Clive Wilmer / Report from Nowhere

Clive Wilmer

© Caroline Forbes

Versión inglesa de los poemas publicados en Clive Wilmer / Informe de ninguna parte. 

____________

In the Library

You at your book. Me unable to read,

supposing that I get between your words
as, fingers twined in your hair or stroking your neck,
      you nonetheless read on.

Since you will not answer letters or calls

or nod to me in the street, I will write to the moon

or else to the image I have of you in my mind,

      which is all responsiveness.

Either way, fearing that I might touch,

you fend me off by scowling into a book;

but I’m there among the words, wanting to be,

      like them, read into you.

                                             [From The Mystery of Things, 2006]

Much Ado About Nothing

signifying

              a lot of fuss about fucking
or even about that primal quantity

known in those days as naught, as naughty,

as NO THING:

                    calling to mind

Courbet’s L ‘Origine du Monde.

For nothing this wide universe I call

—know what I mean?

in it thou art my all

and all for nothing.

For nothing doing. Since nothing

shall come of nothing.

                               Yea,

do on then this nought

else that thou do it for God’s love and

nothing have these nothings if this be nothing

that is not there:

                         and the Nothing that is

our inner man clepeth All.

                                            [From The Mystery of Things, 2006]

Learning to Read

  

In memory of my father

You were the man who named the birds

And, as you did so, taught me words –

Words on the page, that pinion there

Articulations of the air,

Much as the birds mark out their ground

With brilliant instances of sound.

                      [From Report from Nowhere, 2011]

In the Conservatory

A bird’s nest lined with leaves and moss

Kept here through the winter…

           Spring come, I find among leaf-mould

A brown mouse – its tail an unlikely flourish-

Modeling the letter ‘C’

As if it stood for Comfort,

Though it lay there fixed and cold.

                             [From Report from Nowhere, 2011]

Gregoire, 60

  

For Gabriel

Jane Goodall met him in Brazzaville zoo – a living skeleton, every bone in his body visible, almost hairless from malnutrition. Born 1944. Believed to be the oldest chimpanzee in the world.

Note from James and Other Apes. Photographs by James Mollison.

Shakespeare – imagine him

Granted a further decade as God’s spy.

He might have looked like this:

                                            blanched white

The patchy beard, and parched the mottled skin.

Or Rembrandt, older still, and with an eye

As dim,

A will as faint,

A hand too frail to lift a brush and paint

His own nobility exposed to light.

                                    [From Report from Nowhere, 2011]

Gaudier-Brzeska in the Trenches

From his letters

The day’s magnificent: the sky brushed clear,

Wind fresher, skylarks singing cheerfully…

Nothing I’ve yet heard has disturbed that choir –

Not the crude clamour, even, of the shells.

And in the woods at night the nightingales

Sing over us. They solemnly proclaim

Our conduct sacrilege and foolery.

I cannot but respect their high disdain.

                                 [From Report from Nowhere, 2011]

A Farmhouse near Modena, c.1980

O magnum mysterium

In the dark, the grey

Carrara shafts, with their scrolled

capitals.

            A small boy

sprung out of nowhere

charges in, gloves flapping

about his wrists.

He stops short.

Hay in the mangers, straw

on the bricked ground,

                                and white

oxen parted by the shafts –

freed from the yoke, patient,

heads to the wall,

gilt traces

tingeing their soft horns.

The boy standing among them

awed, a farmhand

stoops into the corner to lift out

for his gaze

a mother hedgehog suckling her eight young,

pinkish tadpoles dangling

from her teats.

                             [From Report from Nowhere, 2011]

Civitas

For Peter Carpenter

drove stakes in.

                      So that in good time

The stockade framed pictures of the wilderness.

                      So with all settlement.

I too keep watch.

I trample the nettles down which stand outside

the shored-up wall of Peterhouse on guard. For here,

as in 1280, Library and Hall secure,

the city of Cambridge ends

                  and the beautiful and fertile desolation

of the Fen Country begins:

willow and mare’s tail, heron and lacewing,

ditch-water, tussock grass and the endless sky.

