Sarah Holland-Batt

from Aria (2008)


Pocket Mirror

In this small grey circle I am
cropped, a moony snippet, an eye
the size of a world,
a doubled pupil. Shelled in
like a snail, I seal all space:
my sight is minuscule. Here

is the hinge, the gap
between what there is
and what I see – and the glass
is cool and deep
as a well. Within, words bend
and flex in mindless echo.

I stare, I stare –
I am cut from clear air,
brutal and planetary. Call
my name, I won’t answer. Twist
my arm, I won’t yell.
My cell, my cell –

this black rictus,
it’s hell – still I stand,
smudged, in this circle.
Just to see
glass to eye, eye to glass,
what I am.
 

*

The Idea of Mountain

And of that kind of permanence –
we long for it sometimes,
the obstinacy of a single stone
and its mindlessness. To be less alive
to each particular sadness. Monolithic.
Unmoved as the old man who wakes
and knows no pleasure or disgrace
can harm his tired heart any more
because he has lived, in practical terms, for ever.
Beyond cold or heat. Beyond all of it
except our itness. Five years I lived
by that black mountain range, the heights
of which let nothing grow, not yellow aspen
or even blue spruce, just the barren peaks
shouldering the snow and sun and surviving.
I would lie in the thistle-grass and watch
wasps mating below the sheer persisting rock,
frantic, their torsos the bright colour of pollen,
their heads the purest black –
and I saw, finally, how our last hours play out
against the continuing earth, how we wake
consoled by the morning’s petty smallness,
the kettle’s steam, fat hissing on the stove,
and the cat nudging our ankles, its hunger and our own
never fully appeased. But I would have it still –
the aspens, the hunger, the wasps,
and this happiness, sidling slow
as a foal towards the phosphorescence of new grass:
naïve, and wedded to a predictable end.
 

*

The Art of Disappearing

The moon that broke on the fencepost will not hold.
Desire will not hold. Memory will not hold.
The house you grew up in, its eaves, its attic will not hold.
The still lives and the Botticellis will not hold.
The white peaches in the bowl will not hold.
Something is always about to happen.
You get married, you change your name,
and the sun you wore like a scarf on your wrist has vanished.
It is an art, this ever more escaping grasp of things;
imperatives will not still it – no stay or wait or keep
to seize the disappeared and hold it clear, like pain.
So tell the car idling in the street to go on,
tell the skirmish of chesspieces to go on,
tell the scraps of paper, the lines to go on.
It is winter: that means the blossoms are gone,
that means the days are getting shorter.
And the dark water flows endlessly on.
 

*

from The Hazards (2015)


No End to Images

No end to tissues of tears beside the bed
or to avenues of trees and cathedrals,
no end to bee-eaters in the rose apples
or summer on the balcony in Neukölln,
no end to the pharmaceutical clouds over Kraków.
No end to the hour I stood and shook
like a leaf in the shower’s privacy,
no end to my name, snagged like a burr,
no end to the body which is colossally small
with its pains and plainer longings.
No end to grief, never any end to that.
No end to the silver train stalled in Budapest
where I wept in the empty sleeper,
no end to iron shoes along the Danube,
to history, the convalescent light
that falls on my desk so evenly,
no end to the gardens of Europe
with their murderous symmetry,
no end to picnics on the forest’s edge
or piazzas of pure Carrara marble,
to cruelty, madness, oblivion,
massacres and women’s scarves,
the hunger of wolves, ripening stonefruit,
no end to fear and secret police,
and no end to Bach fugues on the turntable
whose ideas resolve so cleanly
into a life infinitely more gentle and orderly
than our fraught morning fights
or the cries we send echoing at night
down the hollow halls of love.

*

from The Jaguar (2022)


The Kindest Thing

The doctor with an Armani model’s jawline
is brisk when he tells me the kindest thing
is to withhold antibiotics.
Pneumonia is the old man’s friend, he says,
his stare so piercing I feel compelled
by his beauty – he is almost shining
with charisma and vitality, this man who coaxes
patients towards death like an emerald boa
stretching its pink jaw by inches
until the glass frog is entirely inside the snake’s head,
subsumed into the hypnotic knot of its body,
its scales flexing electric green as new leaves,
its white lightning bolts rippling and contracting –
or like the sinister musk blossoming
of an orchid mantis – limbs variegated
like borlotti beans in flecked rose and cream –
swaying like a silken flower to lure
the dreaming crickets in. The kindest thing
is to hand yourself up to death’s calling,
I know this, but I am not handing myself up,
I am offering over my father, tenderly
unhinging death’s jaws until he is swamped
with fever, his pupils tracking some invisible thread
as he eases into unconsciousness, his eyes
bright with the knowledge of one
who senses he is being carried away
but does not know why or where.

*

Terminal Lucidity

After twenty years away, an intercession of clarity
in your final hours: surfacing from a morphine surge,
suddenly you were there again,
your eyes lighting on my face, gold-panned hazel,
alive with the old intelligence.
In the small hospital room at the corridor’s end
we listened to Clair de Lune
as vague rain prickled outside in the garden bed.
You listened, dozed, awoke. I spoke,
and you stayed until my words petered out,
then stayed through the silence after.
It’s all silence now – the profound silence
which makes all other silences loud –
yet in the caesurae of days, I hear you listening.

