The Weather Wheel

by Mimi Khalvati

Overview

In these new poems, each of them written in couplets and contained within the space of 16 lines, Mimi Khalvati takes the weather, the seasons, and the passage of night and day as the ground on which she draws her emblems of human life and love. An extended elegy for her mother, the book is also a series of meditations on the small details of animals’ lives and on the vulnerable animal within the human being.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847772589
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	11/01/2014
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Mimi Khalvati is the author of six poetry collections, including The Chine, Entries on Light, In White Ink, Mirrorwork, and The Meanest Flower, which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2006 and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Read an Excerpt

The Weather Wheel

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By Mimi Khalvati

Carcanet Press Ltd

Copyright © 2014 Mimi Khalvati
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-486-6

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CHAPTER 1

Earthshine

    House Mouse


    Even the mist was daffodil yellow in the morning sun,
    a slant of April sun that glowed on my banana skin.

    And in the shadow of my arm a mouse lay, white belly up
    like a lemur sunbathing. Begging she was, paws curled,

    miniature paws like nail clippings, hind legs crossed
    in a rather elegant fashion, tail a lollipop stick.

    Pricked on her shadow, her ear and fur stood sharp as grass
    but her real ear was soft, thin, pliable, faint as a sweetpea petal

    and her shut eye a tiny arc like the hilum of a broad bean.
    Yesterday she was plump. Today she's thin. Sit her up, she'll sit.

    You can see how Lennie would have 'broke' his, petting it –
    mine weighs no more than a hairball, nestling in my palm

    as though it were wood pulp, crawlspace, a 'wee-bit housie'
    and she, the pup, the living thing. The baby look's still on her.

    And the depth of her sleep. I tuck her into the finger
    of my banana skin – a ferryboat to carry her over the Styx.


    Madame Berthe's Mouse Lemur


    We should have been lemurs, lowering our metabolism
    to suit, going into torpor in the cool dry winter months

    to save on water and energy. We too should have sailed
    on a raft of matted leaves out of poor Africa, out to Madagascar

    into a forest of mangrove and thorn scrub, feeding off gum,
    honeydew larvae, bedding down in tree holes en famille.

    The very smallest of us, the veriest Tom Thumb, the most
    minute pygmy, tsitsidy, mausmaki, itsy bitsy portmanteau,

    little living furry torch, eyes two headlamp luminaries, front
    a bib of chamois, tip to tail – and mostly tail – barely as long

    as the line I write in, despite illegal logging, slash and burn,
    would survive longer than many folk, especially in captivity.

    Only the barn owl, goshawk, to watch for in the dark – raptors
    with their own big beauty. But Madame Berthe's Mouse Lemur

    is caught in the act – a chameleon clasped in her hands,
    a geisha lowering her fan: the smallest primate on our planet.


    Sun Sparrow


    Sun, like a sparrow in the house, seeks dustgrounds
    small as a handkerchief to play in. Sun sparrow, house sparrow,

    I give you landing strips of dust on wood, runways
    between photo frames, wood grain and wood knot roses,

    nests of cane and cloth for you to steal, netherlands I never clean
    for you to bathe in. Here's a dust bath, look, under the bed,

    large enough for you and all your family. Why, even
    the numbered hairs of my head, fallen, have lined a nest,

    innumerable nests and silver they are, the better for you
    to shine in. Come, sun, roost. And here is my skin. Warm it.

    Sun sparrow, didn't Sappho herself have sparrows,
    fair fleet sparrows, draw Aphrodite's chariot to wing her plea?

    I ask no such thing. But I see you land, on wood, on wall,
    take flight again and you who have your own warmth,

    who need no streetlight, neon sign to roost in – why flee?
    Be sociable, stay awhile on my flaking sill, hop right in.


    Knifefish


    Lit, lit, lit, lit are the estates at dawn:
    honeycomb stairwells, corridors, landing lights,

    flare paths for passengers flying home.
    Three jets like electric fish streak the sky with rose.

