Selected Poems 1966-1987 Read online

  and not flinch, not raise an eye

  to search for an eye on the watch

  from his coign of seclusion.

  Deliberately he would unclasp

  his book of withholding

  a page at a time and it was nothing

  arcane, just the old rules

  we all had inscribed on our slates.

  Each character blocked on the parchment secure

  in its volume and measure.

  Each maxim given its space.

  Tell the truth. Do not be afraid.

  Durable, obstinate notions,

  like quarrymen’s hammers and wedges proofed

  by intransigent service.

  Like coping stones where you rest

  in the balm of the wellspring.

  How flimsy I felt climbing down

  the unrailed stairs on the wall,

  hearing the purpose and venture

  in a wing-flap above me.

  The Scribes

  I never warmed to them.

  If they were excellent they were petulant

  and jaggy as the holly tree

  they rendered down for ink.

  And if I never belonged among them,

  they could never deny me my place.

  In the hush of the scriptorium

  a black pearl kept gathering in them

  like the old dry glut inside their quills.

  In the margin of texts of praise

  they scratched and clawed.

  They snarled if the day was dark

  or too much chalk had made the vellum bland

  or too little left it oily.

  Under the rumps of lettering

  they herded myopic angers.

  Resentment seeded in the uncurling

  fernheads of their capitals.

  Now and again I started up

  miles away and saw in my absence

  the sloped cursive of each back and felt them

  perfect themselves against me page by page.

  Let them remember this not inconsiderable

  contribution to their jealous art.

  Holly

  It rained when it should have snowed.

  When we went to gather holly

  the ditches were swimming, we were wet

  to the knees, our hands were all jags

  and water ran up our sleeves.

  There should have been berries

  but the sprigs we brought into the house

  gleamed like smashed bottle-glass.

  Now here I am, in a room that is decked

  with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,

  and I almost forget what it’s like

  to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.

  I reach for a book like a doubter

  and want it to flare round my hand,

  a black-letter bush, a glittering shield-wall

  cutting as holly and ice.

  An Artist

  I love the thought of his anger.

  His obstinacy against the rock, his coercion

  of the substance from green apples.

  The way he was a dog barking

  at the image of himself barking.

  And his hatred of his own embrace

  of working as the only thing that worked—

  the vulgarity of expecting ever

  gratitude or admiration, which

  would mean a stealing from him.

  The way his fortitude held and hardened

  because he did what he knew.

  His forehead like a hurled boule

  travelling unpainted space

  behind the apple and behind the mountain.

  In Illo Tempore

  The big missal splayed

  and dangled silky ribbons

  of emerald and purple and watery white.

  Intransitively we would assist,

  confess, receive. The verbs

  assumed us. We adored.

  And we lifted our eyes to the nouns.

  Altar stone was dawn and monstrance noon,

  the word ‘rubric’ itself a bloodshot sunset.

  Now I live by a famous strand

  where seabirds cry in the small hours

  like incredible souls

  and even the range wall of the promenade

  that I press down on for conviction

  hardly tempts me to credit it.

  On the Road

  The road ahead

  kept reeling in

  at a steady speed,

  the verges dripped.

  In my hands

  like a wrested trophy,

  the empty round

  of the steering wheel.

  The trance of driving

  made all roads one:

  the seraph-haunted, Tuscan

  footpath, the green

  oak-alleys of Dordogne

  or that track through corn

  where the rich young man

  asked his question—

  Master, what must I

  do to be saved?

  Or the road where the bird

  with an earth-red back

  and a white and black

  tail, like parquet

  of flint and jet,

  wheeled over me

  in visitation.

  Sell all you have

  and give to the poor.

  I was up and away

  like a human soul

  that plumes from the mouth

  in undulant, tenor,

  black-letter Latin.

  I was one for sorrow,

  Noah’s dove,

  a panicked shadow

  crossing the deer path.

  If I came to earth

  it would be by way of

  a small east window

  I once squeezed through,

  scaling heaven

  by superstition,

  drunk and happy

  on a chapel gable.

  I would roost a night

  on the slab of exile,

  then hide in the cleft

  of that churchyard wall

  where hand after hand

  keeps wearing away

  at the cold, hard-breasted

  votive granite.

  And follow me.

  I would migrate

  through a high cave mouth

  into an oaten, sun-warmed cliff,

  on down the soft-nubbed,

  clay-floored passage,

  face-brush, wing-flap,

  to the deepest chamber.

  There a drinking deer

  is cut into rock,

  its haunch and neck

  rise with the contours,

  the incised outline

  curves to a strained

  expectant muzzle

  and a nostril flared

  at a dried-up source.

  For my book of changes

  I would meditate

  that stone-faced vigil

  until the long dumbfounded

  spirit broke cover

  to raise a dust

  in the font of exhaustion.

  FROM

  The Haw Lantern

  (1987)

  For Bernard and Jane McCabe

  The riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves.

  Us, listening to a river in the trees.

  Alphabets

  I

  A shadow his father makes with joined hands

  And thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wall

  Like a rabbit’s head. He understands

  He will understand more when he goes to school.

  There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week,

  Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y.

  This is writing. A swan’s neck and swan’s back

  Make the 2 he can see now as well as say.

  Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate

  Are the letter some call ah, some call ay.

  There are charts, there are headlines, ther
e is a right

  Way to hold the pen and a wrong way.

  First it is ‘copying out’, and then ‘English’

  Marked correct with a little leaning hoe.

  Smells of inkwells rise in the classroom hush.

  A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O.

  II

  Declensions sang on air like a hosanna

  As, column after stratified column,

  Book One of Elementa Latina,

  Marbled and minatory, rose up in him.

