At Easter, searching so fearful-careful,
So hopeless-careless, rag-wings, ragged trousers.
Too low-born for the peregrine’s trapeze, too dopey
For the sparrowhawk’s jet controls –
Where’s the high dream when you rode circles
Mewing near the sun
Into your mirror-self – something unearthly
Lowering from heaven towards you?
Buzzard sits in mid-field, in mild sunlight,
Listening to tangled tales, by mole and by bee,
And by soft-headed dandelion.
When he treads, by chance, on a baby rabbit
He looks like an old woman
Trying to get her knickers off.
In the end he lumbers away
To find some other buzzard, maybe older,
To show him how.
Snipe
You are soaked with the cold rain –
Like a pelt in tanning liquor.
The moor’s swollen waterbelly
Swags and quivers, ready to burst at a step.
Suddenly
Some scrap of dried fabric rips
Itself up
From the marsh-quake, scattering. A soft
Explosion of twilight
In the eyes, with a spinning fragment
Somewhere. Nearly lost, wing-flash
Stab-trying escape routes, wincing
From each, ducking under
And flinging up over –
Bowed head, jockey shoulders
Climbing headlong
As if hurled downwards –
A mote in the watery eye of the moor –
Hits cloud and
Skis down the far rain wall
Slashes a wet rent
In the rain-dusk
Twisting out sideways –
rushes his alarm
Back to the ice-age.
The downpour helmet
Tightens on your skull, riddling the pools,
Washing the standing stones and fallen shales
With empty nightfall.
The Hen
The Hen
Worships the dust. She finds God everywhere.
Everywhere she finds his jewels.
And she does not care
What the cabbage thinks.
She has forgotten flight
Because she has interpreted happily
Her recurrent dream
Of clashing cleavers, of hot ovens,
And of the little pen-knife blade
Splitting her palate.
She flaps her wings, like shallow egg-baskets,
To show her contempt
For those who live on escape
And a future of empty sky.
She rakes, with noble, tireless foot,
The treasury of the dirt,
And clucks with the mechanical alarm clock
She chose instead of song
When the Creator
Separated the Workers and the Singers.
With her eye on reward
She tilts her head religiously
At the most practical angle
Which reveals to her
That the fox is a country superstition,
That her eggs have made man her slave
And that the heavens, for all their threatening,
Have not yet fallen.
And she is stern. Her eye is fierce – blood
(That weakness) is punished instantly.
She is a hard bronze of uprightness.
And indulges herself in nothing
Except to swoon a little, a delicious slight swoon,
One eye closed, just before sleep,
Conjuring the odour of tarragon.
Mallard
Gloom-glossy wind
Ransacking summer’s end.
Crammed, churned leaf-mass.
The river’s shutters clatter.
Myself mixed with it – gusty skeleton,
Scarecrow blown
Inside out, clinging to my straws –
Horizons rolling up. A space-witch
Mussel-blue, in a fling of foul skirts
Gapes a light-streak –
I squint up and vertigo
Has unbalanced the clouds, slithering everything
Into a sack.
Little elf-horse – bolts for freedom.
Gallops out of the river
Flashes white chevrons, climbs
The avalanche of leaves, flickering pennons,
Whinnies overhead –
and is
Snatched away by a huge hand.
Evening Thrush
Beyond a twilight of limes and willows
The church craftsman is still busy –
Switing idols,
Rough pre-Goidelic gods and goddesses,
Out of old bits of churchyard yew.
Suddenly flinging
Everything off, head-up, flame-naked,
Plunges shuddering into the creator –
Then comes plodding back, with a limp, over cobbles.
That was a virtuoso’s joke.
Now, serious, stretched full height, he aims
At the zenith. He situates a note
Right on the source of light.
Sews a seamless garment, simultaneously
Hurls javelins of dew
Three in air together, catches them.
Explains a studied theorem of sober practicality.
Cool-eyed,
Gossips in a mundane code of splutters
With Venus and Jupiter.
Listens –
Motionless, intent astronomer.
Suddenly launches a soul –
The first roses hang in a yoke stupor.
Globe after globe rolls out
Through his fluteful of dew –
The tree-stacks ride out on the widening arc.
Alone and darkening
At the altar of a star
With his sword through his throat
The thrush of clay goes on arguing
Over the graves.
O thrush,
If that really is you, behind the leaf-screen,
Who is this –
Worn-headed, on the lawn’s grass, after sunset,
Humped, voiceless, turdus, imprisoned
As a long-distance lorry-driver, dazed
With the pop and static and unending
Of worms and wife and kids?
