Helen Tookey

 

For a number of years now, the beautiful Bodnant Garden in the Conwy valley has been the place where we usually stop on our way from Liverpool to family holidays in Anglesey. It struck me that this had become (for me, anyway) an important ritual, and I wanted to try to explore it in writing. I began by just trying to write down, in fragments, everything that came into my head when I thought about the garden. I was interested in the fact that I was writing at a distance (both geographically and temporally), so that the text is constructed out of memory and imagination, somewhat at an angle to the place itself. I enjoyed the way that different sections took on different forms and slightly different voices, although I hope that there is a sense of a connecting consciousness throughout the whole. This use of different forms and voices was also, I think, connected to my use of found text (from a 1960s guidebook to the garden, and from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, in English translation); the phrasing, sounds or rhythms of these pieces of text acted as drivers, and perhaps pushed my own writing into directions it would not otherwise have taken. The wider underlying idea that this piece connects to, and which I’m trying to explore from various angles (hopefully, eventually, forming a next collection of poems), is the endlessly puzzling and intriguing question of the self (or ‘personal identity’) through time.

 

 

A Choice of Paths

 

There are many different ways

by which a visitor may walk round the garden

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor

 

 

Has a choice of paths

Should follow the path to the left

Should descend the steps on his right

 

Soon passes a sloping lawn

Sees a tract of grassland

Finds himself on the Rose Terrace

 

Should take the steps on the right

Should take the broad gravel path

Should continue upwards

 

Will pass the end of the Magnolia Borders

Will see below him a bank devoted entirely to camellias

At once will enjoy fine views

 

Who does not wish to descend

However, who descends

Should descend by either of the two flights of steps

 

Should turn left along a formal path

Should cross the lawn towards the corner of the house

Has a sudden view of a waterfall

 

Should leave the Round Garden by the gravel path

Should continue along the path that inclines upwards

In late May and early June, should not fail

 

 

*

 

 

Different possible unfoldings.

 

We might take the steep path

by the sequoias, plunge at once

into depth, downwardness

 

but then we should miss

the ordered pleasures of the terraces,

their geometries.

 

A difference of scale,

of orientation.

 

On the terraces we stand outlined

in air. At right angles

to the plane of the lawns.

 

Under the trees we are creaturely,

held. Unsure of our footing

on sliding ground.

 

The steep path pulls like a child

but we smile and shake our heads,

turn towards the terraces.

 

Something resistant in us still.

Not yet encompassed.

 

 

*

 

 

The present […] must already announce itself as what will soon be past,

we must feel the pressure upon it of a future

already intent on dispossessing it

 

 

There is always a child.

 

The child always runs ahead,

along the path. Come on! says the child,

tugging at your hand. The child wants

to reach the future. The child wants to know

where the path will lead.

 

You dawdle. You already know.

 

There is always a child,

but the child is not always the same child.

 

This summer, Edith runs along the paths,

finds the small graves of the family pets

beneath the sequoia.

 

 

*

 

 

The main feature of the Lily Terrace

is a formal piece of water

 

 

Hold it up to your mind, turn it over.

A smooth surface, a regular shape:

shallow, long, rectangular.

Uniform in substance: rhyming itself

all the way through. A falling beat,

a slow measure. A new line of thought.

Pleasure of valid argument,

of sound construction: tight as a drum.

Turning it over, looking for holes,

looking for missteps. Finding none.

 

 

*

 

 

What desire is mirrored to us

from the lily-pond?

 

Overlapping circles of platelike leaves.

Spirograph symmetry of flowerheads.

 

Plants with their roots in water, their heads in air.

Exploiting the trick of surface tension,

balanced on a skin we would fall right through.

 

Inches above the water-surface

we watch dragonflies mating in air.

 

Pink, green, shiny-metallic,

clamped to each other like mechanical toys.

Miniature cybernauts

carrying out their programming.

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor should descend by either of the two flights of steps

that follow the curve of the bowed wall.

 

 

We delay.

 

We walk among the roses,

we kneel by the lily ponds

as long as we can.

 

But all the while we know it,

we feel it in every part of ourselves

– the river running in the valley floor,

inside the rocky throat of itself.

 

The pull of water.

 

 

*

 

 

Hiraethlyn

 

 

The river’s name is longing.

What it means is: you can never go back.

 

Try to put your finger on it,

try to stop yourself in your own tracks

 

– you can’t. Any more than

the children’s dams of sticks and leaves

can stop the mill-race.

