Belonging

Poems

Dick Davis

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780804010436
• eBook ISBN: 9780804040051
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

There are worlds within our own in which even the smallest victories are hard won, the tender moment is almost unbearable, and the understated rings like a bell. Belonging, a new collection by British poet Dick Davis, is an extended visit to these worlds.

Deepened by his dry wit and the formal rigor of his verse, the poems of Belonging negotiate their way among personal and political divides—generations in a family, man and woman, and the tentative present and our inherited pasts.

But behind much of the writing there is also a desire for a kind of idealized belonging—to a clerisy of civilized and humane decency which can be found intermittently in all cultures and is the monopoly of none. Davis's own cosmopolitan background provides the context for many of the poems, yet he is concerned always to find the humanly universal within the local and anecdotal—a hope realized in these careful and incandescent poems.

Teresia Sherley

Waking in the Sussex dewfall with the first light showing through,

Hearing English rustlings, stirrings, as the day begins anew,

Grateful for surprise, survival, for my exiled life with you

As my lawless mind betrays me and I’m neither here nor there,

Neither bride nor wife nor mother, still sublimely unaware

That there was a place called England, that we had a life to share—

So in no place I lie hearing sounds that give me to the past,

Wagons creaking, kitchen clatter—but I know the dawn has passed

And no call from dawn’s muezzin told me night had gone at last.

Still I stay here for a moment not consenting quite to wake,

Over Esfahan’s green gardens I remember morning break,

Yellow light on pools and plane trees, and the shadows that they make

And the sudden breeze of sunrise, like a nervous lover’s hands

Hardly touching, but still touching, as my body understands,

Like a whisper that insists on life’s importunate demands

Tugging me to love and pleasure, to what passes as we sleep,

To the roses’ quick unfolding, to the moments that won’t keep,

To the ruin of a childhood, and the tears that parents weep.

When you begged my hand in marriage and the shah gave his consent

Gossip called me Christian payment or a pretty compliment

But I’d seen you and considered what a marriage with you meant—

Strangeness always my companion, at my side and in my bed,

Unknown syllables exulting in my mouth and in my head

Silences I couldn’t fathom, all my faux pas left unsaid,

But what’s marriage but a launching of a life to the unknown?

Whether yoked to some poor dervish, or the partner to a throne,

Women’s lives stay inextricably dependent and alone:

And the glamour of your difference was rubbed amber to a straw,

As I trembled like a mouse beneath some cat’s capricious paw

Barely breathing “Yes” when asked if I approved of what I saw.

If the hazards I accepted were no worse than others choose

Still I feared my life without you if it seemed I might refuse—

All the ways I could be left alone with nothing left to lose,

So I came to you, became your wife and, as you said, your friend,

Ignorant of everything—except my nagging need to spend

All my days within the dream-life I could not allow to end.

Promises proliferate; an alien in a curious land,

Drawn to lives I thought I’d be a part of, love, and understand,

Clutching at what can’t be closed on by a fumbling foreign hand—

This I shared with you, my darling, when I saw you lost, unsure

As the conversation chanced on turns you hadn’t bargained for,

As Rejection smiled urbanely, and Discretion closed the door,

Left you what you were, a stranger, and you saw—whatever you did—

Though the phantom Friendship beckoned, smiled and simpered, she

eluded

All attempts to hold her: you stayed welcomed, baffled, and excluded.

This we shared in Europe, feted in Vienna, Prague and Spain

As the entertaining envoys of the shah’s exotic reign,

While the gaudy greetings withered to politely phrased disdain—

And the Vatican, remember, when beneath St. Peter’s dome

We were gawked at as the cicerones’ chicest sight in Rome,

Dogged by strangeness till we rested in the place that you call home

Where you looked in vain for childhood that you’d thought could

never change

And you realized that from now on life at best could rearrange

Vistas lived through, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Shadows
• A Monorhyme for the Shower
• Haydn and Hokusai
• Night Thoughts
• Iran Twenty Years Ago
• To the Persian Poets
• Political Asylum
• In History
• Gongora
• A Petrarchan Sonnet
• Casanova
• Dido
• In the Restaurant
• Duchy and Shinks
• West South West
• Teresia Sherley
• What
• A World Dies . . .
• Sweet Pleasure . . .
• Hibernation
• No Going Back
• Secrets
• Out of Time
• Aubade
• A Se Stesso
• “Live Happily”
• Guides for the Soul
• Games
• Victorian
• Partners
• Just a Small One, As You Insist
• Desire
• Farewell to the Mentors
• A Bit of Paternity
• Kipling’s Kim, Thirty Years On
• New at It
• Déjà Lu
• Growing Up
• Old
• Small Talk
• Just So
• Notes