Stranger, I’m looking at the back of your head;
at the heart of the crown
where the whorl starts;
at the touch of skin
like the stars
clustered at the core of a spiral galaxy,
curls whirling out in points of light on dark
to infinity and beyond …
There are more than 170 billion galaxies
in the observable universe –
but on the top deck of this bus the greatest mystery
is the dark matter of your eyes
which I shall never see –
as you will never read this little poem.
Nick Drake’s poetry is usually grounded in everyday contemporary experience, but his imagination also enjoys travelling, following the routes of good but accessible science. The Back of Your Head concludes his fourth Bloodaxe collection, Out of Range, and picks up some faint signals from another poem earlier in the collection, Life on Earth, addressed to the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The epigraph of Life on Earth quotes Jimmy Carter’s message to the intelligent anglophone alien out there, accompanying a “Golden Record” of terrestrial life: “This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” The first sentence of this could be a description of Drake’s book, and the quick, communicative responses of the poems to their age.
The Back of Your Head begins with a small, physical space: the part of the head from which the hair radiates in its different directions, and the skin, pores and hair-follicles may be visible. This space is potentially one of intimacy, although, for the two figures in the poem, the paths will never intersect.
Drake’s image of a particularly defenceless part of the human body reminded me of something my art teacher once described. During the morning assembly, when everyone, even the teachers, knelt for prayer, she would look at the ranged heels of those in front of her, and think what a vulnerable part of the body the heel was. This may have been partly because of association with the Achilles tendon, but also, I think, because visually it’s such a thin-stemmed, frail-looking object. I remember being persuaded by her insight, but at the same time priggishly thinking she should have had her eyes shut during morning prayers.
The speaker in the poem is a tender voyeur, soon turned ardent voyager. He gives us a few bare physical details about the passenger, the “Stranger” whom the poem addresses. The hair is curly. The word “dark” occurs twice. Is a white poet writing about a black person, whose experience is essentially different from his own? Is the stranger a woman? Drake is right not to be specific. The passenger’s authentic strangeness needs to be sustained. The star-points in the dark head can become all the more swiftly and smoothly the symbol of mysteries – those of the individual existence and those of the cosmos.
The first stanza contains a clutch of initiating metaphors: “the heart of the crown / where the whorl starts; / at the touch of skin / like the stars / clustered at the core of a spiral galaxy”. In the phrase “touch of the skin” the word “touch” is used colloquially, to mean a small fragment, but of course it’s also meant to rouse a tactile nerve, and heightens the sense of the vulnerable and intimate, the ease of touch and, perhaps, the secret desire for it.
Juxtaposition of the top deck of the bus and the “observable universe” with its “170 billion galaxies” suggests contrast but also comparability. All bodies are starlike, made of the same carbon molecules. There is both an observable and an unobservable universe to confront: the unobservable part, for the poet-observer, centres, rather dramatically and wonderfully, on “the dark matter” of the passenger’s eyes. The passenger is, of course, in the dark about being observed and brought into a poem. Yet the speaker is more than ever connected to him or her, still able to address them as “you”.
Finally, the poet’s message is mutual invisibility: he will never see the passenger’s eyes, his poem will never be read by them. How does he know such things, particularly the latter? It’s a little insurance policy of a superstition, perhaps, to assume there couldn’t be a coincidence. It’s not impossible that the passenger would ever read “this little poem”, even if it is unlikely. He wouldn’t know the poet had sat behind him on the bus, though, unless he was a mind-reading alien all along.
Readers and writer in some future virtual reality may be able to see into each other’s eyes and read each other’s brains. I hope to be stardust long before then. But for anyone who writes down “token(s) of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings”, the words are voyagers into space, or at least passengers on the long-distance Arriva bus.
Destination Infinity would be a big ask. Only something true for all time and all space is infinite. That sounds like an ambitious journey, especially for Arriva.
In the meantime, have a happy, if finite, Christmas
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