Cello Music by JAMES LASDUN

You’re visiting a castle. There’s a lake,

A hill, a wood, gardens, a herd of deer,

And then inside, paintings of lakes and hills,

Mounted antlers, the cornucopian year

Carved in four oak festoons--you’re here to slake

A once-yearly thirst for the concentrate

Of irretrievable times. It doesn’t work--

Like drinking to get drunk and staying sober;

The trees don’t make a wood, that rain-pocked murk

Won’t turn into a lake, you can’t translate

These stones into a castle . . . Time to go;

The windows darken as you set off home--

Room after room, the blaze of chandeliers

Sliding away like honey from a comb,

Days out of a life, or any slow

Extinguishing of fire . . . Much later on,

Reaching a village with a puddled street

And wet bronze soldier, slowing down, you see

Framed in a window misted by the heat

Of a single lamp and her own action,

A woman playing the cello, all alone

In a plain room at a plain brass music stand,

But cradling rose-grained curves and scrolls of wood

Like something alive; one splayed-out, powerful hand

Trembling where her blood pulses into the tone

As she plunges and draws back the bow--

She seems incongruous in this dead place,

Its only light her own. You cannot hear

But you can see the music in her face,

Its ecstasies--you see it now

And it’s not a face you see, but a lake

Mottled like jade with lily-pads, dead leaves,

Gold in a silk-tailed swish scrolled through the black--

You climb a hill, and underfoot thick sheaves

Of wet grass furrow silver like the track

A finger leaves in velvet. Browsing deer

Move like a forest carpet come to life--

Split chestnut eyes, bare branches, wet red leaves

Dotted with melting snow, you catch a whiff

Of wild rose, then white battlements appear.

From “A Jump Start” by James Lasdun (W.W. Norton: $7.95, paper; 46 pp.; 0-393-30590-2). Lasdun, who now lives in New York, is a member of the younger generation of British poets, a generation including Craig Raine, Michael Hofmann, James Fenton and Tony Harrison. 1989, James Lasdun. Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Co.