*


The Jaguar

It shone like an insect in the driveway:
iridescent emerald, out-of-season Christmas beetle.
Metallic flecks in the paint like riverbed tailings,
squeaking doeskin seats. Bottle green, my father called it,
or else forest. A folly he bought without test-driving,
vintage 1980 XJ, a rebellion against his tremor.
The sole bidder, he won the auction without trying
the day after the doctor told him to draw a line
under his driving years. My mother didn’t speak
for weeks. It gleamed on the terracotta drive,
wildcat forever lunging on the hood,
predatory, the chrome snagging in the sun,
ornament of my father’s madness,
miraculous and sleek, until he started to tinker,
painted the leather seats with acrylic
so they peeled and cracked, jacked the gearstick,
hacked a hole into the dash with a Stanley knife,
jury-rigged the driver’s seat so it sat so low
you couldn’t see over the dash. For months
he drove it even though my mother begged,
he drove it as though he was punishing her,
dangerously fast on the back roads, then
opened up the engine on the highway, full
throttle, even though he was going blind in one eye,
even though my mother and I refused to get in,
and for the first time in years my father
was happy – he was happy to be driving,
he was happy my mother and I
were miserable. Finally his modifications
killed it, the car he always wanted and waited
so long to buy, and it sat like a carcass
in the garage, like a headstone, like a coffin –
but it’s no symbol or metaphor. I can’t make anything of it.

from ARIA (2008)

I
    19     Pocket Mirror
    20     Shore Acres
    21     Francesca in the Second Circle
    22     Ruined Estates
    23     The Woodpile
    25     Cavendish Road
    26     Rock Roses
    27     Atonement
    28     Tracery
    29     January: An Air
    31     Late Aspect
    32     Circles and Centres
    34     Meditation on the Plums I
    35     Elégie

II
    36     Misery and Pizzicato
    37     Letter to Robert Lowell
    39     Exhaustion
    40     Two Kinds of Stubbornness
    41     The Sewing Room
    42     Mythos
    43     Materials
    44     Athenian Jar
    45     The Crow
    46     Un bel dì, vedremo
    48     Not a Life, But Like One

III
    49     Remedios the Beauty
    51     Stormclouds over Mexico
    52     Letter from K
    53     Laughter and Forgetting
    54     Aria for a Painted Dancer
    56     The Idea of Mountain
    57     A Good Marriage
    58     The Fires
    60     Salem Song
    61     The Art of Disappearing

    63     Notes


from THE HAZARDS (2015)

I
    69     Medusa
    70     This Landscape Before Me
    72     The Orchid House
    74     Tropic Rain
    75     Botany
    76     A Scrap of Lace
    78     An Illustrated History of Settlement
    80     The House on Stilts
    82     Galah’s Skull
    83     Desert Pea
    84     Approaching Paradise

II
    86     The Vulture
    88     Essay on the Toucan
    89     The Capuchin
    91     The Macaw
    93     Life Cycle of the Eel
    94     Orange-bellied Parrot
    96     Green Ant Tarantella
    97     Three Sketches of a Favourite Cat
    98     Possum
    99     A Crab Tide

III
    100     Of Germany
    101     Late Hammershøi
    103     Collioure/Love Poem
    104     Beauty Is a Ticket of Admission to All Spectacles
    105     Primavera: The Graces
    106     The Quattrocento as a Waltz
    107     Interbellum
    109     Rain, Ravello
    110     Embouchure
    112     Against Ingres
    114     Liebesträume
    115     Umbrian Sketch
    116     Reclining Nude
    118     Goya’s Dog
    119     The Flowers on His Bedside Speak of Eternity
    120     No End to Images

IV
    121     Insurgency
    122     Night Sonnet
    123     Impressions of April
    124     Morningside Spring
    125     Mercado
    126     Garden Apartment, Taube
    127     Via dell’Amore
    128     The Atlantic
    130     O California
    131     The Invention of Ether
    133     Last Goodbyes in Havana
    134     Ensign
    135     The Hazards

    137     Notes


from THE JAGUAR (2022)

I
    143     My Father as a Giant Koi
    144     The Gift
    146     The Parachute
    147     Brazil
    148     Empires of Mind
    150     The Gurney
    152     Time Remaining
    154     Lime Jelly
    156     The Kindest Thing
    157     Terminal Lucidity
    158     Nessun Dorma
    160     The Outing
    162     The Clearing
    164     At Springbrook

II
    166     Thalassography
    168     Light Years
    170     Pikes Peak
    172     Substantia Nigra
    173     The Midpoint
    175     Tijuana
    177     Kneeling Figure
    179     The Jaguar
    181     The Odds
    182     The Grip
    184     Neurostimulator
    186     The Night Shift
    188     Maidenhair
    190     Vital Signs

III
    192     Instructions for a Lover
    193     Epithalamium
    195     Classical Allegory
    196     Affidavit
    197     Parable of the Clubhouse
    198     Cipriani
    200     On Tiepolo’s Cleopatra
    201     Ode to Cartier
    203     Alaska
    205     The Proposal
    207     The Worst of It
    208     Blue Quandong
    210     Serious Moonlight

IV
    212     Driving Through Drystone Country
    214     Gin & Tonic at the Rock Hotel
    215     Lago Nicaraguense
    216     Quetzalcoatl
    218     Sketches from the Nile
    220     Meditation on Risk in New Hampshire
    222     Upon Viewing a Still Life by Chardin and Thinking of the Marathon Bombing in Boston
    224     Monopoli
    225     On Worthing Beach
    228     Great North Road
    231     Mediterranean Steps
    233     In My Father’s Country
    233         I  The Burr
    234         II  Your Dying
    236         III  The Hex
    237         IV  Long Division
    238         V  Antipodes
    239         VI  Anti-Gravity
    240         VII  A Brief History of the British Raj
    241         VIII  Brain Surgery
    242         IX  The Tremor
    243         X  Indirect Address
    244         XI  Winter, Worthing

    247     Notes

    251     Thanks

    255     Biographical note