So here we are in summer
back after probate
to look through her things
share them out
clear the house
share with each other
the strange snagging stillness
which feels as if it contains
a swarm of data waiting for meaning
her house without her
the risen moon
of her absence
which we’ve all been whirlpooling through
these last six months down our own private rapids
fed by the underground waters of nothing hereafter
but look there’s a presence
her stick in the corner
her handwriting everywhere
we can laugh open her wine remember
and catch sunlight striking leaves
of the beech trees into green flame
from her old bedroom window
where as she dressed
piecing together for another day
all her perverse
strength and reckless fragility
where she used to watch the red sun rise
and see deer
pretty but bugger them demolishing
new buds on her roses
before we made her move
to the ground floor
banned her
from carting her cracked pelvis upstairs alone.
None of the goldfinches robins
and coal tits that so delighted her
are around
jasmine has overgrown the bird-feeder pole
and even the roses
no deer could get at them now
each flower must have bloomed
over that hidden trellis
in its own scented dark
but at the farthest point of her daily walk
through the retirement village
in an avenue of slanting shadows
the pyramid orchids she treasured are ablaze
purple pop-ups on the verge
through ancient blonde hair of meadow grass.
One of the many books we shall now have to take to Oxfam
says that in Iranian cosmology
God holds up the sky to stop it falling
and the mountains
hold the earth down
like tent pegs over a groundsheet
including Mount Qaf
sacred mountain the imaginary
farthest point of earth
only spot in this world where the roc might land
which artists always paint in the holy colour of Islam
the glow-green of traffic lights or emerald
but those same mountains
landslip earthquake volcano
may shake us dementedly loose at any time.
She was so sure
there was nothing beyond this earth.
No sign-bearer or tireless messenger
running through interstellar fields
could have tempted her to say
When I die I’ll see the lining of the world
the other side beyond the sunrise
beyond coal tits beech trees robins
the daily crossword and a thousand
invisible moral obligations of duty and care
like folding down the end of the sellotape
so it never sticks to the roll for someone else.
She would never buy unearthly.
No gods omens or signs.
But in the land of the setting sun
we are all hungry for fruits of the real
and what she believed in
were entangled photons
the smallest light particles
quantum linked however far away
of family children and the mysterious earth.
These were her emerald arrow
in every underpass the green glow
lighting her shadows saying This Way.
In 2014 I was very fortunate to visit the Borderlands Foundation at Krasnogruda, outside the town of Sejny by the Lithuanian border, with my dear friend Eva Hofmann, and to see the manor house where Miłosz spent his summer holidays and where his mother’s family came from. So much of his inspiration came from nature, and I was particularly moved by this beautiful landscape of hills, lakes and forests and bright-blowing clouds. In an essay on T. S. Eliot, Miłosz argues that questions of formal freedom are bound up with art’s role as communication: how you say something is inseparable from what you say and who you say it to. He liked poems that focused on ‘real things’: description which ‘demands observation, so intense that the veil of everyday falls away and something we paid no attention to is revealed as miraculous’. He called the poems in his anthology, The Book of Luminous Things, ‘loyal towards reality’. His poem ‘Meaning’ calls on the religious insight that real presence must lie somewhere else. Miłosz wrote it in 1991, two years after he had seen Krasnogruda again after long exile, and the form is the ancient Greek amoebaic convention of question and answer. The first voice claims that when he dies, he will see the world’s ‘true meaning’ beyond the real, but there is a wry laugh behind this idea and when I responded to this poem, six months after my mother (who enjoyed a laugh and never believed in anything beyond nature) died, I suspect I was remembering something Miłosz said was integral to his writing, which he called ‘romantic irony’.