and I sat in the dark hall estranged from it
as a couple vowed and called it their loving cup
and held it in our gaze until the curtain
jerked shut with an ordinary noise.
Dipped and glamoured then by this translation,
it was restored to its old haircracked doze
on the mantelpiece, its parchment glazes fast –
as the otter surfaced once with Ronan’s psalter
miraculously unharmed, that had been lost
a day and a night under the lough water.
And so the saint praised God on the lough shore
for that dazzle of impossibility
I credited again in the sun-filled door,
so absolutely light it could put out fire.
XI
As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope
I plunged once in a butt of muddied water
surfaced like a marvellous lightship
and out of its silted crystals a monk’s face
that had spoken years ago from behind a grille
spoke again about the need and chance
to salvage everything, to re-envisage
the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift
mistakenly abased …
What came to nothing could always be replenished.
‘Read poems as prayers,’ he said, ‘and for your penance
translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.’
Returned from Spain to our chapped wilderness,
his consonants aspirate, his forehead shining,
he had made me feel there was nothing to confess.
Now his sandalled passage stirred me on to this:
How well I know that fountain, filling, running,
although it is the night.
That eternal fountain, hidden away,
I know its haven and its secrecy
although it is the night.
But not its source because it does not have one,
which is all sources’ source and origin
although it is the night.
No other thing can be so beautiful.
Here the earth and heaven drink their fill
although it is the night.
So pellucid it never can be muddied,
and I know that all light radiates from it
although it is the night.
I know no sounding-line can find its bottom,
nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom
although it is the night.
And its current so in flood it overspills
to water hell and heaven and all peoples
although it is the night.
And the current that is generated there,
as far as it wills to, it can flow that far
although it is the night.
And from these two a third current proceeds
which neither of these two, I know, precedes
although it is the night.
This eternal fountain hides and splashes
within this living bread that is life to us
although it is the night.
Hear it calling out to every creature.
And they drink these waters, although it is dark here
because it is the night.
I am repining for this living fountain.
Within this bread of life I see it plain
although it is the night.
XII
Like a convalescent, I took the hand
stretched down from the jetty, sensed again
an alien comfort as I stepped on ground
to find the helping hand still gripping mine,
fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide
or to be guided I could not be certain
for the tall man in step at my side
seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush
upon his ashplant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.
Then I knew him in the flesh
out there on the tarmac among the cars,
wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.
His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,
cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,
and suddenly he hit a litter basket
with his stick, saying, ‘Your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
What you do you must do on your own.
The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,
so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’
It was as if I had stepped free into space
alone with nothing that I had not known
already. Raindrops blew in my face
as I came to and heard the harangue and jeers
going on and on. ‘The English language
belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,
rehearsing the old whinges at your age.
That subject people stuff is a cod’s game,
infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage.
You lose more of yourself than you redeem
doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim
out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,
elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.’
The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac
fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly
the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.
from Sweeney Redivivus
The First Gloss
Take hold of the shaft of the pen.
Subscribe to the first step taken
from a justified line
into the margin.
Sweeney Redivivus
I stirred wet sand and gathered myself
to climb the steep-flanked mound,
my head like a ball of wet twine
dense with soakage, but beginning
to unwind.
Another smell
was blowing off the river, bitter
as night airs in a scutch mill.
The old trees were nowhere,
the hedges thin as penwork
and the whole enclosure lost
under hard paths and sharp-ridged houses.
And there I was, incredible to myself,
among people far too eager to believe me
and my story, even if it happened to be true.
In the Beech
I was a lookout posted and forgotten.
On one side under me, the concrete road.
On the other, the bullocks’ covert,
the breath and plaster of a drinking place
where the school-leaver discovered peace
to touch himself in the reek of churned-up mud.
And the tree itself a strangeness and a comfort,
as much a column as a bole. The very ivy
puzzled its milk-tooth frills and tapers
over the grain: was it bark or masonry?
