(Olga Levertoff, 1914-1934)

i

By the gas fire, kneeling
to undress,
scorching luxuriously, raking
her nails over olive sides, the red
waistband ring—

(and the little sister
beady-eyed in the bed—
or drowsy, was I? My head
a camera—)

Sixteen. Her breasts
round, round, and
dark-nippled—

who now these two months long
is bones and tatters of flesh in earth.

ii

The high pitch of
nagging insistence, lines
creased into raised brows—

Ridden, ridden—
the skin around the nails
nibble sore—

You wanted 
to shout the world to its senses,
did you?—to browbeat

the poor into joy’s
socialist republic—
What rage

and human shame swept you
when you were nine and saw
the Ley Street houses,

grasping their meaning as slum.
Where I, reaching that age,
teased you, admiring

architectural probity, circa
eighteen-fifty, and noted
pride in the whitened doorsteps.

Black one, black one,
there was a white
candle in your heart.

iii
                                   i

Everything flows
                           she muttered into my childhood,
pacing the trampled grass where human puppets
rehearsed fates that summer,
stung into alien semblances by the lash of her will—

Everything flows—
I looked up from my Littlest Bear’s cane armchair 
and knew the words came from a book
and felt them alien to me

but linked to words we loved
                                                from the hymnbook—Time
like an ever-rolling stream / bears all its sons away—


                                   ii

Now as if smoke or sweetness were blown my way
I inhale a sense of her livingness in that instant.
feeling, dreaming, hoping, knowing boredom and zest like anyone else—

a young girl in the garden, the same alchemical square
I grew in, we thought sometimes
too small for our grand destinies—

                                                        But dread
was in her, a bloodbeat, it was against the rolling dark
oncoming river she raised bulwarks, setting herself
to sift cinders after early Mass all of one winter,

labelling her desk’s normal disorder, basing
her verses on Keble’s Christian Year, picking
those endless arguments, pressing on

to manipulate lives to disaster…To change,
to change the course of the river! What rage for order
disordered her pilgrimage—so that for years at a time

she would hide among strangers, waiting
to rearrange all mysteries in a new light.

                                   iii

Black one, incubus—
           she appeared
riding anguish as Tartars ride mares

over the stubble of bad years.

In one of the years
    when I didn’t know if she were dead or alive
I saw her in dream

haggard and rouged
             lit by the flare
from an eel - or cockle-stand on a slum street—

was it a dream? I had lost

all sense, almost, of
     who she was, what—inside of her skin,
under her black hair
                                dyed blonde—

it might feel like to be, in the wax and wane of the moon,
in the life I feel as unfolding, not flowing, the pilgrim years—

iv

On your hospital bed you lay
in love, the hatreds
that had followed you, a
comet’s tail, burned out

as your disasters bred of love
burned out,
while pain and drugs
quarreled like sisters in you—

lay afloat on the sea
of love and pain—how you always
loved that cadence. ‘Underneath
are the everlasting arms’—

all history
burned out, down
to the sick bone, save for

that kind candle.

v
                                  i

In a garden grew whenas I lay—

you set the words to a tune so plaintive
it plucks its way through my life as through a wood.

As through a wood, shadow and light between birches,
gliding a moment in open glades, hidden by thickets of holly

your life winds in me.                                 In Valentines
a root protrudes from the greensward several yards from its tree

we might raise like a trapdoor’s handle, you said,
and descend long steps to another country

where we would live without father or mother
and without longing for the upper world. The birds
sang sweet, O song, in the midst of the daye,

and we entered silent mid-Essex churches on hot afternoons
and communed with the effigies of knights and their ladies

and their slender dogs asleep at their feet,
the stone so cold—                 In youth

is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.

                                  ii

Under autumn clouds, under white
wideness of winter skies you went walking
the year you were most alone

returning to the old roads, seeing again
the signposts pointing to Theydon Garnon
or Stapleford Abbots or Greensted,

crossing the ploughlands (where color I named murple,
a shade between brown and mauve that we loved
when I was a child and you

not much more than a child) finding new lanes
near White Boding or Abbess Roding, or lost in Romford’s
new streets where there were footpaths then—

frowning as you ground out your thoughts, breathing deep
of the damp still air, taking
the frost into your mind unflinching.

How cold it was in your thin coat, your down-at-heel shoes—
tearless Niobe, your children were lost to you
and the stage lights had gone out, even the empty theater

was locked to you, cavern of transformation where all
had almost been possible.
                                         How many books
you read in your silent lodgings that winter,
how the plovers transpierced your solitude out of doors with their angry cries
I had flung open my arms to in longing, once, by your side
stumbling over the furrows—

Oh, in your torn stockings, with unwaved hair,
you were trudging after your anguish
over the bare fields, soberly, soberly.

vi

Your eyes were the brown gold of pebbles under water.
I never crossed the bridge over the Roding, dividing
the open field of the present from the mysteries,
the wraiths and shifts of time-sense Wanstead Park held suspended,
without remembering your eyes. Even when we were estranged
and my own eyes smarted in pain and anger at the thought of you.
And by other streams in other countries, anywhere where the light
reaches down through shallows to gold gravel. Olga’s
brown eyes. One rainy summer, down in the New Forest,
when we could hardly breathe for ennui and the low sky,
you turned savagely to the piano and sightread
straight through all the Beethoven sonatas, day after day—
weeks, it seemed to me. I would turn the pages some of the time,
go out to ride my bike, return—you were enduring in the
falls and rapids of the music, the arpeggios rang out, the rectory
trembled, our parents seemed effaced.
I think of your eyes in that photo, six years before I was born,
the fear in them. What did you do with your fear, 
later? Through the years of humiliation,
of paranoia and blackmail and near-starvation, losing
the love of those you loved, one after another,
parents, lovers, children, idolized friends, what kept
compassion’s candle alight in you, that lit you
clear into another chapter (but the same book) ‘a clearing
in the selva oscura,
a house whose door
swings open, a hand beckons
in welcome’?
                      I cross
so many brooks in the world, there is so much light
dancing on so many stones, so many questions my eyes
smart to ask of your eyes, gold brown eyes,
the lashes short but the lids
arched as if carved out of olivewood, eyes with some vision
of festive goodness in back of their hand, or veiled, or shining,
unknowable gaze…