Sarah Howe

Maybe holding back
is just another kind

of need. I am a blue
plum in the half-light.

You are a tiger who
eats his own paws.

The day we married
all the trees trembled

as if they were mad -
be kind to me, you said.
...

It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.

- CHINESE PROVERB



This is the tale of the woodsman's daughter. Born with a box
of ashes set beside the bed,
in case. Before the baby's first cry, he rolled her face into the cinders -
held it. Weak from the bloom
of too-much-blood, the new mother tried to stop his hand. He dragged
her out into the yard, flogged her
with the usual branch. If it was magic in the wood, they never
said, but she began to change:

her scar-ridged back, beneath his lashes, toughened to a rind; it split
and crusted into bark. Her prone
knees dug in the sandy ground and rooted, questing for water,
as her work-grained fingers lengthened
into twigs. The tree - a lychee - he continued to curse as if it
were his wife - its useless, meagre
fruit. Meanwhile the girl survived. Feathered in greyish ash,
her face tucked in, a little gosling.

He called her Mei Ming: No Name. She never learned to speak. Her life
maimed by her father's sorrow.
For grief is a powerful thing - even for objects never conceived.
He should have dropped her down
the well. Then at least he could forget. Sometimes when he set
to work, hefting up his axe
to watch the cleanness of its arc, she butted at his elbow - again,
again - with her restive head,

till angry, he flapped her from him. But if these silent pleas had
meaning, neither knew.
The child's only comfort came from nestling under the
lychee tree. Its shifting branches
whistled her wordless lullabies: the lychees with their watchful eyes,
the wild geese crossing overhead.
The fruit, the geese. They marked her seasons. She didn't long to join
the birds, if longing implies

a will beyond the blindest instinct. Then one mid-autumn, she craned
her neck so far to mark the geese
wheeling through the clouded hills - it kept on stretching - till
it tapered in a beak. Her pink toes
sprouted webs and claws; her helpless arms found strength
in wings. The goose daughter
soared to join the arrowed skein: kin linked by a single aim
and tide, she knew their heading

and their need. They spent that year or more in flight, but where -
across what sparkling tundral wastes -
I've not heard tell. Some say the fable ended there. But those
who know the ways of wild geese
know too the obligation to return, to their first dwelling place. Let this
suffice: late spring. A woodsman
snares a wild goose that spirals clean into his yard - almost like
it knows. Gripping its sinewed neck

he presses it down into the block, cross-hewn from a lychee trunk.
A single blow. Profit, loss.
...

I watched the turquoise pastel
melt between your fingerpads;
how later you flayed

the waxen surface back
to the sunflower patch
of a forethought, your

instrument an upturned
brush, flaked to the grain -
the fusty sugar paper buckled.

You upended everything,
always careless of things:
finest sables splayed

under their own weight,
weeks forgotten - to emerge
gunged, from the silted

floor of a chemical jamjar.
I tidied, like a verger
or prefect, purging

with the stream from the oil-
fingered tap. Stop,
you said, printing

my elbow with a rusty index,
pointing past an ancient
meal's craquelured dish

to the oyster-crust
at the edge of an unscraped palette -
chewy rainbow, blistered jewels.
...

I keep everything until the moment it's needed.
I am the glint in your bank manager's eye.
I never eat cake in case of global meltdown.
I am my own consolation.

I have a troubled relationship with material things:
I drop my coppers smugly in the river.
(I do everything with an unbearable smugness.)
I propose a vote of thanks.

I make small errors in your favour. Sometimes
I pretend nothing is wrong.
I won second prize in a beauty contest.
I am yellowing at the edges.

I was last seen drawing the short straw.
I hang about tragically on street corners, where
I hand out cards that read: if you see
I am struggling to lift this card, please, do not help me.
...

Across the road, the girls quit school in threes
and fours, tripping off at speed to stations

or familiar cars, their silhouettes, slung
with shoulder bags and hockey sticks, like mules.

Remember, says the afternoon; the shut
door shudders brassily beneath my hand.

It is already dark, or darkening -
that sky above the dimming terraced rows

goes far beyond a child's imagining.
I tread along the backstreet where the cabs

cut through behind the luminous science labs -
their sills of spider plants in yoghurt pots

among the outsize glassware cylinders
like pygmies contemplating monoliths.

You cannot walk the other side because
the walled garden meets the road direct

in pools of spangled tarmac after rain;
the open gutter choking up with leaves.

As though to listen, the colossal trees
lean out into the tungsten-haloed street.

