Armenia

1

You nudge Hafiz’s rose
and act the wild children’s nurse.
You breathe from the eight-flanked shoulders
of the peasants’ bullish church.

Painted in ochre gone hoarse,
you lie beyond that peak.
The only photo that adheres
shows glasses set out for tea.

 

2

You wanted colours to draw with
and so, from out of its case,
the Lion of Lines, with its paw
snatched a half-dozen crayons.

Land of fish above fires
and potters travelling dead plains,
the red-bearded Sardars were endured
in the middle of stone and clay.

Far from the anchors and tridents,
where the rocks dried off and rested,
you watched how some loved life,
others, administrative measures.

Plain as a child’s drawing,
and sending no sudden tide
through my blood, the women who walk here
distribute the beauty of a lion.

Your youthful graves, your ominous
language warm my thoughts;
letters are a blacksmith’s tongs,
each word is a clamp from the forge …

 

3

I can’t see a thing, and my unlucky ears have gone deaf;
hoarse ochre and red lead are the only colours I’ve left.

For some reason I dreamt of Armenian mornings, and planned
to go and examine the habits of the blue tit in Yerevan,

and the way that the baker stoops to play blind man’s buff
as he takes the moist hides of flat loaves from the oven.

Yerevan, Yerevan, did a bird sketch out your lines?
Did a lion colour you in with his crayons, like a child?

Yerevan, Yerevan, a roasted nut of a city,
a Babylon I love for its streets, so big-mouthed and twisted.

I thumbed through a muddled-up life, like a mullah his Koran.
I froze my time, and did my warm veins no harm.

Yerevan, Yerevan, there’s nothing, nothing I crave
or need any more. I’ll leave you your icy grapes.

 

4

With your mouth muffled up like a wet rose
and the eight-sided honeycombs your hands would hold,
you stood and suppressed your tears
for whole mornings on the outskirts of the world.

You turned your back, in shame and grief,
on the bearded cities of the East.
Look how you lie on the salting stock
as they take the death mask from your face.

 

5

Wrap a shawl round your hand, and send it to the centre
of the crowned dogrose, into the celluloid thorns.
Be bold about it. Keep on till it crunches.
          We’ll have that rose out, without shears!
Careful the petals don’t fall off at once —
rose litter — muslin — Solomon’s flower —
wild and no good for sherbet,
giving up neither oil nor scent.

 

6

Territory of bawling stones,
Armenia, Armenia;
calling the hoarse mountains to their weapons,
Armenia, Armenia.

For centuries flying towards Asia’s trumpets of silver,
Armenia, Armenia;
the sun hands Persian coins out at will.
Armenia, Armenia.

 

7

No, not ruins but the theft of timber from the forest’s huge circumference:
a Christianity of animals and fables, with the anchoring stumps of its felled oaks.
The rolls of stone cloth that top the columns, stolen from a pagan storehouse;
and grapes the size of pigeon-eggs, and rams whose horns are curls of hair;
the ruffled eagles, with their owl’s wings, that Byzantium left undefiled.

 

8

The rose in the snow is cold:
          Three yards of snow on Sevan Island …
          A mountain fisherman drags out his blue sledge,
          the whiskered mouths of the well-fed trout
          perform police duties
          over the lime of the lakebed.

But in Yerevan and Echmiadzin
          the massive mountain’s drunk all the air,
          I’d need an ocarina’s high notes to charm it,
          a dudka to tame it,
                                          for the snow to thaw in my mouth.

Snow, snow, snow on rice paper,
          the mountain floats to my lips.
          I am cold and glad.

 

9

The hooves of a stumbling farm horse
clatter on purple granite
as its forelegs find the bald plinth,
the stone that resounds with the State.

Behind it, barely pausing for breath,
come the makers of knotted cheese,
who’ve brokered peace between God and the Devil
and render one half unto each.

 

10

What wealth in a grind-you-down village,
the hairlike music of water.
A thread? A sound? A warning?
Begone! Maintain your distance!

And in that maze of moist voices
the stale mist fills with insect sounds
as if some nymph has come to visit
the watchmaker’s home underground.

 

11

This is the last time I’ll see you,
half-blind Armenian sky,
my final glance and blink
at the roadside tent of Ararat,
my final time in the library
of perfect earth the potters wrote with,
where I opened the hollow volume
from which the first humans learned.

 

12

The blue and the clay, the clay and the blue.
What more could you want? So come on and squint,
like a half-blind shah, at a turquoise ring,
at the book of resonant clay, the earth
become book, the festering book, the clay road
we make our ordeal, as if it were music and word.