    Black ghost, ghost knifefish, how many days
    since you went abroad, lurking in your murky pools,

    locating dawn by sonar, by electric fields alone?
    To image your world in darkness – driftwood

    casting distortion shadows – no matter how weak
    your receptor organ, faint its discharge, barely a volt,

    through tail-bend, waveform, you fire, you feel,
    sensing lightning, earthquake, your own kind

    turning their dimmer switch up and down,
    for this is how you talk. Old Aba Aba, grandpa,

    with your one room lit at a time, feeling for walls,
    navigating as surely as in the brightest, highest dawn!


    Snail


    Close the trapdoor. Let no light in. No,
    not the luminous apricot cloud or whale cloud,

    fat peach cloud or the isthmus of blue,
    the sky lanes in between. Close the chink.

    Sea slug, land snail, one head and one foot,
    draw the one foot in. You are all head now,

    helmet, foetus and dome, oceans under,
    trapdoor sealed. Safe, safe, safe.

    Snail-deep, slug-dark, shu-shu-shush.
    Waves roll in. But here you are landed,

    relic on the sand. The moon has carried you
    on his back but what do you know of love?

    Its arrow, smear of silk. And of hatred?
    Salt, drawing your love juice into its grains,

    giving you age, old age and its snail-slow shrivelling.
    Be lazy, snail, be slow. Savour every inch.


    Sciurus Carolinensis


    Sun rivers on glass, threatens to mount, blaze
    into my eyeline so that, heat-struck, I headlong

    down to hump squirrelled in the shade below, leaves
    moving as I move, as grass moves with the snake.

    I am the grey. Born helpless, blind and deaf.
    My mother lays me across her forepaws, fetches me

    out of a cave, weans me once my teeth appear.
    Sciurus names only my skia, shadow, oura, tail.

    I displace the red. Acorn-bred, carrier of the pox,
    I infect it with lesions, ulcers, scabs, weeping crusts,

    it shivers, shivers, skia, oura, and then it's dead.
    I mean no harm. I'm no image seared on your brain

    only seen side on, tail up, ears tufted like conifer spurs;
    no nutkin on a branch, jug on a wall, graphic loop,

    no ampersand between presentiment and trace.
    Skia, oura, I flicker on the walls of the cave.


    The Conservatory


    If you keep two blinds down and one blind up
    and sit under the one that's up under the skylight

    and the Sunday morning rain, you create –
    at absolutely no expense – the kind of conservatory

    you've always wanted but without the wicker
    and kelims, the view onto the dripping garden

    and the cat, all soaking, hidden under a hedge.
    You are elevated instead. You are a bird in a nest.

    Rick as a small boy sold birds for pocket money.
    He made his own trap out of a wire washing basket,

    a stick, some fishing line, some bread, catching
    sparrows, dunnocks and, if he was lucky, a finch,

    before progressing to proper trap cages with a call bird
    that would sing and attract more birds he'd extricate,

    sell, then start over again. Now he's a mouse-catcher
    with no pension. 'You're not illegible', he said they said.


    The Little Gloster


    With such icy winds, facing the rising sun in the garden
    makes no difference so I take shelter on the terrace,

    comforted by two black sheepskins, one under me,
    one over, kindly provided by the establishment.

    Seagulls, seen from below, their red feet neatly stowed,
    beaks and eyes painted like wooden toys, hang

    immobile long enough to be scrutinised in flight
    before they swerve away. Propped against a fence,

    a reindeer is spotted with fairy lights you expect to see
    vanish like daylight stars and everything that loomed

    last night on a smuggler's night black with storm
    – the distillation tower's disembodied four red eyes –

    retreats into its rightful place. Young waiters, chefs,
    preparing for the fair, are lining up white deckchairs

    close enough to the seafront to feel spray. Sandwiched
    in these sheepskins, I am half man, half sheep, myself.


    Microchiroptera


    Only human noises populate the night. No owl, pheasant,
    wailing fox, only stars that have buried their heads in cloud.

