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 wingflap 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 deerpath.
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.
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, there 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 horse-shoe.
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 Ο
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
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