I meet another on the road - this snail's
slow ribbon turns the asphalt into gold.
...

This morning's autocorrect function flipped
my fat-fingered vision into visor.
I have taken to eating and sleeping

in a different room from myself. Sometimes
I could do with a helmet. She gave him
a glass clock as an expression of love

but really it was a present for her.
You could hear the affection frittering
away. Prepositions are for orphans.

It could be said all we need to survive
is the wet beading on its pillowy
surfaces, the salt-rose. Her fortitude

in briny air a lesson to those prone
to opening doors and leaving them that way.
All those visible cogs going about their

intestinal churn, a Copernican
universe - as insular. Adverbs are
for undinists. Over there seems somehow

further off these days. The dawn is a leash
round a prisoner's neck. Who is holding
the end? More wars than Kodak reels. Recall

how its glossy slink would spool and spool and
fail to catch? Still we don't recognize words
are the last things we should put in our mouths.

Nouns are for bourgeois materialists.
First place salt on the tongue. Then use the thread
to stitch up the lips. What to do with the

cherries? Its too-loud tick kept us awake.
I had to move it to the next-door room.
Then the next. Then lag it at night like a

talkative bird. The heart is a zeppelin,
tethered and leaking. How can we help but
scoff? People with glass clocks shouldn't row boats.
...

The last of the sheet I shuffle off an ankle -
a sound like the spilling of sand
from shovel and the night air blurs

for a second with its footfall.
Our entwined shape a word in the dark.
On my forehead and cheek

each flourishing
charge of your breathing
is a moment's reprieve. Heat


in this place goes deeper than sleep,
wraps everything, increases sheen -
the forearm weighing your flank

as, dreaming, you turn from me,
curlicues slick on the backs
of thighs, my hand at your neck

and eyes aware of several kinds of dark
struggling to perfect themselves
- the hidden chair, the bouquet of our clothes

the razory arms of a juniper rattling crazily
at the edge of that endless reddening haze -
glad we move on to the city at dawn.
...

Against platinum birches

I want nothing here [but you].



We have trees at home. Shall I

wing you the courtyard fountain's



midnight palaver, to lull

the list of your lonely sleep?



Love is wicker, then water;

marriage an avenue of



limes, but not the bitter kind.

I'm stood at the north extreme:



the reflecting pool unrolls

a shadow world of clouds &



yews, another far orchard,

enamelled pavilions.



It's shaking hardly at all.

My nights are aloner too.
...

Take
that pet of medieval didacts, the manicule, or little hand: fringe-dweller of
early manuscripts, whose jotted, peripheral fists, sprung with an admonitory digit
lace the tanned margins of our most cankered and flame-buckled books - a fervid
injunction to look. Picture them: speckled palely
at the page edge, their flare of crumbs trailing in
to the tangled inky forest of a spreadeagled folio
you've just heaved off the shelves. Now follow
their frail pointers as if you yourself - stooped
to track this scribe's oddly curling ascenders -
might be thrown back to the moment of their
still-wet penning & the cloister's draughty
aisle - you leaning in at the old monk's
shoulder & attending to that crooked
gesture: grasp his hand across the
ages' gutter - its urgent here
...

Belonging to the Emperor

Today my name is Sorrow.
So sang the emperor's first nightingale.

The emperor was a fickle god.
He preferred to be thrilled by an automatic bird

in filigreed gold. A musicbox, a leitmotif.
Love me, please. Orange blossom.

I see my father bathed in the blare of that same
aria, prodding the remote

to loop. Chiamerà, chiamerà -
His face is red. Beneath his glasses, it is wet.

Fabulous

GFP is a protein derived from the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, which emits
green light upon illumination with blue light.
- Hofker & van Deursen, Transgenic Mouse: Methods and Protocols

Chimera, chimera -

where does your garden grow?
A grafted Paradise. A mouthful of snow.

A Trojan conception - maculate cargo.
A spliced mouse - its unearthly day-glo.
...

pickerel, n.1 - A young pike; Several smaller kinds of N. American pike.
pickerel, n.2 - A small wading bird, esp. the dunlin, Calidris alpina.


I see it clearly, as though I'd known it myself,
the quick look of Jane in the poem by Roethke -
that delicate elegy, for a student of his thrown
from a horse. My favourite line was always her
sidelong pickerel smile. It flashes across her face
and my mind's current, that smile, as bright and fast
and shy as the silvery juvenile fish - glimpsed,
it vanishes, quick into murk and swaying weeds -
a kink of green and bubbles all that's left behind.

