Vizzavona
That morning the husband is chasing chestnuts,
off on some N road or other, gazing intently at dusty,
pavement soils, a carrier-bag in hand.
In the new childlessness of their retirement
this is a lonely time for her, a weekly
concerto of silence broken only by rills.
She rises late and wears a summer dress –
it’s cream with lashes of dark green leaves
to camouflage the rustic hemlines.
Cycling the morning to Vizzavona, she happens
on the travelling butcher’s camionette.
They recognise each other from the time
the couple met him at the hot resort,
stalking the promenade, hawking his hams,
salamis, saucisson, haunches of inland boar.
She didn’t know the butcher hails from here,
she tells him by way of affability, noting
his veiny, sun-toughened arms cleaning his knife,
his bright, fleshy face, the smile of service
and self-confidence in his skill at his arts.
He lives where she does, he replies with a wink;
home is anywhere for a travelling man.
He shows her the spread of his meat trays,
the cuts laid out on fresh forest ferns.
She focuses on the two dead rabbits,
scrawny, destinies all but completed –
no more prolific childbearing for them.
It’s hot that morning, and there's no husband,
just a strong butcher, who hands out steaks for free,
and she promises to come shopping again.
Hear this poemBocca Palmente
Early lunch – chocolate bars on a draughty rock;
scoops of cloudless water from the peristalsis of a stream.
Mid-morning it is fresh in the umbrella of the pines.
Groundwater bubbles through the sweating,
detritus-soaked soil.
It is an hour as the hawk flits,
two as the lizard bolts,
three for the lovers who clamber
up the stony meander,
arms tugging on vibrant trunks
and each other’s encouragement.
Suddenly the canopy disintegrates, suddenly
it is all angled rays, sun signals
bouncing off granite into the newly-tuned
Corsican radar in their eyes:
all mountains dancing bossa nova
round an azure painted hall.
On the bald pate of the Bocca Palmente
she points down at the impenetrable
forest of their past, reminding him of
the start of the walk,
when they stepped through a gate and the foliage clothed them;
when they decided to get lost in the damp, colluding trees.
He points out to the Pleine Orientale,
reminding her of the incalculable sea,
their future atoms glimmering in the haze of
whatever salty breakers, whatever
knuckly roots, whatever narrow,
lightning-bleached ledges await them.
Col de Verde
Because he’s been watching, watching for weeks,
he knows the rival will be chestnut-trawling
at the Col de Verde this Monday afternoon;
that creature. That creature of habit.
This is most convenient, also a perfect
spot for an ambush with its three-way crossroads
of untraceable concrete, its shut-down villa,
its solitude hemmed by the roar of saw
as loggers carve house-beams
from the totality of the trees.
4pm,
out of the midday heat, he’s crouched
behind a slouched pine, stroking its green bark,
considering her and the imminent future.
The pistol is confident – in his hands
it’s taken countless rabbits down, even a boar.
Up drives the rattling old Merc, silver,
eager in the post-siesta cool.
Out steps the rival, encumbered with
carrier-bags and heavy, flayed boots;
with his wife, whose light presence
wasn’t anticipated by the squatting shooter.
No matter – it is better. I can show her first-hand
the force of my passion.
She’s mine – now! he shouts, fractured English,
coarse Italianate rasp of several weeks’s patience
erupting in a cracked shot. A bullet misses,
rapping into the D of a roadsign, the rival
throws himself against the dusty track.
A groan, a dislocated reality, suspended
as lover hangs pistol over husband’s heart.
A second shot and hawks scatter with
a desperate screel; then the local wellspring
trickles as before, hardly breaking
this brand new silence; then
the loggers get revving, the aged trees fall,
and new homes begin to be built.
That evening lying with the butcher
she is suddenly alone without her husband‘s sweat,
alone, except for a pistol in the unstained kitchen.
She lets her feet float in there,
allows her hands to take the weapon,
permits her eyes to aim…
Her cottage is bedded in its own wood,
its own kin, so she feels no
fear of neighbours, only the fear
of unfamiliar: the metal of a gun;
the wringing of male blood from sheets;
the tearful smell of bones
burning through the night.
Refuge di U Prati
I can see the whole of heaven,
the match-light of each star,
the evening made complete
in the chords of a guitar.
A vagrant heifer's tinkling bell
rang throughout the day,
will echo through the night,
echo through the night.
And the world inside this mountain-hut
listens to the bard
while you are here again
as ever, despite the black hills
sleeping between us,
the black hills
sleeping despite us.
Bocca di Laparu
Some fifteen hundred metres
above the dogfish-spotted seas
I plunge off the Usciolu ridge
back into the leafy ocean –
enchanted, where birds swim
in a mist of cool humidity, of peace;
then, descend through mulchy slabs
of fern, mosquito marsh,
roads of dust and mud,
into the villages of rusty cars and marble mansions,
of oak-like men splitting evening wood.
This is the heart of Corsica,
which beats with French passion,
with Italian tenacity; which pumps
the Mediterranean through all
the sinews of its rooty trees, through
the muscles of its mountains,
while its skin of maquis moults in the breeze,
releasing a wild, marjoram dust.
Guitera-les-Bains
From deep beech woods she steps down
into a dry stream bed, white tufa rock
poisoned with ore, crusted with orange,
porous, ragged like a parched sponge.
She treads carefully, confident,
away from the wild brown pigs,
into salamander territory.
