High on a windblown hedge. Ocarina earth.
Three listening posts up on some hard-baked tier
Above the resonating amphorae.
vi
Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,
Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead
And lay down flat among their dainty shins.
In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy space
He experimented with infinity.
His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting
For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch
Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused
In the fleece-hustle was the original
Of a ripple that would travel eighty years
Outward from there, to be the same ripple
Inside him at its last circumference.
vii
(I misremembered. He went down on all fours,
Florence Emily says, crossing a ewe-leaze.
Hardy sought the creatures face to face,
Their witless eyes and liability
To panic made him feel less alone,
Made proleptic sorrow stand a moment
Over him, perfectly known and sure.
And then the flock’s dismay went swimming on
Into the blinks and murmurs and deflections
He’d know at parties in renowned old age
When sometimes he imagined himself a ghost
And circulated with that new perspective.)
viii
The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.
The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’
The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.
ix
A boat that did not rock or wobble once
Sat in long grass one Sunday afternoon
In nineteen forty-one or two. The heat
Out on Lough Neagh and in where cattle stood
Jostling and skittering near the hedge
Grew redolent of the tweed skirt and tweed sleeve
I nursed on. I remember little treble
Timber-notes their smart heels struck from planks,
Me cradled in an elbow like a secret
Open now as the eye of heaven was then
Above three sisters talking, talking steady
In a boat the ground still falls and falls from under.
x
Overhang of grass and seedling birch
On the quarry face. Rock-hob where you watched
All that cargoed brightness travelling
Above and beyond and sumptuously across
The water in its clear deep dangerous holes
On the quarry floor. Ultimate
Fathomableness, ultimate
Stony up-againstness: could you reconcile
What was diaphanous there with what was massive?
Were you equal to or were you opposite
To build-ups so promiscuous and weightless?
Shield your eyes, look up and face the music.
xii
And lightening? One meaning of that
Beyond the usual sense of alleviation,
Illumination, and so on, is this:
A phenomenal instant when the spirit flares
With pure exhilaration before death –
The good thief in us harking to the promise!
So paint him on Christ’s right hand, on a promontory
Scanning empty space, so body-racked he seems
Untranslatable into the bliss
Ached for at the moon-rim of his forehead,
By nail-craters on the dark side of his brain:
This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.
Settings
Hazel stealth. A trickle in the culvert.
Athletic sealight on the doorstep slab,
On the sea itself, on silent roofs and gables.
Whitewashed suntraps. Hedges hot as chimneys.
Chairs on all fours. A plate-rack braced and laden.
The fossil poetry of hob and slate.
Desire within its moat, dozing at ease –
Like a gorged cormorant on the rock at noon,
Exiled and in tune with the big glitter.
Re-enter this as the adult of solitude,
The silence-forder and the definite
Presence you sensed withdrawing first time round.
xiv
One afternoon I was seraph on gold leaf.
I stood on the railway sleepers hearing larks,
Grasshoppers, cuckoos, dog-barks, trainer planes
Cutting and modulating and drawing off.
Heat wavered on the immaculate line
And shine of the cogged rails. On either side,
Dog daisies stood like vestals, the hot stones
Were clover-meshed and streaked with engine oil.
Air spanned, passage waited, the balance rode,
Nothing prevailed, whatever was in store
Witnessed itself already taking place
In a time marked by assent and by hiatus.
xv
And strike this scene in gold too, in relief,
So that a greedy eye cannot exhaust it:
Stable straw, Rembrandt-gleam and burnish
Where my father bends to a tea-chest packed with salt,
The hurricane lamp held up at eye-level
In his bunched left fist, his right hand foraging
For the unbleeding, vivid-fleshed bacon,
Home-cured hocks pulled up into the light
For pondering a while and putting back.
That night I owned the piled grain of Egypt.
I watched the sentry’s torchlight on the hoard.
I stood in the door, unseen and blazed upon.
xix
Memory as a building or a city,
Well lighted, well laid out, appointed with
Tableaux vivants and costumed effigies –
Statues in purple cloaks, or painted red,
Ones wearing crowns, ones smeared with mud or blood:
So that the mind’s eye could haunt itself
With fixed associations and learn to read
Its own contents in meaningful order,
Ancient textbooks recommended that
Familiar places be linked deliberately
With a code of images. You knew the portent
In each setting, you blinked and concentrated.
xxii
Where does spirit live? Inside or outside
Things remembered, made things, things unmade?
What came first, the seabird’s cry or the soul
Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?
Where does it roost at last? On dungy sticks
In a jackdaw’s nest up in the old stone tower
Or a marble bust commanding the parterre?
How habitable is perfected form?
And how inhabited the windy light?
What’s the use of a held note or held line
That cannot be assailed for reassurance?
(Set questions for the ghost of W.B.)
xxiv
Deserted harbour stillness. Every stone
Clarified and dormant under water,
The harbour wall a masonry of silence.
Fullness. Shimmer. Laden high Atlantic
The moorings barely stirred in, very slight
Clucking of the swell against boat boards.
Perfected vision: cockle
minarets
Consigned down there with green-slicked bottle glass,
Shell-debris and a reddened bud of sandstone.
Air and ocean known as antecedents
Of each other. In apposition with
Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.
Crossings
xxvii
Everything flows. Even a solid man,
A pillar to himself and to his trade,
All yellow boots and stick and soft felt hat,
Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet
As the god of fair days, stone posts, roads and crossroads,
Guardian of travellers and psychopomp.
