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Mimi Khalvati poems
and the road is beset with obstacles and thorns.
But let it take its time for I have hours and hours to wait
here, snowbound in Lisbon, glad of this sunlit café
outside Departures, for an evening flight to Heathrow.
Being my soul’s steed, I should like to know its name
and breed – a Marwari of India, Barb of North Africa,
the Akhal-Teke of Western Asia or a Turkoman,
now extinct? Is it the burnt chestnut colour of the ant,
grey as a Bedouin wind, the four winds that made it?
O Drinker of the Wind, I travel by air, sea, land
and wherever I am, there you are behind my back
pounding the cloud streets, trailing banners of cirrus
or as Platero once did, from fear or chill, hoofing a stream,
breaking the moon into a swarm of clear, crystal roses.
No, no matter your thirst, ride swiftly, mare, stallion,
mother, father, for without you I feel forever homesick.
Every day the world is beloved by me, the seagull eager
for its perch. I woke this morning to a darkened room,
my soul stabled at the gate. We grow older, quieter,
hearing degrees of movement, distance, and the dead
would listen if they could to the voices of the living
as bedrock listens to the ocean. I listen to the waves,
trying to make them go one, two, one, two, to hear
what Virginia Woolf heard. But she heard it in memory,
darling memory that delineates. One, two, one, two,
and all the variable intervals in between surrendering
to ‘the very integer’ Alice Oswald rhymed with water,
creating a thumb hole through which to see the world.
Light fluctuates and my soul fluctuates like a jellyfish
underwater. My hand throws animal shadows on paper
and there, outlined, is a single goat, black and white,
standing on top of the mountain, like a tiny church.
Snow was literally swarming round the streetlamp like gnats.
The closer they came, the larger they grew, snow-gnats, snow-bees,
and in my snood, smoking in the snow, I watched them.
Everyone else was behind the door, I could hear their noise
which made the snow, the swarm, more silent. More welcome.
I could have watched for hours and seen nothing more than specks
against the light interrupting light and away from it, flying blind
but carrying light, specks becoming atoms. They flew too fast
to become snow itself, flying in a random panic, looming close
but disappearing, like flakes on the tongue, at the point of recognition.
They died as they landed, riding on their own melting as poems do
and in the morning there was nothing to be seen of them.
Instead, a streak of lemon, lemon honey, rimmed the sky
but the cloud lid never lifted, the weekend promised a blizzard.
I could have watched for hours and seen nothing more than I do now,
an image, metaphor, but not the blind imperative that drove them.
I have landed
as if on the wing
of a small plane.
It is a song I have
landed on that barely
feels my weight.
Sky is thick with wishes.
Regrets fall down
like rain.
Visit me.
I am always in
even when the place
looks empty,
even though the locks
are changed.