On a Moscow Train

from Prospects of Leningrad

A round of laughter down the corridor holds
a jam of students as we gather speed to clatter
towards darkness and the distant suburbs.
A massive locomotive crawls in a siding
as we pass. Monumental, heroic,
it is a barely moving block
of painted steel and unheard purpose.
Away from the centre, Leningrad dims
to street lights, and the muffled glow
of blocked and distant high-rise windows.

The samovar enshrined in the corridor
tangs the air with a delicate charcoal pungency.
The young attendant, black haired and humorous,
brings tea in rough edged glasses and silver holders.
“It’s Georgian,” he jokes. “Strong enough to make
your moustaches grow.” The smiling face of
Stalin conjured fades with the sweetness of
the tea we sip, and curtained Russia passes.
Sleep seals our train of citizens and tourists, and
holds, once more, dreams of Moscows of the morning.

Day brings birch forests and half hidden dachas,
the city of palaces and revolutions
and wide angled rivers is hours in the west.
Last night’s laughter stays asleep in its bunks –
its owners stir singly, and, clutching toilet bags,
go quietly past cabins in the grey blue light
for the morning’s morning water rituals.

The train touches the city on its lips.
Those most awake stand like visionaries
at windows, agape to have the new anatomised:
tall apartments standing, square faced and naked,
out of the open, end of winter ground;
paths passing silvered trees to litterless stations,
where people aroused to work, wait or talk,
unheedful of our expressed, passing interest.
Invisible, powerless to them,
we hardly exist. As if the gods of atheism,
we are allowed to be all seeing.

Then come the enterprises of every city:
the factories and workshops, long buildings
that contain their functions in fluorescent halls
behind their grime sheathed windows. The train slows
to its purpose, draws to a sharp, unsteadying stop.
Cases in hand, we stride the gap between
carriage and city, and then stand about
with luggage and each other in the chilly
sun. A station sign says three degrees,
much higher than it feels and we take it
as a gift of welcome, a metaphor
which means the place is warmer than its airs.

Ludwig’s Last Note

The pianist Murray McLachlan played Beethoven’s Last Piano Sonata [op 111, no 32] at a Northumberland Music Festival recital – and described the conditions under which it was probably written.

The second movement concludes the piece – no expected third – and it just winds quietly and thoughtfully to silence.

Ludwig’s Last Note

Beethoven at a Broadwood. Deaf, held in the cruelty
of jaundice, his life, as they say, a guttering candle
flickering defiance at his unlidded piano. Broken
quills litter a table; ink is open,

Spilled; paper is everywhere; staved off,
a tiny scrawl of etched entreaties, intentions,
demands.   Last movement, then. He strikes
the keys with rage he cannot hear, a tumult

of silence hisses its answer. He is pursuing
a simple theme and time keeps its distance.
His fingers seek new scales, arpeggios,
as they hammer noiselessly in his head.

Then, without a protest or the usual flourish,
they simply stop, a slowing to an absence, an emptiness.
And that’s it for the piano. He summons up the last quartets,
the European Ninth, then slips away to death.

That last sonata breaks the ground beyond.
Behind the weight of style and sound that was
his own, the sentence of that stop asserts a life
that suddenly is far too good to lose and then is gone.

 

[background]

Voluntary

The fourth year’s in the hall
sitting in gilded silence.

The Head is talking.
Uniform, behaviour
and lunchtime lateness.
A litany of regulation
for summer’s insolence.
They sit without disturbance,
absorbing the assault
upon their childhood’s anarchy.

Sunlight, escaping through
the curtains from the air outside,
kindles five faces in the front row.
They shine like brass,
expressionless as wishes.

A trumpeter practises. In a room
somewhere he picks his way
through three strands of a tune
in a cannon of repetition.
An apprentice following the master.
In the echo of the corridor
it’s hard to tell where youth
takes on from age, the one
becomes the other.

The words, the notes, the sunlight
counterpoint each other round the space
we try to fill. A bell rings.
The morning’s lessons have begun.

Balkan Pine

In the days since I fell
my skin has hardened –
red-brown, stretched tight –
weeping from the craters
where their bullets came.

If you come now, I smell of water, earth;
pine forest clings to my clothes.
There is no corruption. You smell
the men who did this,
who went away laughing.

 Ford 1999

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