‘Look for a man with an ashplant on the boat,’
My father told his sister setting out
For London, ‘and stay near him all night
And you’ll be safe.’ Flow on, flow on
The journey of the soul with its soul guide
And the mysteries of dealing-men with sticks!
xxix
Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch.
Its coldness to the thumb. Its see-saw lift
And drop and innocent harshness.
Which is a music of binding and of loosing
Unheard in this generation, but there to be
Called up or called down at a touch renewed.
Once the latch pronounces, roof
Is original again, threshold fatal,
The sanction powerful as the foreboding.
Your footstep is already known, so bow
Just a little, raise your right hand,
Make impulse one with wilfulness, and enter.
xxx
On St Brigid’s Day the new life could be entered
By going through her girdle of straw rope:
The proper way for men was right leg first,
Then right arm and right shoulder, head, then left
Shoulder, arm and leg. Women drew it down
Over the body and stepped out of it.
The open they came into by these moves
Stood opener, hoops came off the world,
They could feel the February air
Still soft above their heads and imagine
The limp rope fray and flare like wind-borne gleanings
Or an unhindered goldfinch over ploughland.
xxxii
Running water never disappointed.
Crossing water always furthered something.
Stepping stones were stations of the soul.
A kesh could mean the track some called a causey
Raised above the wetness of the bog,
Or the causey where it bridged old drains and streams.
It steadies me to tell these things. Also
I cannot mention keshes or the ford
Without my father’s shade appearing to me
On a path towards sunset, eyeing spades and clothes
That turf-cutters stowed perhaps or souls cast off
Before they crossed the log that spans the burn.
xxxiii
Be literal a moment. Recollect
Walking out on what had been emptied out
After he died, turning your back and leaving.
That morning tiles were harder, windows colder,
The raindrops on the pane more scourged, the grass
Barer to the sky, more wind-harrowed,
Or so it seemed. The house that he had planned
‘Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you know’,
A paradigm of rigour and correction,
Rebuke to fanciness and shrine to limit,
Stood firmer than ever for its own idea
Like a printed X-ray for the X-rayed body.
xxxiv
Yeats said, To those who see spirits, human skin
For a long time afterwards appears most coarse.
The face I see that all falls short of since
Passes down an aisle: I share the bus
From San Francisco Airport into Berkeley
With one other passenger, who’s dropped
At the Treasure Island military base
Half-way across Bay Bridge. Vietnam-bound,
He could have been one of the newly dead come back,
Unsurprisable but still disappointed,
Having to bear his farm-boy self again,
His shaving cuts, his otherworldly brow.
xxxvi
And yes, my friend, we too walked through a valley.
Once. In darkness. With all the streetlamps off.
As danger gathered and the march dispersed.
Scene from Dante, made more memorable
By one of his head-clearing similes –
Fireflies, say, since the policemen’s torches
Clustered and flicked and tempted us to trust
Their unpredictable, attractive light.
We were like herded shades who had to cross
And did cross, in a panic, to the car
Parked as we’d left it, that gave when we got in
Like Charon’s boat under the faring poets.
Squarings
xxxvii
In famous poems by the sage Han Shan,
Cold Mountain is a place that can also mean
A state of mind. Or different states of mind
At different times, for the poems seem
One-off, impulsive, the kind of thing that starts
I have sat here facing the Cold Mountain
For twenty-nine years, or There is no path
That goes all the way – enviable stuff,
Unfussy and believable.
Talking about it isn’t good enough
But quoting from it at least demonstrates
The virtue of an art that knows its mind.
xxxviii
We climbed the Capitol by moonlight, felt
The transports of temptation on the heights:
We were privileged and belated and we knew it.
Then something in me moved to prophesy
Against the beloved stand-offishness of marble
And all emulation of stone-cut verses.
‘Down with form triumphant, long live,’ (said I)
‘Form mendicant and convalescent. We attend
The come-back of pure water and the prayer-wheel.’
To which a voice replied, ‘Of course we do.
But the others are in the Forum Café waiting,
Wondering where we are. What’ll you have?’
xxxix
When you sat, far-eyed and cold, in the basalt throne
Of ‘the wishing chair’ at Giant’s Causeway,
The small of your back made very solid sense.
Like a papoose at sap-time strapped to a maple tree,
You gathered force out of the world-tree’s hardness.
If you stretched your hand forth, things might turn to stone.
But you were only goose-fleshed skin and bone,
The rocks and wonder of the world were only
Lava crystallized, salts of the earth
The wishing chair gave a savour to, its kelp
And ozone freshening your outlook
Beyond the range you thought you’d settled for.
xl
I was four but I turned four hundred maybe
Encountering the ancient dampish feel
Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.
Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats
In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould
Around the terracotta water-crock.
Ground of being. Body’s deep obedience
To all its shifting tenses. A half-door
Opening directly into starlight.
Out of that earth house I inherited
A stack of singular, cold memory-weights
To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.
xli
Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before
I knew river shallows
or river pleasures
I knew the ore of longing in those words.
The places I go back to have not failed
But will not last. Waist-deep in cow-parsley,
I re-enter the swim, riding or quelling
The very currents memory is composed of,
Everything accumulated ever
As I took squarings from the tops of bridges
Or the banks of self at evening.
Lick of fear. Sweet transience. Flirt and splash.
Crumpled flow the sky-dipped willows trailed in.
xlii
Heather and kesh and turf stacks reappear
Summer by summer still, grasshoppers and all,
The same yet rarer: fields of the nearly blessed
Where gaunt ones in their shirtsleeves stooped and dug
Or stood alone at dusk surveying bog-banks –
Apparitions now, yet active still