 

Whirlpools, swallow holes.

It worries away at its own contours,

becomes more and more its own reactions.

 

Streaming: you as flow.

Electrical impulse, spark gap.

Memory perhaps nothing more

than a by-product of so much change.

 

But does the river have memory?

Can it look back and see itself

or is it only instants

 

separate as the silver beads

it shatters to in its constant falling

over the weir?

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor who descends to the Dell

will find much to enjoy.

 

 

The path brings us out at the stone bridge

where we cross the river, join the crowd.

Adults drink coffee from paper cups,

children eat ice-cream.

 

It’s funny: here at the lowest point,

far down on the valley floor

– shouldn’t there be sombreness?

But there is joy, a sense of celebration.

 

Only inside the old mill is it different:

the cold stone, the huge wheel

stopped and waiting.

 

Here, the children never linger.

 

They wrinkle their noses, like dogs,

at the dank smell of green stone,

of dripping water.

 

They could not say why

but they know for sure

this is no place for them.

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor has a choice of paths,

up either side of the little river

 

 

The pink hydrangeas are pretty,

but the blue!

We are greedy for the blue,

the huge pale globes of them

against the valley’s deep greens.

 

Palest brightest bits of blue

like miniature bits of broken china,

dolls’ tea-plates.

 

The blue hydrangeas speak to us

of things very far away –

 

palest highest thinnest sky

over the mountains

 

or the syllables of Himalaya

– lovely, and never ours.

 

 

*

 

 

Pride of place among the shrubs

is held by rhododendrons

 

 

But wasn’t there always something about them –

 

met in the shady places

where parks gave way to undergrowth,

to almost-woods

 

something like trees but low, dense –

 

crawlspaces,

smooth glowing reddish branches

twisting into tunnels, caves

 

roofs and walls of stiff dark glossy green

floor a dry scuff of dust

 

and the flowers! bright hot

showy splashes of purple and pink

 

– puzzling mix

of forest and hot-house,

 

didn’t they always seem to speak

of somewhere else?

 

 

*

 

 

The upkeep of woods, fences, and river banks is an obvious expense.

Watchers and caretakers have to be paid

 

 

and you know they have seen you,

many times, as you walked the paths:

 

bright eyes among the trees,

small beings the height of children

 

but old as the hills, old

as this steepsided valley itself

 

 – yes, they have watched you,

holding out their invisible hands

 

as you walked the paths, at every instant

and everywhere ahead of you.

 

Watchers and caretakers have to be paid

but with what must you pay them, what currency

 

will they accept? – You have paid them already,

whether you willed it or no,

 

with that which runs away from you

and away with you, as the mill-race runs

 

always and ever away with itself.

 

 

*

 

 

What question are you trying to answer?

Whose past, whose future?

 

In the same way I can never coincide with my life

which is for ever fleeing from itself

 

– and Edith runs

away from you, along the path

              becomes

a smaller version of herself

another child in another summer –

 

 

*

 

 

Laburnum

 

 

Etymology unknown.

 

Perhaps lapa, laba, rock, from the terrain

on which it grows. Perhaps labrum, lip,

or labor, to glide down. Also known

as golden chain, golden rain.

 

Deep shining lake of gold – we drink it,

we drown in it. Pressed down

by the weight of gold:

no air, no breathing-space.

 

All parts of the plant are poisonous.

 

 

*

 

 

If the world is the field of our experience

and if we are nothing but a view of the world…

 

 

Why then this particular view,

why this seeing?

 

Somewhere that can only ever be

a temporary stopping-point.

 

Somewhere you can only ever be

a visitor –

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor should take the path that leads upwards

 

 

The way back is a steep climb.

 

Here, we skirt –

we keep to the edges.

 

We could return to the terraces,

but we never do.

It seems we can’t risk

their density,

their involutions.

 

Instead, we go to the grassland,

the looser parts,

where it’s really hardly

a garden at all.

 

Where we can start to imagine

how we might leave.

 

 

 

Notes

 

Text in italics is taken from the guidebook The Garden at Bodnant, Tal-y-Cafn, Denbighshire (Norwich: Jarrold & Sons, for the National Trust, c. 1967), except for ‘The present […] must already announce itself as what will soon be past…’, ‘In the same way I can never coincide with my life…’, and ‘If the world is the field of our experience…’, which (in prose form) are from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 414, p. 383, p. 406.

