A false spring. By noon the frost
Whitens the shadows only and the stones
Where they lie away from light. The fields
Give back an odour out of earth
Smoking up through the haysmells where the hay
– I thought it was sunlight in its scattered brightness –
Brings last year’s sun to cattle wintering:
The dark will powder them with white, and day
Discover the steaming herd, as beam
On beam, and bird by bird, it thaws
Towards another noon. Et resurrexit:
All will resurrect once more,
But whether you will rise again – unless
To enter the earthflesh and its fullness
Is to rise in the unending metamorphosis
Through soil and stem… This valediction is a requiem.
What was the promise to Abraham and his seed?
That they should feed an everlasting life
In earthdark and in sunlight on the leaf
Beyond the need of hope or help. But we
Would hunger in hope at the shimmer of a straw,
Although it burned, a mere memory of fire,
Although the beauty of earth were all there were.
V
In summer’s heat, under a great tree
I hear the hawks cry down.
The beauty of earth, the memory of your fire
Tell of a year gone by and more
Bringing the leaves to light: they spread
Between these words and the birds that hang
Unseen in predatory flight. Again,
Your high house is in living hands
And what we were saying there is what was said.
My body measures the ground beneath me
Warm in this beech-foot shade, my verse
Pacing out the path I shall not follow
To where you spoke once with a wounded
And wondering contempt against your flock,
Your mind crowded with eagerness and anger.
The hawks come circling unappeasably. Their clangour
Seems like the energy of loss. It is hunger.
It pierces and pieces together, a single note,
The territories they come floating over now:
The escarpment, the foreshore and the sea;
The year that has been, the year to be;
Leaf on leaf, a century’s increment
That has quickened and weathered, withered on the tree
Down into this brown circle where the shadows thicken.
Hay
The air at evening thickens with a scent
That walls exude and dreams turn lavish on –
Dark incense of a solar sacrament
Where, laid in swathes, the field-silk dulls and dries
To contour out the land’s declivities
With parallels of grass, sweet avenues:
Scent hangs perpetual above the changes,
As when the hay is turned and we must lose
This clarity of sweeps and terraces
Until the bales space out the slopes again
Like scattered megaliths. Each year the men
Pile them up close before they build the stack,
Leaving against the sky, as night comes on,
A henge of hay-bales to confuse the track
Of time, and out of which the smoking dews
Draw odours solid as the huge deception.
Under the Bridge
Where the ranch-house disappeared its garden
seeded and the narcissi
began through a slow mutation
to breed smaller and smaller stars
unimpaired in scent: beside these
the horns of the cala lilies
each scroll protruding an insistent
yellow pistil seem from their scale
and succulent whiteness to belong
to an earlier world:
if there were men in it the trellises
that brace these stanchions
would fit the scale
of their husbandry and
if they made music it would
shudder and rebound
like that which travels down
the metal to the base
of this giant instrument
bedded among teazle, fennel, grass
in a returning wilderness
under the bridge
San Francisco
San Fruttuoso
the divers
Seasalt has rusted the ironwork trellis
at the one café. Today
the bathers are all sunbathers
and their bodies, side by side,
hide the minute beach:
the sea is rough and the sun’s
rays pierce merely fitfully
an ill-lit sky. Unvisited,
the sellers of lace and postcards
have nothing to do, and the Dorias
in their cool tombs under the cloisters
sleep out history unfleshed.
Oggi pesce spada
says the café sign, but we
shall eat no swordfish today:
we leave by the ferry
from which the divers are arriving.
We wait under an orange tree
that produces flowers but no oranges.
They litter the rocks with their gear
and begin to assume
alternative bodies, slipping
into black rubbery skins with Caution
written across them.
They are of both sexes. They strap on
waist weights, frog feet,
cylinders of oxygen,
they lean their heaviness which water will lighten
back against rock, resting there
like burdened seals.
They test their cylinders
and the oxygen hisses at them.
They carry knives
and are well equipped to encounter
whatever it is draws them downwards
in their sleek black flesh.
The postcards show Christ –
Cristo del mare –
sunk and standing on his pedestal
with two divers circling
as airy as under-water birds
in baroque, ecstatic devotion
round the bad statue.
Will they find calm down there
we wonder, stepping heavily
over the ship-side gap,
feeling already the unbalancing
pull of the water under us.