  For he was fostered next in a stricter school

  Named for the patron saint of the oak wood

  Where classes switched to the pealing of a bell

  And he left the Latin forum for the shade

  Of new calligraphy that felt like home.

  The letters of this alphabet were trees.

  The capitals were orchards in full bloom,

  The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches.

  Here in her snooded garment and bare feet,

  All ringleted in assonance and woodnotes,

  The poet’s dream stole over him like sunlight

  And passed into the tenebrous thickets.

  He learns this other writing. He is the scribe

  Who drove a team of quills on his white field.

  Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab.

  Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold.

  By rules that hardened the farther they reached north

  He bends to his desk and begins again.

  Christ’s sickle has been in the undergrowth.

  The script grows bare and Merovingian.

  III

  The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O.

  He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves.

  Time has bulldozed the school and school window.

  Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves

  Made lambdas on the stubble once at harvest

  And the delta face of each potato pit

  Was patted straight and moulded against frost.

  All gone, with the omega that kept

  Watch above each door, the good-luck horseshoe.

  Yet shape-note language, absolute on air

  As Constantine’s sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO

  Can still command him; or the necromancer

  Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house

  A figure of the world with colours in it

  So that the figure of the universe

  And ‘not just single things’ would meet his sight

  When he walked abroad. As from his small window

  The astronaut sees all he has sprung from,

  The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O

  Like a magnified and buoyant ovum—

  Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare

  All agog at the plasterer on his ladder

  Skimming our gable and writing our name there

  With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.

  Terminus

  I

  When I hoked there, I would find

  An acorn and a rusted bolt.

  If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney

  And a dormant mountain.

  If I listened, an engine shunting

  And a trotting horse.

  Is it any wonder when I thought

  I would have second thoughts?

  II

  When they spoke of the prudent squirrel’s hoard

  It shone like gifts at a nativity.

  When they spoke of the mammon of iniquity

  The coins in my pockets reddened like stove-lids.

  I was the march drain and the march drain’s banks

  Suffering the limit of each claim.

  III

  Two buckets were easier carried than one.

  I grew up in between.

  My left hand placed the standard iron weight.

  My right tilted a last grain in the balance.

  Baronies, parishes met where I was born.

  When I stood on the central stepping stone

  I was the last earl on horseback in midstream

  Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.

  From the Frontier of Writing

  The tightness and the nilness round that space

  when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect

  its make and number and, as one bends his face

  towards your window, you catch sight of more

  on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent

  down cradled guns that hold you under cover

  and everything is pure interrogation

  until a rifle motions and you move

  with guarded unconcerned acceleration—

  a little emptier, a little spent

  as always by that quiver in the self,

  subjugated, yes, and obedient.

  So you drive on to the frontier of writing

  where it happens again. The guns on tripods;

  the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

  data about you, waiting for the squawk

  of clearance; the marksman training down

  out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

  And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed,

  as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall

  on the black current of a tarmac road

  past armour-plated vehicles, out between

  the posted soldiers flowing and receding

  like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

  The Haw Lantern

  The wintry haw is burning out of season,

  crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,

  wanting no more from them but that they keep

  the wick of self-respect from dying out,

  not having to blind them with illumination.

  But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost

  it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes

  with his lantern, seeking one just man;

  so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw

  he holds up at eye-level on its twig,

  and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,

  its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,

  its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.

  From the Republic of Conscience

  I

  When I landed in the republic of conscience

  it was so noiseless when the engines stopped

  I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

  At immigration, the clerk was an old man

  who produced a wallet from his homespun coat

  and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

  The woman in customs asked me to declare

  the words of our traditional cures and charms

  to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

  No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.

  You carried your own burden and very soon

  your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

  II

  Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning

  spells universal good and parents hang

  swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.

  Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells

  are held to the ear during births and funerals.

  The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.

  Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.

  The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,

  The hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

  At their inauguration, public leaders

  must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep

  to atone for their presumption to hold office—

  and to affirm their faith that all life sprang

  from salt in tears which the sky-god wept

  after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

  III

  I came back from that frugal republic

 
; with my two arms the one length, the customs woman

  having insisted my allowance was myself.

  The old man rose and gazed into my face

  and said that was official recognition

  that I was now a dual citizen.

  He therefore desired me when I got home

  to consider myself a representative

  and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

  Their embassies, he said, were everywhere

  but operated independently

  and no ambassador would ever be relieved.

  Hailstones

  I

  My cheek was hit and hit:

  sudden hailstones

  pelted and bounced on the road.

  When it cleared again

  something whipped and knowledgeable

  had withdrawn

  and left me there with my chances.

  I made a small hard ball

  of burning water running from my hand

  just as I make this now

  out of the melt of the real thing

  smarting into its absence.

  II

  To be reckoned with, all the same,

  those brats of showers.

  The way they refused permission,

  rattling the classroom window

  like a ruler across the knuckles,

  the way they were perfect first

  and then in no time dirty slush.

  Thomas Traherne had his orient wheat

  for proof and wonder

  but for us, it was the sting of hailstones

  and the unstingable hands of Eddie Diamond

  foraging in the nettles.

  III

  Nipple and hive, bite-lumps,

  small acorns of the almost pleasurable

  intimated and disallowed

  when the shower ended

  and everything said wait.

  For what? For forty years

  to say there, there you had

  the truest foretaste of your aftermath—

  in that dilation

  when the light opened in silence

  and a car with wipers going still

  laid perfect tracks in the slush.

  The Stone Verdict

  When he stands in the judgement place

  With his stick in his hand and the broad hat

  Still on his head, maimed by self-doubt

  And an old disdain of sweet talk and excuses,

  It will be no justice if the sentence is blabbed out.

  He will expect more than words in the ultimate court

  He relied on through a lifetime’s speechlessness.

  Let it be like the judgement of Hermes,