There are times when the rain

comes and comes again, and then the earth

turns to water, the pollared willows stand

in water, paths disappear, and flocks

of waterbirds, their empire welling back,

honk, as if humankind had never been.

The poet Michael Longley, a gentle man

who knows too well those lovers of their race,

those neighbours who on Saturdays

plant bombs in civic centres – he told me

‘I love looking at holes in the roads,

when workmen dig up gas-pipes or whatever,

and you glimpse the soil buried for generations

and you see there can be no continuing city.’

Beneath tarmac, beyond city walls,

what have we lost or gained?

                                         I remember

a day in the 1970s when a coach

taking me into London, toward sunset,

was stopped short

by a herd of cattle homeward bound, their herdsmen

driving them on across the strip of road

bisecting Wanstead Common. There it was:

suburb, and pasture, and cars in a slowed procession,

the unschooled drivers leaning on their horns,

and against a damson sky, in silhouette,

this scene from Samuel Palmer,

Arcadian not millenarian.

Those who in the name of life

expunge abortionists and vivisectionists

do not recover pastoral innocence.

Here behind Peterhouse is a patchwork –

outbuildings, car park, scrub and a new hotel.

I look for a thing I love:

above a blocked-in gateway, carved in stone,

a heraldic shield – in the top left-hand quarter

a martlet, poised for flight,

the beak ajar and pointing toward the sky, but barred

by the black letters ALF sprayed from a gun.

                                           [From Report from Nowhere, 2011]

Approaching San Polo, Venice 

The space between the rooftops opens up
And there, on a high gable in the gap,

An angel has touched down, as if he were
A bird of passage blown off course, secure 

In mastery of the air and yet dismayed 

At finding himself here, his life mislaid 

On a strange planet where the creatures die 

Not understanding why.

                                                    [Unpublished]

The Blind Storyteller

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum

It is told of the blind storyteller Borges

That, travelling in England, he asked to see

A church surviving from the time of Bede.

In the dark porch he stooped beneath the lintel

And came erect in a strait place, foursquare

And bracketed by walls of enduring stone.

Himself a figure in parenthesis, 

Like time at pause, he paused at the chancel step

And spoke aloud, in Bede’s recessive language, 

The words of the Our Father.

                                         One would like

To hear that the roof opened to reveal

A cloudless azure firmament, with the Rood 

Borne high aloft by angels, and a stairway

At the foot of which his English grandmother

Stood pointing out her ancestors ascending 

In generations to the throne of heaven,

But there is no such incident recorded

In the account of her who tells the tale.

                                                             [Unpublished]

[Volver a los poemas en español]

____________

CLIVE WILMER (Harrogate, 1945) es profesor en el Sidney Sussex College de la universidad de Cambridge. Su obra poética reunida, desde su primer libro, The Dwelling-Place (1977), hasta Report from Nowhere (2011) está recogida en New and Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012). Como crítico, ha editado la obra de Ruskin y William Morris (Penguin), así como la poesía de Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Carcanet). Fue cofundador de la revista Numbers y, entre el año 1989 y 1992, presentó el programa de entrevistas de la BBC Radio 3, Poet of the Month, publicado posteriormente como libro (Poets Talking, de próxima aparición en España). Ha traducido a los poetas húngaros Miklós Radnóti, János Pilinszky y György Petri, entre otros, en colaboración con George Gömöri. Colabora habitualmente en el Times Literary Supplement y PN Review. 

MISAEL RUIZ ha traducido El misterio de las cosas, de Clive Wilmer (Vaso Roto, Barcelona, 2011), Antología poética, de R.S. Thomas (Trea, Gijón, 2008) y Antología poética, de George Herbert (Animal Sospechoso Editor, Barcelona, 2014, en colaboración con Santiago Sanz). Es autor del libro de poesía El hueco de las cosas (Trea, Gijón, 2010).