Treecreeper
On the tree-bole a zig-zag upward rivulet
Is a dodgy bird, a midget ace,
Busy as a shrew, moth-modest as lichen.
Inchmeal medical examination
Of the tree’s skin. Snap-shot micro-scanner
And a bill of instant hypodermic.
He’s unzipping the tree-bole
For deeper scrutiny. It sticks. It jerks.
No microbe dare be, nor bubble spider.
All the trees are waiting – pale, undressed –
So he can’t dawdle. He jabs, dabs, checks essentials,
Magnet-safe on undersides, then swings
In a blur of tiny machinery
To the next patient’s foot, and trickles upward
Murmuring ‘Good, good!’ and ‘Good, good!’
Into the huge satisfying mass of work.
A Dove
Snaps its twig-tether – mounts –
Dream-yanked up into vacuum
Wings snickering.
Another, in a shatter, hurls dodging away up.
They career through tree-mazes –
Nearly uncontrollable love-weights.
Or now
Temple-dancers, possessed, and steered
By solemn powers
Through insane, stately convulsions.
Porpoises
Of dove-lust and blood splendour
With arcs
And plungings, and spray-slow explosions.
Now violently gone
Riding the snake of the long love-whip
Among flarings of mares and stallions
Now staying
Coiled on a bough
Bubbling molten, wobbling top-heavy
Into one and many.
Sing the Rat
Sing the hole’s plume, the rafter’s cockade
Who melts from the eye-corner, the soft squealer
Pointed at both ends, who chews through lead
Sing the scholarly meek face
Of the penniless rat
Who studies all night
To inherit the house
Sing the riff-raff of the roof-space, who dance till dawn
Sluts in silk, sharpers with sleek moustaches
Dancing the cog-roll, the belly-bounce, the trundle
Sing the tireless hands
Of the hardworking rat
Who demolishes the crust, and does not fail
To sign the spilt flour
The rat, the rat, the ratatatat
The house’s poltergeist, shaped like a shuttle
Who longs to join the family
Sing his bright face, cross-eyed with eagerness
His pin-fingers, that seem too small for the job
Sing his split nose, that looks so sore
O sing his fearless ears, the listener in the wall
Let him jump on your head, let him cling there
Save him from sticks and stones
Sing the rat so poor he thrives on poison
Who has nothing to give to the trap, though it gapes for a year
Except his children
Who prays only to the ferret
‘Forget me’ and to the terrier
‘In every thousand of me, spare two’
Sing him
Who stuffs his velvet purse, in hurry and fear
With the memory of the fork,
The reflections of the spoon, the hope of the knives
Who woos his wife with caperings, who thinks deep
Who is the slave of two fangs
O sing
The long-tailed grey worry of the night-hours
Who always watches and waits
Like a wart on the nose
Even while you snore
O sing
Little Jesus in the wilderness
Carrying the sins of the house
Into every dish, the hated one
O sing
Scupper-tyke, whip-lobber
Smutty-guts, pot-goblin
Garret-whacker, rick-lark
Sump-swab, cupboard-adder
Bobby-robin, knacker-knocker
Sneak-nicker, sprinty-dinty
Pintle-bum
Swallows
What The Schoolmaster Said:
She flicks past, ahead of her name,
Twinkling away out over the lake.
Reaching this way and that way, with her scissors,
Snipping midges
Trout are too numb and sunken to stir for.
Sahara clay ovens, at mirage heat,
Glazed her blues, and still she is hot.
She wearied of snatching clegs off the lugs of buffaloes
And of lassooing the flirt-flags of gazelles.
They told her the North was one giant snowball
Rolling South. She did not believe them.
She exchanged the starry chart of Columbus
For a beggar’s bowl of mud.
Did she close her eyes and trust in God?
No, she saw lighthouses
Streaming in chaos
Like sparks from a chymney –
She had fixed her instruments on home.
So now, suddenly, into a blanch-tree stillness,
A silence of celandines,
A fringing and stupor of frost
She bursts, weightless –
and anchors
On eggs frail as frost.
There she goes, flung taut on her leash,
Her eyes at her mouth-corners,
Water-skiing out across a wind
That wrecks great flakes against windscreens.
What The Farmer’s Wife Said:
It’s the loveliest thing about swallows,
The moment they come,
The moment they dip in, and are suddenly there.
For months you just never thought about them
Then suddenly you see one swimming maybe out there
Over our bare tossing orchard, in a slattery April blow,
Probably among big sloppy snowflakes.