 

Helen Tookey

 

For a number of years now, the beautiful Bodnant Garden in the Conwy valley has been the place where we usually stop on our way from Liverpool to family holidays in Anglesey. It struck me that this had become (for me, anyway) an important ritual, and I wanted to try to explore it in writing. I began by just trying to write down, in fragments, everything that came into my head when I thought about the garden. I was interested in the fact that I was writing at a distance (both geographically and temporally), so that the text is constructed out of memory and imagination, somewhat at an angle to the place itself. I enjoyed the way that different sections took on different forms and slightly different voices, although I hope that there is a sense of a connecting consciousness throughout the whole. This use of different forms and voices was also, I think, connected to my use of found text (from a 1960s guidebook to the garden, and from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, in English translation); the phrasing, sounds or rhythms of these pieces of text acted as drivers, and perhaps pushed my own writing into directions it would not otherwise have taken. The wider underlying idea that this piece connects to, and which I’m trying to explore from various angles (hopefully, eventually, forming a next collection of poems), is the endlessly puzzling and intriguing question of the self (or ‘personal identity’) through time.

 

 

A Choice of Paths

 

There are many different ways

by which a visitor may walk round the garden

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor

 

 

Has a choice of paths

Should follow the path to the left

Should descend the steps on his right

 

Soon passes a sloping lawn

Sees a tract of grassland

Finds himself on the Rose Terrace

 

Should take the steps on the right

Should take the broad gravel path

Should continue upwards

 

Will pass the end of the Magnolia Borders

Will see below him a bank devoted entirely to camellias

At once will enjoy fine views

 

Who does not wish to descend

However, who descends

Should descend by either of the two flights of steps

 

Should turn left along a formal path

Should cross the lawn towards the corner of the house

Has a sudden view of a waterfall

 

Should leave the Round Garden by the gravel path

Should continue along the path that inclines upwards

In late May and early June, should not fail

 

 

*

 

 

Different possible unfoldings.

 

We might take the steep path

by the sequoias, plunge at once

into depth, downwardness

 

but then we should miss

the ordered pleasures of the terraces,

their geometries.

 

A difference of scale,

of orientation.

 

On the terraces we stand outlined

in air. At right angles

to the plane of the lawns.

 

Under the trees we are creaturely,

held. Unsure of our footing

on sliding ground.

 

The steep path pulls like a child

but we smile and shake our heads,

turn towards the terraces.

 

Something resistant in us still.

Not yet encompassed.

 

 

*

 

 

The present […] must already announce itself as what will soon be past,

we must feel the pressure upon it of a future

already intent on dispossessing it

 

 

There is always a child.

 

The child always runs ahead,

along the path. Come on! says the child,

tugging at your hand. The child wants

to reach the future. The child wants to know

where the path will lead.

 

You dawdle. You already know.

 

There is always a child,

but the child is not always the same child.

 

This summer, Edith runs along the paths,

finds the small graves of the family pets

beneath the sequoia.

 

 

*

 

 

The main feature of the Lily Terrace

is a formal piece of water

 

 

Hold it up to your mind, turn it over.

A smooth surface, a regular shape:

shallow, long, rectangular.

Uniform in substance: rhyming itself

all the way through. A falling beat,

a slow measure. A new line of thought.

Pleasure of valid argument,

of sound construction: tight as a drum.

Turning it over, looking for holes,

looking for missteps. Finding none.

 

 

*

 

 

What desire is mirrored to us

from the lily-pond?

 

Overlapping circles of platelike leaves.

Spirograph symmetry of flowerheads.

 

Plants with their roots in water, their heads in air.

Exploiting the trick of surface tension,

balanced on a skin we would fall right through.

 

Inches above the water-surface

we watch dragonflies mating in air.

 

Pink, green, shiny-metallic,

clamped to each other like mechanical toys.

Miniature cybernauts

carrying out their programming.

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor should descend by either of the two flights of steps

that follow the curve of the bowed wall.

 

 

We delay.

 

We walk among the roses,

we kneel by the lily ponds

as long as we can.

 

But all the while we know it,

we feel it in every part of ourselves

– the river running in the valley floor,

inside the rocky throat of itself.

 

The pull of water.

 

 

*

 

 

Hiraethlyn

 

 

The river’s name is longing.

What it means is: you can never go back.

 

Try to put your finger on it,

try to stop yourself in your own tracks

 

– you can’t. Any more than

the children’s dams of sticks and leaves

can stop the mill-race.