She can see the magic lizard at
a hundred paces, how it sits starfished,
unmoved by threat of forest fire,
painted by the jaundiced sun and
the coaly, moonless night.
At ten paces it will snap its head
like a mousetrap, then loathing her danger
sprint off into another dead gill.
She observes it still.
This is a skill she learned back in England,
at her daughter’s house in the fortnight
where she half-explained that daddy was gone;
when she spent whole evenings charting
the silvery spit of a slug, the darting
commute of a damselfly, the relentless
pursuit of grief chasing daylight
deep into beech woods.
Punta d’Urghiavari
It’s market day. Once a week
the village brings its stock together:
the baker unshelves last night’s
leftover loaves and sticks; chestnuts
are shaken from wide green nets
into splintering barrows; the pork maker,
famous across the island,
sells no boar-packed strings to glitterati
today – all the piped meat is sold in the square
to paysans over the chinking of Panach’ bottles
and the clinking of community;
mountain cheese is wheeled out for free;
the leathery men show off their
hand-sharpened knives.
She rises early on market day and climbs
the Punta to the west: an hour and a half
up the simmering hill, feet brushing matted
twigs across the forest floor, hands
groping at adolescent pines, singing
a repeating mantra to herself -
something with a beat; keeping blood pumped
through her hardened calves.
She chews on cheese from the dairyman’s stall.
Above the cloudline she dries her hands of sweat
then drags herself up the rope-way
towards the summit-cross.
She lies on the top slopes until sunset,
eyes closed to the sky, ears and skin
alive to the rushing of far-below water,
the shriek of hawk.
She lets her fingers hike her belly’s flatlands,
her ribcage’s poking earthworks,
the massif of her full, inconsequential breasts.
She squeezes her thighs together and remembers
how a single pulse of heat can ignite the forest,
and the press of her finger on the pistol‘s trigger
as she turned the rabbit-butcher into meat
to avenge her husband.
She can almost recall him entirely,
high above the bustle and squeal of the stalls,
but something is missing and
she cannot quite put her finger on it,
not in the way he could.
Quasquara
She keeps the plaque they hung above the front door.
Like so much of this house, like so much
inside and out, it’s wood, carved into time.
It bears both their names “M. et Mme.”,
and in this way she resurrects him,
and nightly she cooks a favourite dinner,
herb risotto, wild boar stew, mountain cheese
on a small wooden board.
Platoons of ramblers have marched in
to enjoy it as the evenings close off the hills,
but none has asked after Monsieur,
though their tired minds may wonder,
and none has ever asked her story,
though it may be rich to tell.
Punta Maggiola
I recline, my cap drying on the wooden cross,
the remaining foothills stretching into the sea
like giant, spiny lizards lounging by lakeside at siesta.
The hunter and his spaniel are still at the pass;
I'm watching them and their shotgun. I can
hear the rustle of the boars in their final tussle
before they become steaks on the market.
In go the earphones, I twizzle the iPod to
Omni Trio, Rolling Hills, so I can
attach the right music to rocky peaks:
bass to darkening green valleys,
insistent drums to my thousand footfalls,
overarching strings to the thick, unforgiving heat.
She will be remaking the bunkhouse
for tonight's guests; she is hunted by love,
forgotten by the thirsty days;
pulling in the shutters with a rusted hook-stick.
I won't see Mme's story again, in her drawn eyes,
won't re-read her deconstruction
in the gazette-clippings she exhumed for me;
won't give her my curious look,
which was all she had ever needed.
But I can call my mother in six hours,
reassure her I haven't fallen
off the top of the world -
like I already have a thousand ways
since slipping from her nurture,
since she changed the maths of time
with a twist of the year-hand,
when my body-clock struck adulthood
and jungle music started to kick.
The Corsican Wife
Mountains coax a thin white moon
into their heavy breasts.
A clear sky exposes its secret stars,
she christens them with dead friends’ names.
a weathered old Peugeot rusts,
falling apart on a hard shoulder.
Breathy hikers rumble in weighing
today’s collected rocks and blisters;
she bustles over dinner,
jemmying open bottles of fragrant beer.
Herbs of the hills shake themselves off
onto her bar-room floor to be gathered
with an old soft brush and thrown
into wild boar stew.
Her cottage yawns in the dusk,
hewn from surrounding pine.
An old man of the village shakes
chestnuts trawled that day,
toasting them on her beech-wood fire,
starters for the guests, washed down
with wine from young grapes.
A beck rushes beyond a little private
sewage works that feeds the stream,
frightens off the night fishes.
I watched and thought of my mother:
her timid bravery in our Dordogne house,
cracked glass unfixed in the frosty porch,
Capricorn worm nibbling the roof away.
Her father loaned the money so he could extract
a pound of desperate loyalty;
husband and lover circled each other
like dragonflies fighting for a leaf on a pond;
her children cried in the darkness of her dream,
refusing to switch on the lights.
It was my mother’s idea to buy that house,
paint white the shutters to sweep away
their beechy, autumnal past,
mend the broken porch, hang new lanterns –
a bienvenu to passing hikers, holiday hunters
or couples using false names in foreign places.
She could see this in a beat-up, run-down house;
she gave something finished-with a brand new start,
a reason to be loved again. She looked
at the future shaped by her.
And in this pocket of Corsica I am lying in a gite
which is exactly what her dream would have become –
if the stars, and mountains of chestnut, beech and pine,
and all their spiny rocks, had ever woken up
and been our secret helpers.