And there it is – the first swallow,
Flung and frail, like a midge caught in the waterskin
On the weir’s brink – and straightaway you lose it.
You just got a glimpse of whisker and frailty
Then there’s nothing but jostled daffodils, like the girls running in from a downpour
Shrieking and giggling and shivering
And the puckered primrose posies, and the wet grit.
It’s only a moment, only a flicker, easy to miss –
That first swallow just swinging in your eye-corner
Like a mote in the wind-smart,
A swallow pinned on a roller of air that roars and snatches it away
Out of sight, and booms in the bare wood
And you know there’ll be colder nights yet
And worse days and you think
‘If he’s here, there must be flies for him’
And you think of the flies and their thin limbs in that cold.
What The Vicar Said:
I agree
There’s nothing verminous, or pestilential, about swallows.
Swallows are the aristocrats
The thoroughbreds of summer.
Still, there is something sinister about them.
I think it’s their futuristic design.
The whole evolution of aircraft
Has been to resemble swallows more and more closely.
None of that propellor-blur, ponderous, biplane business
Of partridges and pheasants,
Or even the spitfire heroics of hawks.
When I was a boy I remember
Their shapes always alarmed me, slightly,
With the thought of the wars to come,
The speed beyond sound, the molten forms.
You might say
They have a chirruppy, chicken-sweet expression
With goo-goo starlet wide-apart eyes,
And their bills seem tiny, almost retroussé cute –
In fact, the whole face opens
Like a jet engine.
And before this, they solved the problem, did they not,
Of the harpoon.
Under the Hill of Centurions
The river is in a resurrection fever.
Now at Easter you find them
Up in the pool’s throat, and in the very jugular
Where the stickle pulses under grasses –
Cock minnows!
They have abandoned contemplation and prayer in the pool’s crypt.
There they are, packed all together,
In an inch of seething light.
A stag-party, all bridegrooms, all in their panoply –
Red-breasted as if they bled, their Roman
Bottle-glass greened bodies silked with black
In the clatter of the light loom of water
All singing and
Toiling together,
Wreathing their metals
Into the warp and weft of the lit water –
I imagine their song,
Deep-chested, striving, solemn.
A wrestling tress of kingfisher colour,
Steely jostlings, a washed mass of brilliants
Labouring at earth
In the wheel of light –
Ghostly rinsings
A struggle of spirits.
Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan
for Hilary and S
imon
‘Up in the pools,’ they’d said, and ‘Two miles upstream.’
Something sinister about bogland rivers.
And a shock –
after the two miles of tumblequag, of Ice-Age hairiness, crusty, quaking cadaver and me lurching over it in elation like a daddy-long-legs –
after crooked little clatterbrook and again clatterbrook (a hurry of shallow grey light so distilled it looked like acid) –
and after the wobbly levels of a razor-edged, blood-smeared grass, the flood-sucked swabs of bog-cotton, the dusty calico rip-up of snipe –
under those petrified scapulae, vertebrae, horn-skulls the Cuillins (asylum of eagles) that were blue-silvered like wrinkled baking foil in the blue noon that day, and tremulous –
early August, in a hot lateness (only three hours before my boat), a glimpse of my watch and suddenly
up to my hip in a suck-hole then on again teetering over the broken-necked heath-bobs a good half-hour and me melting in my combined fuel of toil and clobber suddenly
The shock.
The sheer cavern of current piling silence
Under my feet.
So lonely-drowning deep, so drowned-hair silent
So clear
Cleansing the body cavity of the underbog.
Such a brilliant cut-glass interior
Sliding under me
And I felt a little bit giddy
Ghostly
As I fished the long pool-tail
Peering into that superabundance of spirit.
And now where were they, my fellow aliens from prehistory?
Those peculiar eyes
So like mine, but fixed at zero,
Pressing in from outer darkness
Eyes of aimed sperm and of egg on their errand,
Looking for immortality
In the lap of a broken volcano, in the furrow of a lost glacier,
Those shuttles of love-shadow?
Only humbler beings waved at me –
Weeds grazing the bottom, idling their tails.
Till the last pool –
A broad, coiling whorl, a deep ear
Of pondering amber,
Greenish and precious like a preservative,
With a ram’s skull sunk there – magnified, a Medusa,
Funereal, phosphorescent, a lamp
Ten feet under the whisky.
I heard this pool whisper a warning.
I tickled its leading edges with temptation.
I stroked its throat with a whisker.
I licked the moulded hollows
Of its collarbones
Where the depth, now underbank opposite,
Pulsed up from contained excitements –
Eerie how you know when it’s coming –