 

Whirlpools, swallow holes.

It worries away at its own contours,

becomes more and more its own reactions.

 

Streaming: you as flow.

Electrical impulse, spark gap.

Memory perhaps nothing more

than a by-product of so much change.

 

But does the river have memory?

Can it look back and see itself

or is it only instants

 

separate as the silver beads

it shatters to in its constant falling

over the weir?

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor who descends to the Dell

will find much to enjoy.

 

 

The path brings us out at the stone bridge

where we cross the river, join the crowd.

Adults drink coffee from paper cups,

children eat ice-cream.

 

It’s funny: here at the lowest point,

far down on the valley floor

– shouldn’t there be sombreness?

But there is joy, a sense of celebration.

 

Only inside the old mill is it different:

the cold stone, the huge wheel

stopped and waiting.

 

Here, the children never linger.

 

They wrinkle their noses, like dogs,

at the dank smell of green stone,

of dripping water.

 

They could not say why

but they know for sure

this is no place for them.

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor has a choice of paths,

up either side of the little river

 

 

The pink hydrangeas are pretty,

but the blue!

We are greedy for the blue,

the huge pale globes of them

against the valley’s deep greens.

 

Palest brightest bits of blue

like miniature bits of broken china,

dolls’ tea-plates.

 

The blue hydrangeas speak to us

of things very far away –

 

palest highest thinnest sky

over the mountains

 

or the syllables of Himalaya

– lovely, and never ours.

 

 

*

 

 

Pride of place among the shrubs

is held by rhododendrons

 

 

But wasn’t there always something about them –

 

met in the shady places

where parks gave way to undergrowth,

to almost-woods

 

something like trees but low, dense –

 

crawlspaces,

smooth glowing reddish branches

twisting into tunnels, caves

 

roofs and walls of stiff dark glossy green

floor a dry scuff of dust

 

and the flowers! bright hot

showy splashes of purple and pink

 

– puzzling mix

of forest and hot-house,

 

didn’t they always seem to speak

of somewhere else?

 

 

*

 

 

The upkeep of woods, fences, and river banks is an obvious expense.

Watchers and caretakers have to be paid

 

 

and you know they have seen you,

many times, as you walked the paths:

 

bright eyes among the trees,

small beings the height of children

 

but old as the hills, old

as this steepsided valley itself

 

 – yes, they have watched you,

holding out their invisible hands

 

as you walked the paths, at every instant

and everywhere ahead of you.

 

Watchers and caretakers have to be paid

but with what must you pay them, what currency

 

will they accept? – You have paid them already,

whether you willed it or no,

 

with that which runs away from you

and away with you, as the mill-race runs

 

always and ever away with itself.

 

 

*

 

 

What question are you trying to answer?

Whose past, whose future?

 

In the same way I can never coincide with my life

which is for ever fleeing from itself

 

– and Edith runs

away from you, along the path

              becomes

a smaller version of herself

another child in another summer –

 

 

*

 

 

Laburnum

 

 

Etymology unknown.

 

Perhaps lapa, laba, rock, from the terrain

on which it grows. Perhaps labrum, lip,

or labor, to glide down. Also known

as golden chain, golden rain.

 

Deep shining lake of gold – we drink it,

we drown in it. Pressed down

by the weight of gold:

no air, no breathing-space.

 

All parts of the plant are poisonous.

 

 

*

 

 

If the world is the field of our experience

and if we are nothing but a view of the world…

 

 

Why then this particular view,

why this seeing?

 

Somewhere that can only ever be

a temporary stopping-point.

 

Somewhere you can only ever be

a visitor –

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor should take the path that leads upwards

 

 

The way back is a steep climb.

 

Here, we skirt –

we keep to the edges.

 

We could return to the terraces,

but we never do.

It seems we can’t risk

their density,

their involutions.

 

Instead, we go to the grassland,

the looser parts,

where it’s really hardly

a garden at all.

 

Where we can start to imagine

how we might leave.

 

 

 

Notes

 

Text in italics is taken from the guidebook The Garden at Bodnant, Tal-y-Cafn, Denbighshire (Norwich: Jarrold & Sons, for the National Trust, c. 1967), except for ‘The present […] must already announce itself as what will soon be past…’, ‘In the same way I can never coincide with my life…’, and ‘If the world is the field of our experience…’, which (in prose form) are from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 414, p. 383, p. 406.