I watched the red-brick chimney rear
its stamen, course by course,
and the steeplejacks up there at their antics
like flies against the mountain.
I felt the tanks’ advance beginning
at the cynosure of the growth rings,
then winced at their imperium refreshed
in each powder
ed bolt-mark on the concrete.
And the pilot with his goggles back came in
so low I could see the cockpit rivets.
My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge.
My thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post.
The First Kingdom
The royal roads were cow paths.
The queen mother hunkered on a stool
and played the harpstrings of milk
into a wooden pail.
With seasoned sticks the nobles
lorded it over the hindquarters of cattle.
Units of measurement were pondered
by the cartful, barrowful and bucketful.
Time was a backward rote of names and mishaps,
bad harvests, fires, unfair settlements,
deaths in floods, murders and miscarriages.
And if my rights to it all came only
by their acclamation, what was it worth?
I blew hot and blew cold.
They were two-faced and accommodating.
And seed, breed and generation still
they are holding on, every bit
as pious and exacting and demeaned.
It was more sleepwalk than spasm
yet that was a time when the times
were also in spasm –
the ties and the knots running through us
split open
down the lines of the grain.
As I drew close to pebbles and berries,
the smell of wild garlic, relearning
the acoustic of frost
and the meaning of woodnote,
my shadow over the field
was only a spin-off,
my empty place an excuse
for shifts in the camp, old rehearsals
of debts and betrayal.
Singly they came to the tree
with a stone in each pocket
to whistle and bill me back in
and I would collide and cascade
through leaves when they left,
my point of repose knocked askew.
I was mired in attachment
until they began to pronounce me
a feeder off battlefields
so I mastered new rungs of the air
to survey out of reach
their bonfires on hills, their hosting
and fasting, the levies from Scotland
as always, and the people of art
diverting their rhythmical chants
to fend off the onslaught of winds
I would welcome and climb
at the top of my bent.
Drifting Off
The guttersnipe and the albatross
gliding for days without a single wingbeat
were equally beyond me.
I yearned for the gannet’s strike,
the unbegrudging concentration
of the heron.
In the camaraderie of rookeries,
in the spiteful vigilance of colonies
I was at home.
I learned to distrust
the allure of the cuckoo
and the gossip of starlings,
kept faith with doughty bullfinches,
levelled my wit too often
to the small-minded wren
and too often caved in
to the pathos of waterhens
and panicky corncrakes.
I gave much credence to stragglers,
overrated the composure of blackbirds
and the folklore of magpies.
But when goldfinch or kingfisher rent
the veil of the usual,
pinions whispered and braced
as I stooped, unwieldy
and brimming,
my spurs at the ready.
The Cleric
I heard new words prayed at cows
in the byre, found his sign
on the crock and the hidden still,
smelled fumes from his censer
in the first smokes of morning.
Next thing he was making a progress
through gaps, stepping out sites,
sinking his crozier deep
in the fort-hearth.
If he had stuck to his own
cramp-jawed abbesses and intoners
dibbling round the enclosure,
his Latin and blather of love,
his parchments and scheming
in letters shipped over water –
but no, he overbore
with his unctions and orders,
he had to get in on the ground.
History that planted its standards
on his gables and spires
ousted me to the marches
of skulking and whingeing.
Or did I desert?
Give him his due, in the end
he opened my path to a kingdom
of such scope and neuter allegiance
my emptiness reigns at its whim.
As he prowled the rim of his clearing
where the blade of choice had not spared
one stump of affection
he was like a ploughshare
interred to sustain the whole field
of force, from the bitted
and high-drawn sideways curve
of the horse’s neck to the aim
held fast in the wrists and elbows –
the more brutal the pull
and the drive, the deeper
and quieter the work of refreshment.
The Master
He dwelt in himself
like a rook in an unroofed tower.
To get close I had to maintain
a climb up deserted ramparts
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 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