Facing East by Ruth Padel

Facing East             

This steel shell memorial to two lives,

a composer and his singer, looms at me

before sun-up like a guardian of the earth –

or a freezing North Sea re-run of the birth

of Aphrodite. Dark, says the sculptor

in her book. Dark like a wave born

backwards, shattering as it breaks.

Light and dark like life and death,

part shining and part rust, with movement

between colours as between the forms.

I creep in and run my hand along a frilled

bronze rim. A bivalve – two shells or

a single broken one self-joining at the core.

I think of the philandering sigh of ocean,

life-long partners betraying and forgiving

and Plato’s cave: the fire, the sun

and how, arguing against his gift, he banned

artists for reflecting our world back

with a false beauty, making real unreal,

enticing us to take the shadow for the thing.

I gaze out, invisible as Echo,

at a lead gauze sea. Over my head

the breaker’s cusp is a fanned-card silhouette.

Round the edge, letters punched out of metal

like finger-holes in a flute, write in paling sky,

I hear the voices of the drowned. Iron cloud

on the horizon splices day from night

like west from east. On the news

is flat-to-flat urban warfare in Aleppo

and air attacks on Gaza. Over here, in kitchens,

at the Tuesday evening pub quiz, on the bus or tube,

how quickly arguments flare up

even in England; even if we’ve never been

to what we call the middle of the east.

We identify. Some chasm through the centre

must be in and of us all: creatures of relation

and division, always wrong-footed by the past

on its bed of ice, the sub-tectonic clash

of ancient histories on common ground.

Suddenly I see this rifted arabesque,

a monument to music joined only at its core,

is all of us. Harmonia’s gift is cursed.

She can’t help it, she’s Aphrodite’s child –

one false note and what you get is discord –

and her father, lord of war,

is Apollo’s enemy. East or west, the first thing

looting soldiers smash (before starting on God’s

perfect instrument, the larynx) is an oud or violin.

Sing the sadness and pain of Sabah,

the microtonal range of the maqam.

Hijaz, conjuring distant desert

and our longing for it. Sing the body:

tongue and teeth to whistle through,

palms to clap, lips to hum, vibrate

or tremble, and the fragile, mucus-laden

vox humana. Sing also of David’s harp

placed sideways on the mountain, pitched

to catch wind blowing from rocks

below the tower of Lebanon which looks

toward the oldest city in the world –

whose sky burns indigo, dark-pearled

as strong espresso, above the fountain

in Umayyad Mosque. Where children

used to lick orchid-root ice cream

from Bakdash Parlour and now play

Asking-for-Papers-of-Identity-

at-Gun-Point. Where Saladin

and the head of John the Baptist

both lie buried. Where old men

with pewter urns poured tamarisk-

flavour liquorice in sudden jumps,

the way a flat stone skims water.

Al Fayha, Fragrant City, home

to rosa damascena and the damask plum:

these dawn-lit pebbles of the west

glow like your hieroglyph intarsia

whose weavers set compound floats

of warp and weft at angles to reflect

light scatter-wise, depending who you are

and where you’re looking from.

What will survive are meanings we have found

in what the world has made. Like the calm

rufous freckling of those burnished steps –

infused with cardamom, I remember –

to Al-Hamidiyah Souq beside the citadel.

And at the top, strings of hanging flip-flops,

rosewood sets of backgammon like puzzle books

inlaid with mother-of-pearl, glinting gargoyle fish

and stalls of uncut samite, whose glitter-twill

depends on optic interference like the play of light

in Damascus Twist, the iron-plait steel

of sword blades and gun-barrels:

the mystery metal welded in carbon fire

which can cut a rifle muzzle or a hair

floating across a dagger. Whose laminate spirals,

acid-bitten into waves, resemble damask.

What would we be without desire for form?

Pattern keeps us safe. We look for omens in a flock

of redwing, the gods’ will in dappled entrails,

the outline of a story in the stars. We break the line

to shape it, string catgut over membrane,

set up a ten-foot memorial

to music – a scallop shell, a pilgrim’s prayer –

in shale of an eroding coast

and turn it east to face the storm.

Voices of the drowned. I watch dawn

gild the sea to iridescence. Sea-birds arc

and squawk and flicker-print the air.

Breakers roar on draining shingle.

Palmetto patterns dint the waves

from grey to silver, hyacinth and jade.

Making is our defence against the dark.