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
xiii
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,
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 ski
n
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
And territorial, still sure of their ground,
Still interested, not knowing how far
The country of the shades has been pushed back,
How long the lark has stopped outside these fields
And only seems unstoppable to them
Caught like a far hill in a freak of sunshine.
xliii
Choose one set of tracks and track a hare
Until the prints stop, just like that, in snow.
End of the line. Smooth drifts. Where did she go?
Back on her tracks, of course, then took a spring
Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.
She landed in her form and ate the snow.
Consider too the ancient hieroglyph
Of ‘hare and zig-zag’, which meant ‘to exist’,
To be on the qui vive, weaving and dodging
Like our friend who sprang (goodbye) beyond our ken
And missed a round at last (but of course he’d stood it):
The shake-the-heart, the dew-hammer, the far-eyed.
xliv
All gone into the world of light? Perhaps
As we read the line sheer forms do crowd
The starry vestibule. Otherwise
They do not. What lucency survives
Is blanched as worms on nightlines I would lift,
Ungratified if always well prepared
For the nothing there – which was only what had been there.
Although in fact it is more like a caught line snapping,
That moment of admission of All gone,
When the rod butt loses touch and the tip drools
And eddies swirl a dead leaf past in silence
Swifter (it seems) than the water’s passage.
xlv
For certain ones what was written may come true:
They shall live on in the distance
At the mouths of rivers.
For our ones, no. They will re-enter
Dryness that was heaven on earth to them,
Happy to eat the scones baked out of clay.
For some, perhaps, the delta’s reed-beds
And cold bright-footed seabirds always wheeling.
For our ones, snuff
And hob-soot and the heat off ashes.
And a judge who comes between them and the sun
In a pillar of radiant house-dust.
xlvi
Mountain air from the mountain up behind;
Out front, the end-of-summer, stone-walled fields;
And in a slated house the fiddle going
Like a flat stone skimmed at sunset
Or the irrevocable slipstream of flat earth
Still fleeing behind space.
Was music once a proof of God’s existence?
As long as it admits things beyond measure,
&
nbsp; That supposition stands.
So let the ear attend like a farmhouse window
In placid light, where the extravagant
Passed once under full sail into the longed-for.
xlvii
The visible sea at a distance from the shore
Or beyond the anchoring grounds
Was called the offing.
The emptier it stood, the more compelled
The eye that scanned it.
But once you turned your back on it, your back
Was suddenly all eyes like Argus’s.
Then, when you’d look again, the offing felt
Untrespassed still, and yet somehow vacated
As if a lambent troop that exercised
On the borders of your vision had withdrawn
Behind the skyline to manoeuvre and regroup.
xlviii
Strange how things in the offing, once they’re sensed,
Convert to things foreknown;