    Listening becomes a momentous task. The eye as always
    fights for supremacy and the ear, fazed as a bat in rain,

    imagining it hears a rush of water, hears 'all things hushed'.
    O chauve-souris, flying mouse, leather mouse, flittermouse,

    jealous naked microbat, winged seed of sycamore,
    umbrella man, acrobat hanging in your own skin parachute,

    flying patagium carpet, O bat-being in fairy wings,
    string purse, anus face, where are your echoes now

    – dry flutter of a mothwing, rustle of a centipede –
    where is your pulsing cry, your lovesong in the dark?

    In the vast homelessness of a country night – dear country,
    left behind – we come back into our moral being, back

    into the animal ground of our being under the absent stars.
    Under their roofs and rafters, we navigate that ground.


    The Landing Stage


    How slippery the path just at the end where the indigo stutters
    of dragonflies rain against glass water! Where everything is flower –

    the air, its scent, cabbage whites, single, paired; pines, cedars,
    carpet dew; where old age flowers in its slow walk to the water;

    where the left brain flowers and the right, the lawnmower
    sprays grass fountains; where sadness settles for the pine cones,

    not knowing if they are really pine cones at this distance;
    where Anne flowers in an orange shawl and our lungs

    are grey wildflowers, minds a mindless garden; where,
    in the event of fire, we are to collect at the bottom of the lawn.

    We are to collect our belongings, blankets, iPads, medicines.
    We are to collect sunlight silvering on our shoulders.

    Our shoulders are thin. We collect our thinness, our boniness,
    in a huddle of silver water down by the river. Be careful!

    they warn me, those who are, going down to the landing stage
    raised high enough to dangle younger legs over the water.


    Earthshine


    Under the giant planes beside the gate where we said goodbye,
    the one bare trunk where squirrels flatten themselves on bark

    side by side with a voluminous plane whose ivy outraces branch,
    under the two great planes where we stood vaguely looking round

    since it was a clear night, the street empty and we, small gaggle,
    newly intimate but standing a yard apart, keeping our voices low

    though they carried bright as bells as we counted the evening out,
    gestured towards the cars, deciding who would go with whom

    and gradually splitting off, under the planes with the squirrel dreys
    hidden in all that ivy, but hanging low directly above the station,

    there, where we looked pointing, like an Oriental illustration
    of Arabian Nights, lay the old moon in the new moon's arms:

    earthshine on the moon's night side, on the moon's dark limb,
    earthlight, our light, our gift to the moon reflected back to us.

    And the duty we owe our elders as the Romans owed their gods
    – duties they called pietàs, we call pity – shone in the moon's pietà.


    Prunus Avium


    We buried my mother's ashes in the holes, the four
    we dug to plant four cherry trees for her, Prunus avium:

    wild cherry, sweet cherry, bird cherry, gean or mazzard,
    each name carrying something of Prunus avium on the wind,

    the wind that blew drifts of ash like bonemeal across clay.
    In three years they'll be grown; in twenty, diamond woodland.

    But we'll recognise our trees, set back where the path ends.
    Surrounding them will be native oak, beech, alder, hazel.

    One cherry tree from each of us: Tara, Bea, Kai and myself.
    And on Tom's behalf, we invoked the name of Yax Tum Bak,

    Mayan God of Planting, there in a desolate, bitterly windy field
    in Buckinghamshire. Clay stuck to our boots in grassy clumps

    and as Tara heaved her spade, worms, lustrous as white mulberries,
    fled, upturned. Later, in the Garden Centre – 'Oh, how beautiful!'

    my mother would have gasped on entering – I bought Tara
    a peach tree for Valentine's Day, Prunus persica, from Persia.

CHAPTER 2

Under the Vine

    Under the Vine


    Yes, I should be living under the vine,
    dapple at my feet and the bare dry dust

    singing of drought, of heat. Look at the pile
    of rubble round the roots, curled dried leaves,

    mound of ant homes I can't see. Look at
    the flower fallen in the dirt, flake yellow,

    listen to the wasps, the bees. And the vine
    above me, the vine that smells of nothing,

    yields nothing but the music of its name,
    the memory of some long-forgotten terrace.