 

Helen Tookey

 

For a number of years now, the beautiful Bodnant Garden in the Conwy valley has been the place where we usually stop on our way from Liverpool to family holidays in Anglesey. It struck me that this had become (for me, anyway) an important ritual, and I wanted to try to explore it in writing. I began by just trying to write down, in fragments, everything that came into my head when I thought about the garden. I was interested in the fact that I was writing at a distance (both geographically and temporally), so that the text is constructed out of memory and imagination, somewhat at an angle to the place itself. I enjoyed the way that different sections took on different forms and slightly different voices, although I hope that there is a sense of a connecting consciousness throughout the whole. This use of different forms and voices was also, I think, connected to my use of found text (from a 1960s guidebook to the garden, and from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, in English translation); the phrasing, sounds or rhythms of these pieces of text acted as drivers, and perhaps pushed my own writing into directions it would not otherwise have taken. The wider underlying idea that this piece connects to, and which I’m trying to explore from various angles (hopefully, eventually, forming a next collection of poems), is the endlessly puzzling and intriguing question of the self (or ‘personal identity’) through time.

 

 

A Choice of Paths

 

There are many different ways

by which a visitor may walk round the garden

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor

 

 

Has a choice of paths

Should follow the path to the left

Should descend the steps on his right

 

Soon passes a sloping lawn

Sees a tract of grassland

Finds himself on the Rose Terrace

 

Should take the steps on the right

Should take the broad gravel path

Should continue upwards

 

Will pass the end of the Magnolia Borders

Will see below him a bank devoted entirely to camellias

At once will enjoy fine views

 

Who does not wish to descend

However, who descends

Should descend by either of the two flights of steps

 

Should turn left along a formal path

Should cross the lawn towards the corner of the house

Has a sudden view of a waterfall

 

Should leave the Round Garden by the gravel path

Should continue along the path that inclines upwards

In late May and early June, should not fail

 

 

*

 

 

Different possible unfoldings.

 

We might take the steep path

by the sequoias, plunge at once

into depth, downwardness

 

but then we should miss

the ordered pleasures of the terraces,

their geometries.

 

A difference of scale,

of orientation.

 

On the terraces we stand outlined

in air. At right angles

to the plane of the lawns.

 

Under the trees we are creaturely,

held. Unsure of our footing

on sliding ground.

 

The steep path pulls like a child

but we smile and shake our heads,

turn towards the terraces.

 

Something resistant in us still.

Not yet encompassed.

 

 

*

 

 

The present […] must already announce itself as what will soon be past,

we must feel the pressure upon it of a future

already intent on dispossessing it

 

 

There is always a child.

 

The child always runs ahead,

along the path. Come on! says the child,

tugging at your hand. The child wants

to reach the future. The child wants to know

where the path will lead.

 

You dawdle. You already know.

 

There is always a child,

but the child is not always the same child.

 

This summer, Edith runs along the paths,

finds the small graves of the family pets

beneath the sequoia.

 

 

*

 

 

The main feature of the Lily Terrace

is a formal piece of water

 

 

Hold it up to your mind, turn it over.

A smooth surface, a regular shape:

shallow, long, rectangular.

Uniform in substance: rhyming itself

all the way through. A falling beat,

a slow measure. A new line of thought.

Pleasure of valid argument,

of sound construction: tight as a drum.

Turning it over, looking for holes,

looking for missteps. Finding none.

 

 

*

 

 

What desire is mirrored to us

from the lily-pond?

 

Overlapping circles of platelike leaves.

Spirograph symmetry of flowerheads.

 

Plants with their roots in water, their heads in air.

Exploiting the trick of surface tension,

balanced on a skin we would fall right through.

 

Inches above the water-surface

we watch dragonflies mating in air.

 

Pink, green, shiny-metallic,

clamped to each other like mechanical toys.

Miniature cybernauts

carrying out their programming.

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor should descend by either of the two flights of steps

that follow the curve of the bowed wall.

 

 

We delay.

 

We walk among the roses,

we kneel by the lily ponds

as long as we can.

 

But all the while we know it,

we feel it in every part of ourselves

– the river running in the valley floor,

inside the rocky throat of itself.

 

The pull of water.

 

 

*

 

 

Hiraethlyn

 

 

The river’s name is longing.

What it means is: you can never go back.

 

Try to put your finger on it,

try to stop yourself in your own tracks

 

– you can’t. Any more than

the children’s dams of sticks and leaves

can stop the mill-race.

