for Ivan Klima
They tell you: all the seasons in a day
Mist overnight: in early morning like a silver lid.

To someone unused to it mist seems to pass

right through the body, by which I mean

the mind.

                By night I’ll stand by the scenic

lookout and mist will climb up from the ground.

Now the air is shiny and soon clear,

across at the point the albatross are circling

and seals roll in the kelp like workers

at belts and pulleys under water, the shadows

shifting, evanescent machines.

                                                  The seals are free

and yet are not, the underwater holds them

anthropomorphised: I see and so does Klima

the charm we put there, the sensuous rolling

but the water closing over …

                                           Samisdat is

unforgettable, his books were typed out one

by one and passed around. Passed on

in secret makes them intimate, the words

like shadows, on paper so thin under the finger

-tips they seem to enter you all that is

essential.

               Klima wants to take

a photo but the seals have moved off

the rockface and the light is fading fast

into the mid-day rain. In ten more minutes

it is sleet.

               Yes, what they say, is happening.

In the city I walk alone in sudden warmth

the streets are grey and piecemeal

the slopes as dull as England. Two men lean out

an upper level of an incomplete building

and hammer away at tin. It’s high, dangerous,

surreal above the shopfronts like a great box

of lollies wrapped in cellophane.

                                                     I am walking past

the church when the rain is sudden, heavy,

and I rush in, imagining the gloomy day-pews.

But an organist is hidden head-down in Bach’s

A Minor fugue, the earth is being thrown about.

And starts, stops, hesitates in practising what

Bach knew. The pipes are full, unstopped, the chords

shake me then go silent, the air like dry land,

all life gone. Then huge, again, unrushed, the

growling bass and the high keys like everyworld

at once.

             If only Klima were here, but he is

speaking to another group remembering

the past, his country’s ‘counter revolution’

and passing hand to hand like touching echoes

his ironic first editions and soon

everyone asking what he’ll write about

now the communists have gone… and only

some will see how such presumption

angers him.

                    At the scenic lookout

the stillness moves right in. The bay is losing

brush-strokes, blue and green: Toss Woolaston/

loose and rough Cezanne. I stare at the swell,

wanting it to surge against me like the Bach.

But it fades. Everything is changing. The mist

climbs up from the valley, sealing off

the open ground. The night. The dark