I was sure of this - the dead girl's vividness -
her smile unseated, as by a stumbling stride -
till one rainy Cambridge evening, my umbrella
bucking, I headed toward Magdalene to meet an
old friend. We ducked under The Pickerel's
painted sign, its coiled fish tilting; over a drink
our talk fell to Roethke, his pickerel smile, and
I had one of those blurrings - glitch, then focus -
like at a put-off optician's trip, when you realise

how long you've been seeing things wrongly.
I'd never noticed: in every stanza after the first,
Jane is a bird: wren or sparrow, skittery pigeon.
The wrong kind of pickerel! In my head, her
smile abruptly evolved: now the stretched beak
of a wading bird - a stint or purre - swung
into profile. I saw anew the diffident stilts
of the girl, her casting head, her gangly almost
grace, puttering away across a tarnished mirror

of estuary mud. In Homer, the Sirens are winged
creatures: the Muses clipped them for their failure.
By the Renaissance, their feathers have switched
for a mermaid's scaly tail. In the emblem by Alciato
(printed Padua, 1618) the woodcut pictures a pair
of chicken-footed maids, promising mantric truths
to a Ulysses slack at his mast. But the subscriptio
denounces women, contra naturam, plied with hind-
parts of fish: for lust brings with it many monsters.

Or take how Horace begins the Ars Poetica,
ticking off poets who dare too much: mating savage
with tame, or snakes with birds, can only create such
horrors, he says, as a comely waist that winds up
in a black and hideous fish. The pickerel-girl swims
through my mind's eye's flummery like a game
of perspectives, a corrugated picture: fish one way
fowl the other. Could it be that Roethke meant
the word's strange doubleness? Neither father

nor lover. A tutor watches a girl click-to the door
of his study with reverent care, one winter evening -
and understands Horace on reining in fantasy.
...

Blockades and green carpeted cobbles - wide
city under sedation, streets pre-lunch but
post-défilé; the wind tugged at a niggling thread.
The sun by then a withered pear, we crossed
the square of the Bastille, stamped confetti
snowglobing in our gait. It was empty then,
and strangely benign, drooped geranium pots
tied to railings. Pooches gave no special heed.
Enough string cancels the need for memory
if you loop the knots from toe to neck to wrist.
By nightfall, the magazine stands oozed buff
nudes and neon wattage. COMMENT SAVOIR
SI ON S'EST TROMPÉ? Such glossed pulp.
Across the Tuilleries' parched and shadowed grass,
Chinese whispers was our game and cheating
compulsory. ‘Send rain and fourpence.' ‘Would you care
to dance?' With untold ingenuity we wasted the moon,
waiting for one true accident. Fidelity was a waltz
on the bandstand - home, we learned, to a phantom
tenor who counselled lovers in filthy acts. Nearby
a lately painted playground was overrun with ghosts -
the children who never woke. His Götterdämmerung
had brought down the rafters every night. We slunk
away like clocked-off scene painters, our palms stained
a municipal red, primary blue in the crooks of our knees.
The older boys scampered in shining culottes,
skimmed their hoops down sanded avenues. I stretched
my hand for one - eluding flesh, its spectral O
rattled on to infinity. ‘Souvenez-vous!' they cried, and laughed.
We had to go quickly, to hide the brightness in our eyes.
Their chanting was somehow delightful, but hard
to read as a book in an unfamiliar tongue. One girl
tied a knot on her balcony: her white hand a manicule tipped
from a gilded margin, her only revolution a staid carousel.
In a high-up rosette at the East of Sainte-Chapelle,
Christopher has been meditating, meditating on light
and colour, the opened flood and the weight of lead.
‘Don't stop,' urged the fireworks, getting brighter.
He wondered and was, in reflection, near overcome.
...

The sun is an orange from the Peloponnese
staining clouds and stuccoed walls,

sailboats tacking out to sea.
Damson shapes chase light from under vines;

shadows grope their way,
thick arabesques of lace furrowed at the frame.

Hills are a smoke-stained fresco flaking,
rooftops shrill as pomegranate seeds.

Poplars are the spears of long-dead warriors
sprouted from a rill of dragon's teeth.

Rising from that faded terracotta dome
come the curling throaty notes

of evening mass below, swelling in
and out of polyphony like a weaver's skilful woof

their path the disappearing smoke
dragged from a censer's golden arc.

Far across this dim intaglio
a white cat pads along a cooling lintel stone.

Only the distant thrum of a scooter
navigating narrow roads.
...