 

Whirlpools, swallow holes.

It worries away at its own contours,

becomes more and more its own reactions.

 

Streaming: you as flow.

Electrical impulse, spark gap.

Memory perhaps nothing more

than a by-product of so much change.

 

But does the river have memory?

Can it look back and see itself

or is it only instants

 

separate as the silver beads

it shatters to in its constant falling

over the weir?

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor who descends to the Dell

will find much to enjoy.

 

 

The path brings us out at the stone bridge

where we cross the river, join the crowd.

Adults drink coffee from paper cups,

children eat ice-cream.

 

It’s funny: here at the lowest point,

far down on the valley floor

– shouldn’t there be sombreness?

But there is joy, a sense of celebration.

 

Only inside the old mill is it different:

the cold stone, the huge wheel

stopped and waiting.

 

Here, the children never linger.

 

They wrinkle their noses, like dogs,

at the dank smell of green stone,

of dripping water.

 

They could not say why

but they know for sure

this is no place for them.

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor has a choice of paths,

up either side of the little river

 

 

The pink hydrangeas are pretty,

but the blue!

We are greedy for the blue,

the huge pale globes of them

against the valley’s deep greens.

 

Palest brightest bits of blue

like miniature bits of broken china,

dolls’ tea-plates.

 

The blue hydrangeas speak to us

of things very far away –

 

palest highest thinnest sky

over the mountains

 

or the syllables of Himalaya

– lovely, and never ours.

 

 

*

 

 

Pride of place among the shrubs

is held by rhododendrons

 

 

But wasn’t there always something about them –

 

met in the shady places

where parks gave way to undergrowth,

to almost-woods

 

something like trees but low, dense –

 

crawlspaces,

smooth glowing reddish branches

twisting into tunnels, caves

 

roofs and walls of stiff dark glossy green

floor a dry scuff of dust

 

and the flowers! bright hot

showy splashes of purple and pink

 

– puzzling mix

of forest and hot-house,

 

didn’t they always seem to speak

of somewhere else?

 

 

*

 

 

The upkeep of woods, fences, and river banks is an obvious expense.

Watchers and caretakers have to be paid

 

 

and you know they have seen you,

many times, as you walked the paths:

 

bright eyes among the trees,

small beings the height of children

 

but old as the hills, old

as this steepsided valley itself

 

 – yes, they have watched you,

holding out their invisible hands

 

as you walked the paths, at every instant

and everywhere ahead of you.

 

Watchers and caretakers have to be paid

but with what must you pay them, what currency

 

will they accept? – You have paid them already,

whether you willed it or no,

 

with that which runs away from you

and away with you, as the mill-race runs

 

always and ever away with itself.

 

 

*

 

 

What question are you trying to answer?

Whose past, whose future?

 

In the same way I can never coincide with my life

which is for ever fleeing from itself

 

– and Edith runs

away from you, along the path

              becomes

a smaller version of herself

another child in another summer –

 

 

*

 

 

Laburnum

 

 

Etymology unknown.

 

Perhaps lapa, laba, rock, from the terrain

on which it grows. Perhaps labrum, lip,

or labor, to glide down. Also known

as golden chain, golden rain.

 

Deep shining lake of gold – we drink it,

we drown in it. Pressed down

by the weight of gold:

no air, no breathing-space.

 

All parts of the plant are poisonous.

 

 

*

 

 

If the world is the field of our experience

and if we are nothing but a view of the world…

 

 

Why then this particular view,

why this seeing?

 

Somewhere that can only ever be

a temporary stopping-point.

 

Somewhere you can only ever be

a visitor –

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor should take the path that leads upwards

 

 

The way back is a steep climb.

 

Here, we skirt –

we keep to the edges.

 

We could return to the terraces,

but we never do.

It seems we can’t risk

their density,

their involutions.

 

Instead, we go to the grassland,

the looser parts,

where it’s really hardly

a garden at all.

 

Where we can start to imagine

how we might leave.

 

 

 

Notes

 

Text in italics is taken from the guidebook The Garden at Bodnant, Tal-y-Cafn, Denbighshire (Norwich: Jarrold & Sons, for the National Trust, c. 1967), except for ‘The present […] must already announce itself as what will soon be past…’, ‘In the same way I can never coincide with my life…’, and ‘If the world is the field of our experience…’, which (in prose form) are from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 414, p. 383, p. 406.

