, sway and clatter.
I cut away brambles, find two tractor tyres,
a harrow chain, cords of rotting poplar.
I light a bonfire. The smoke drifts south
as the first snow falls.

I can’t tell you not to walk on the frozen lake.
You won’t hear me.
Please be careful.

All that’s beneath.

I explore language but go nowhere.
They wanted rhymes after all?
Would understood forgot spot unicorn thunderstorm
divide side coats votes fate state disintegrate…
No, I can’t. You can do that yourself!

The tarantula nebula, it’s up there somewhere

Words wander about
on any freezing night

I worry about you

Of course I do

I know what’s beneath

Please don’t

Not because of you, I
Because of you, I
Not because of you, I
Because of you, I

Not because of you,
I

Not because
of you, I