See now
is the plateholder
quite snug? The light
is not our only
challenge. Take off
a glove then brush
your naked hand
too near the lens
and instantly a scrim
of frost descends
no mere rubbing can
remove. Recall
a brass knob will burn
unwary fingertips
like red-hot iron. Still
cold is quickly
mastered; light less so. First
insert the amber
filter: take the groove-
etched rim, like this.
For unless viewed through
a honey jar's warm
this ice strafed moon-
scape will tend
inexorably to blue. Only
now draw out
the slide. Texture, man!
D'you see it? That
play of bright white
ridge, its shadowed
underside too coy
almost to catch. Don't
release the shutter -
yet. Today the snow
seems practically
transparent, no?
Patience, Captain.
The true photographer
will in his very dreams
calculate exposures.
One perfect morning I
waited two whole hours
for a trio of cavorting
penguins to exactly
echo the mountainside
behind. Have you
checked the lens cap?
Nothing is forgotten?
The men were donning
their skins with a yawn
when at last I flung off
my ice-fringed cloth
that long-hunched gloom
like Jonah
spat out, a prophet, to the light.
...

Outside magnolias sleep. Shadow spires slope
across her chest - the clatter from the curtain
rings retreating. Her profile, level, unaccustomedly
lit, as though a quarter had clicked in the glassy
case of a derelict arcade. Her body's folds
softening to chalk, drowned packets of bone
disturbed by no midwinter, rayless and coddled.
At the waist, the wrinkled hands could be vellum,
pliable as her stab-stitched companions ranged
across the shelves, clasped against the clang
of morning. I would have said something,
Margaret, in the heavy air, the violating must
my so rare breath had stirred. How helpless
is matter - these frail volumes dismantled bit
by bit, in the rash of terrible light. How the eye
strives to right itself, where the image fastens
to its humours, reversed and wrong-way-up,
where the white of a laid-out mother sparks
in a darkened passage, shaking by the shelves.
In spring, the magnolia's pendent blooms
have their own strange gravity - the world
a flipped and fingered slide, its own iconoclast.Outside magnolias sleep. Shadow spires slope
across her chest - the clatter from the curtain
rings retreating. Her profile, level, unaccustomedly
lit, as though a quarter had clicked in the glassy
case of a derelict arcade. Her body's folds
softening to chalk, drowned packets of bone
disturbed by no midwinter, rayless and coddled.
At the waist, the wrinkled hands could be vellum,
pliable as her stab-stitched companions ranged
across the shelves, clasped against the clang
of morning. I would have said something,
Margaret, in the heavy air, the violating must
my so rare breath had stirred. How helpless
is matter - these frail volumes dismantled bit
by bit, in the rash of terrible light. How the eye
strives to right itself, where the image fastens
to its humours, reversed and wrong-way-up,
where the white of a laid-out mother sparks
in a darkened passage, shaking by the shelves.
In spring, the magnolia's pendent blooms
have their own strange gravity - the world
a flipped and fingered slide, its own iconoclast.
...

. . . as obedient chyldren, that ye geue not youre selues ouer vnto your olde lustes . . .
1 Peter 1:13-16. Overpainted on the whitewashed rood screen of Binham Priory, Norfolk, c.1540-43
Word from Ely:
the alabaster Virgin's
bludgeoned head
feigned miracles
tumbled twenty ells -
her velveted cheek
moored in an altar's
candle-strewn jetsam
was said to drop
a waxen tear.


At the priory's fall
its people came too late
amidst clamour &
cries. The glistering Saints
torn from their Sunday
height - each trindle,
screen, & tabernacle,
each tilted face -
quite slubbered over
- washed with white.


As Homily blurred into Homily,
Binham's flock
continued to gaze -
a whole generation
disobedient children
thumbed at the lime's
forgetfulness, hoping to coax
from stubborn chalk
that serpent's peepholed green,
a flash of wheatsheaf hair

almost as bright as ever it was.
...

Go, my only friend. I know this voice has lost
its wintered savour - my sceptic's mewling cries
fritter out across the sad Atlantic's no-man's-land.
If I bury spoons, will you wait for them to bloom?
Estrangement - it had seemed so accidental -
was with us from the first, a doorjamb fixity.
It wasn't that randoms fingered you in bars.
I'm minded of your restive legs, once so sleek
in turquoise denim, now a fuss of cosseted skirts.
The worst is you can't share my unclean food.
Go, my brave hyperbole, chase your cabbalistic
constellations: whether questing beast or curate's
egg, clear-eyed or fly-addled, I can't settle on.
Go. Or come. You're the current, I'm the flotsam.
...