 

Helen Tookey

 

For a number of years now, the beautiful Bodnant Garden in the Conwy valley has been the place where we usually stop on our way from Liverpool to family holidays in Anglesey. It struck me that this had become (for me, anyway) an important ritual, and I wanted to try to explore it in writing. I began by just trying to write down, in fragments, everything that came into my head when I thought about the garden. I was interested in the fact that I was writing at a distance (both geographically and temporally), so that the text is constructed out of memory and imagination, somewhat at an angle to the place itself. I enjoyed the way that different sections took on different forms and slightly different voices, although I hope that there is a sense of a connecting consciousness throughout the whole. This use of different forms and voices was also, I think, connected to my use of found text (from a 1960s guidebook to the garden, and from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, in English translation); the phrasing, sounds or rhythms of these pieces of text acted as drivers, and perhaps pushed my own writing into directions it would not otherwise have taken. The wider underlying idea that this piece connects to, and which I’m trying to explore from various angles (hopefully, eventually, forming a next collection of poems), is the endlessly puzzling and intriguing question of the self (or ‘personal identity’) through time.

 

 

A Choice of Paths

 

There are many different ways

by which a visitor may walk round the garden

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor

 

 

Has a choice of paths

Should follow the path to the left

Should descend the steps on his right

 

Soon passes a sloping lawn

Sees a tract of grassland

Finds himself on the Rose Terrace

 

Should take the steps on the right

Should take the broad gravel path

Should continue upwards

 

Will pass the end of the Magnolia Borders

Will see below him a bank devoted entirely to camellias

At once will enjoy fine views

 

Who does not wish to descend

However, who descends

Should descend by either of the two flights of steps

 

Should turn left along a formal path

Should cross the lawn towards the corner of the house

Has a sudden view of a waterfall

 

Should leave the Round Garden by the gravel path

Should continue along the path that inclines upwards

In late May and early June, should not fail

 

 

*

 

 

Different possible unfoldings.

 

We might take the steep path

by the sequoias, plunge at once

into depth, downwardness

 

but then we should miss

the ordered pleasures of the terraces,

their geometries.

 

A difference of scale,

of orientation.

 

On the terraces we stand outlined

in air. At right angles

to the plane of the lawns.

 

Under the trees we are creaturely,

held. Unsure of our footing

on sliding ground.

 

The steep path pulls like a child

but we smile and shake our heads,

turn towards the terraces.

 

Something resistant in us still.

Not yet encompassed.

 

 

*

 

 

The present […] must already announce itself as what will soon be past,

we must feel the pressure upon it of a future

already intent on dispossessing it

 

 

There is always a child.

 

The child always runs ahead,

along the path. Come on! says the child,

tugging at your hand. The child wants

to reach the future. The child wants to know

where the path will lead.

 

You dawdle. You already know.

 

There is always a child,

but the child is not always the same child.

 

This summer, Edith runs along the paths,

finds the small graves of the family pets

beneath the sequoia.

 

 

*

 

 

The main feature of the Lily Terrace

is a formal piece of water

 

 

Hold it up to your mind, turn it over.

A smooth surface, a regular shape:

shallow, long, rectangular.

Uniform in substance: rhyming itself

all the way through. A falling beat,

a slow measure. A new line of thought.

Pleasure of valid argument,

of sound construction: tight as a drum.

Turning it over, looking for holes,

looking for missteps. Finding none.

 

 

*

 

 

What desire is mirrored to us

from the lily-pond?

 

Overlapping circles of platelike leaves.

Spirograph symmetry of flowerheads.

 

Plants with their roots in water, their heads in air.

Exploiting the trick of surface tension,

balanced on a skin we would fall right through.

 

Inches above the water-surface

we watch dragonflies mating in air.

 

Pink, green, shiny-metallic,

clamped to each other like mechanical toys.

Miniature cybernauts

carrying out their programming.

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor should descend by either of the two flights of steps

that follow the curve of the bowed wall.

 

 

We delay.

 

We walk among the roses,

we kneel by the lily ponds

as long as we can.

 

But all the while we know it,

we feel it in every part of ourselves

– the river running in the valley floor,

inside the rocky throat of itself.

 

The pull of water.

 

 

*

 

 

Hiraethlyn

 

 

The river’s name is longing.

What it means is: you can never go back.

 

Try to put your finger on it,

try to stop yourself in your own tracks

 

– you can’t. Any more than

the children’s dams of sticks and leaves

can stop the mill-race.