    Yes, under a flock of swallows that repeat
    – because we have to believe it – the end,

    the end, nearly the end of a summer
    so long it knows neither month nor week.

    Yes, I should keep my happiness hidden,
    under the vine, from those who envy it.


    Starlight


    Only the brightest stars were out with a half moon
    centred in the sky: a ceiling to learn the names of stars by.

    And in the gaps between the stars, milkcarts went to market,
    pony traps crossed viaducts, oxen drove sad water-wheels,

    history trundled by as birds awoke and the distant sound
    of a plane winked lights. Her owl flew back to Minerva

    as she flashed her shield while, on Apadana's stairways,
    processions of bearded guards, Persians, Medes, marched past.

    Cedar palaces were torched; frigates, night-fishing boats set out.
    Passengers flew like vesper bats straight across the moon,

    roofscapes listened for child lovers leaning over balconies,
    geraniums grew in the dark. I had never been so happy

    and historical. Happy enough to see, holding them up,
    stars on the tip of each finger, countable, spread far apart,

    one by one go out as day rose to pluck the first strains
    of a Spanish guitar. Then the silver moon went white.


    Angels


    Updraughts lift sounds of language imperceptibly, even
    the silent language of Lula as she hobbles up the steps.

    Dogs Lula doesn't know bark along the terraces, cockerels,
    though it isn't dawn, crow anyway. It could be any village

    anywhere in the world, everything in decay. But things
    retain their scent – the rubbed tomato leaf – and sound

    – the bamboo river – and as if heard behind closed doors,
    the angels: angel of September, of the fallen fig and dapple;

    angel of perspective that staggers the terraces upward,
    white steps downward; angels of the sister mountains –

    the first, the second, the third. And the angels, cowled,
    circle us like lepers on the hills, they unveil themselves.

    And I love my angels not as they were in childhood,
    angel of the crab-apple and chine, of calico and sandal,

    but as they are: leprous and discharged, violent and betrayed.
Angel of the soft wind that blows across my breasts.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Weather Wheel by Mimi Khalvati. Copyright © 2014 Mimi Khalvati. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Acknowledgements,
I Earthshine,
House Mouse,
Madame Berthe's Mouse Lemur,
Sun Sparrow,
Knifefish,
Snail,
Sciurus Carolinensis,
The Conservatory,
The Little Gloster,
Microchiroptera,
The Landing Stage,
Earthshine,
Prunus Avium,
II Under the Vine,
Under the Vine,
Starlight,
Angels,
Orchard,
What it Was,
Marrakesh I,
Marrakesh II,
Marrakesh III,
Marrakesh IV,
Marrakesh V,
Marrakesh VI,
Le Café Marocain,
III The Soul Travels on Horseback,
New Year's Eve,
The Pear Tree,
Rain Stories,
Aunt Moon,
Statham Grove Surgery,
The Wardrobe,
Fog,
Snow is,
The Blanket,
The Swarm,
Model for a Timeless Garden,
The Soul Travels on Horseback,
IV Tears,
The Overmind,
Reading the Saturday Guardian,
Midsummer Solstice,
Picking Raspberries with Mowgli,
Sniff,
Drawing Bea,
Nocturne,
The Waves,
Similes,
Cherries and Grapes,
Kusa-Hibari,
Tears,
V Her Anniversary,
The Goat,
On the Occasion of his 150th Anniversary,
In Search of the Animals,
Martina's Radiance,
Mehregan,
Sun in the Window,
Bringing Down the Stars,
The Cloud Sarcophagus,
The Doe,
Abney Park Cemetery,
Migration,
Her Anniversary,
VI The Avenue,
Granadilla de Abona I,
Granadilla de Abona II,
Granadilla de Abona III,
Granadilla de Abona IV,
Granadilla de Abona V,
Granadilla de Abona VI,
Granadilla de Abona VII,
Plaza de los Remedios,
The Wheelhouse,
Finca El Tejado,
The Avenue,
Ghazal: In Silence,
Notes,
About the Author,
Also by Mimi Khalvati from Carcanet Press,
Copyright,