POSTCARDS TO ENGLAND / Lawrence Upton

The cicadas are not singing!
Not even at dawn!



A mosquito on the ground,
turning round,  round,
unwell; I have my poison.



Bearing deep boxes,
a horse slips over cobbles
of broken stones.



We had thought the Greeks here
knew only fast Greek and no English.
Now, though, they reply demotically,
some using the words of inside cities.



Since dawn, a bombardment of cicadas.
Curtains keep back full daylight.
A close one gnashes at me,
his sharp sounds cutting at the half-finished wall
opposite, echoing back in ricocheted distortion;
and, when he stops, the further off
multipliple chants, lacking such overtone,
undertone to the one voice,
smoothly, over the evacuated village. 
We fill out the emptiness talking,
playing music, banging round, being tidiers.



A donkey does his vocal dance and stumbles
at his hobbles in the field below.
All day long in the heat
I hear cicadas.
Two children go by on the tarmac road.
Locals?
Tourists on mopeds.
Motorbikes. Lorries carrying melons.
In the centre of the valley,
a motorbike with two riders heading... south?
No engine sound at all, being so far away;
I watch it in the fullness of lorries, tumbling on cobbles,
as it moves in silence, slow and upright,
balanced as long as it moves;
but I have not moved from here.
The cat looks up on my box of paper,
washing unthinkingly as it comes alive;
sees me as if never before,
yet unconcerned - from familiarity -
and stops even the washing,
tongue and paw still, apparently surprised, and
rolls over, amazed now, in the
disequilibrium of its, his, stillness
and if only I can keep writing
this start to forget what I do
if only I am not asked
how well I think I have written
perhaps I shall balance one word upon another
some houses here have small bricks, thin bricks,
none the size of London's or, usually, none at all
but stone, breeze block and concrete,
strings of small brick laid well on breeze,
holding an additional floor unplanned by the first builder.



Much unconventional music here:
gates and doors and the inevitable cicadas,
plumbing groans and the breath of working animals.
The villa owner's cat squeaks for food, or it
drags at shoes, or it scratches the table legs;
a black cat spits at it
every morning for two hours,
and chases it round
the veranda. The washing line jumps
sideways in today's enormous wind
heavy with a wet towel, and strains
against the uprights of the canopy.
Clothes pegs drop.
Clothes wrung out here and in other rooms.
                   Five minutes ago,
a peach fell on to the rough lawn.
Leaves rustle like paper against the metal rail.
My chair seat. A cuckoo. The dredging
crane in the harbour. Flies in the ear. Conversations
muffled by garden trees. This pen. Shutters
closed or opened by breezes. My hand
upon the paper. Tyres on a sandy road across
the valley, suddenly included in the village noise.
A diesel truck and its loudspeaker advertising melons.
Plastic and wood clothes pegs on the washing line,
now that it's almost empty, sliding, down a scale, hissing.
                                                            Below me,
behind the dense peach tree, a child groans,
though not, I suspect, in pain.
A woman's voice too, answering someone unconcernedly, instructive.
The cicadas resume their chanting.
A hornet over my tea dregs, humming, no doubt,
but not audibly. The lavatory / bathroom door opening or closing
behind me. Laughter from the shitty beach
up here for the first time today. A cock crows.
One cicada within a hundred metres
tinkling like a fishing reel. A car backfires
as a car's engine dopplers on another road;
then, three motorbikes, one with two people --
the man riding and the girl holding on to him.
Moisturiser worked up in hands in the room behind me;
the change in the sound of this pen and this paper
as the home-made table's texture changes;



I stop
and bang my sheets of paper together
and, before I have time to box them,
out of my vision, someone bangs a pail
and all the goats in a field start singing;
a donkey looks up. A pale woman runs by
in flip-flops. Someone fiddles loudly with a lock below
and my lover rattles every piece of cutlery
which exists in our cutlery drawer
then drops
       all the coins
               in her handbag
                      on the floor



I stop again,
taking notes of the final rhyme,
and chickens start. Theirs was the pail;
the goats responded first.



A car.
Another cock.



A moped. A car. A cock. An outboard? all invisible.
Five twenty nine and forty seconds.
A barking dog; its barking echoes