 

Whirlpools, swallow holes.

It worries away at its own contours,

becomes more and more its own reactions.

 

Streaming: you as flow.

Electrical impulse, spark gap.

Memory perhaps nothing more

than a by-product of so much change.

 

But does the river have memory?

Can it look back and see itself

or is it only instants

 

separate as the silver beads

it shatters to in its constant falling

over the weir?

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor who descends to the Dell

will find much to enjoy.

 

 

The path brings us out at the stone bridge

where we cross the river, join the crowd.

Adults drink coffee from paper cups,

children eat ice-cream.

 

It’s funny: here at the lowest point,

far down on the valley floor

– shouldn’t there be sombreness?

But there is joy, a sense of celebration.

 

Only inside the old mill is it different:

the cold stone, the huge wheel

stopped and waiting.

 

Here, the children never linger.

 

They wrinkle their noses, like dogs,

at the dank smell of green stone,

of dripping water.

 

They could not say why

but they know for sure

this is no place for them.

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor has a choice of paths,

up either side of the little river

 

 

The pink hydrangeas are pretty,

but the blue!

We are greedy for the blue,

the huge pale globes of them

against the valley’s deep greens.

 

Palest brightest bits of blue

like miniature bits of broken china,

dolls’ tea-plates.

 

The blue hydrangeas speak to us

of things very far away –

 

palest highest thinnest sky

over the mountains

 

or the syllables of Himalaya

– lovely, and never ours.

 

 

*

 

 

Pride of place among the shrubs

is held by rhododendrons

 

 

But wasn’t there always something about them –

 

met in the shady places

where parks gave way to undergrowth,

to almost-woods

 

something like trees but low, dense –

 

crawlspaces,

smooth glowing reddish branches

twisting into tunnels, caves

 

roofs and walls of stiff dark glossy green

floor a dry scuff of dust

 

and the flowers! bright hot

showy splashes of purple and pink

 

– puzzling mix

of forest and hot-house,

 

didn’t they always seem to speak

of somewhere else?

 

 

*

 

 

The upkeep of woods, fences, and river banks is an obvious expense.

Watchers and caretakers have to be paid

 

 

and you know they have seen you,

many times, as you walked the paths:

 

bright eyes among the trees,

small beings the height of children

 

but old as the hills, old

as this steepsided valley itself

 

 – yes, they have watched you,

holding out their invisible hands

 

as you walked the paths, at every instant

and everywhere ahead of you.

 

Watchers and caretakers have to be paid

but with what must you pay them, what currency

 

will they accept? – You have paid them already,

whether you willed it or no,

 

with that which runs away from you

and away with you, as the mill-race runs

 

always and ever away with itself.

 

 

*

 

 

What question are you trying to answer?

Whose past, whose future?

 

In the same way I can never coincide with my life

which is for ever fleeing from itself

 

– and Edith runs

away from you, along the path

              becomes

a smaller version of herself

another child in another summer –

 

 

*

 

 

Laburnum

 

 

Etymology unknown.

 

Perhaps lapa, laba, rock, from the terrain

on which it grows. Perhaps labrum, lip,

or labor, to glide down. Also known

as golden chain, golden rain.

 

Deep shining lake of gold – we drink it,

we drown in it. Pressed down

by the weight of gold:

no air, no breathing-space.

 

All parts of the plant are poisonous.

 

 

*

 

 

If the world is the field of our experience

and if we are nothing but a view of the world…

 

 

Why then this particular view,

why this seeing?

 

Somewhere that can only ever be

a temporary stopping-point.

 

Somewhere you can only ever be

a visitor –

 

 

*

 

 

The visitor should take the path that leads upwards

 

 

The way back is a steep climb.

 

Here, we skirt –

we keep to the edges.

 

We could return to the terraces,

but we never do.

It seems we can’t risk

their density,

their involutions.

 

Instead, we go to the grassland,

the looser parts,

where it’s really hardly

a garden at all.

 

Where we can start to imagine

how we might leave.

 

 

 

Notes

 

Text in italics is taken from the guidebook The Garden at Bodnant, Tal-y-Cafn, Denbighshire (Norwich: Jarrold & Sons, for the National Trust, c. 1967), except for ‘The present […] must already announce itself as what will soon be past…’, ‘In the same way I can never coincide with my life…’, and ‘If the world is the field of our experience…’, which (in prose form) are from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 414, p. 383, p. 406.