We pass the granular rocks
faulted with long scars.
The sea is bristling up to them.
The straightness of the horizon
as we heave towards it
only disguises the intervening
sea-roll and sea-chop, the clutching glitter.
I rather like
the buck of the boat. What I dislike
with the sea tilting at us
is the thought of losing one’s brains
as one slides sideways
to be flung at the bulwarks
as if weightless, the ‘as if’
dissolving on impact
into bone and blood.
The maternal hand tightens
on the push-chair
that motion is dragging at:
her strapped-in child is asleep.
Perhaps those invisible divers –
luckier than we are –
all weight gone
levitate now
around the statue,
their corps de ballet
like Correggio’s sky-
swimming angels, a swarm
of batrachian legs:
they are buoyed up by adoration,
the water merely an accidental aid
to such staggeringly
slow-motion pirouettes
forgetful of body, of gravity.
&
nbsp; The sea-lurch snatches
and spins the wheels of his chair
and the child travels the sudden gradient
caught at by other hands,
reversed in mid-flight
and returned across the up-
hill deck to his mother:
a visitor,
she has the placid
and faintly bovine look
of a Northern madonna
and is scarcely surprised; he, too,
stays perfectly collected
aware now of what it was he had forgotten
while sleeping – the stuff
he was chewing from a packet,
which he continues to do.
He has come back to his body once more.
How well he inhabits his flesh:
lordly in unconcern,
he is as well accoutred as those divers.
He rides out the storm chewing and watching,
trustfully unaware
we could well go down –
though we do not, for already
the town is hanging above
us and the calm quay water.
From the roofs up there
perhaps one could see the divers
emerging, immersing,
whatever it is they are at
as we glide forward
up to the solid, deck to dock,
with salted lips.
That same sea
which wrecked Shelley
goes on rocking behind
and within us, hiding
its Christ, its swordfish,
as the coast reveals
a man-made welcome to us
of wall, street, room,
body’s own measure and harbour,
shadow of lintel, portal
asking it in.
Above Carrara
for Paolo and Francesco
Climbing to Colonnata past ravines
Squared by the quarryman, geometric gulfs
Stepping the steep, the wire and gear
Men use to pare a mountain: climbing
With the eye the absences where green should be,
The annihilating scree, the dirty snow
Of marble, at last we gained a level
In the barren flat of a piazza, leaned
And drank from the fountain there a jet
As cold as tunnelled rock. The place –
Plane above plane and block on block –
Invited us to climb once more
And, cooled now, so we did
Deep between church- and house-wall,
Up by a shadowed stairway to emerge
Where the village ended. As we looked back then
The whole place seemed a quarry for living in,
And between the acts of quarrying and building
To set a frontier, a nominal petty thing,
While, far below, water that cooled our thirst
Dyed to a meal now, a sawdust flow,
Poured down to slake those blades
Slicing inching the luminous mass away
Above Carrara…
Fireflies
The signal light of the firefly in the rose:
Silent explosions, low suffusions, fire
Of the flesh-tones where the phosphorus touches
On petal and on fold: that close world lies
Pulsing within its halo, glows or goes:
But the air above teems with the circulation
Of tiny stars on darkness, cosmos grows
Out of their circlings that never quite declare
The shapes they seem to pin-point, swarming there
Like stitches of light that fleck and thread a sea,
Yet unlike, too, in that the dark is spaces,
Its surfaces all surfaces seen through,
Discovered depths, filled by a flowering,
And though the rose lie lost now to the eye,
You could suppose the whole of darkness a forming rose.
Instead of an Essay
for Donald Davie
Teacher and friend, what you restored to me
Was love of learning; and without that gift
A cynic’s bargain could have shaped my life
To end where it began, in detestation
Of the place and man that had mistaught me.
You were the first to hear my poetry,
Written above a bay in Italy:
Lawrence and Shelley found a refuge once
On that same coast – exiles who had in common
Love for an island slow to learn of it
Or to return that love. And so had we
And do – you from the far shore of the sea
And I beside a stream in Gloucestershire
That feeds it. Meeting maybe once a year
We take the talk up where we left it last,
Forgetful of which fashions, tide on tide –
The Buddha, shamanism, suicide –
Have come and passed.
Brother in a mystery you trace
To God, I to an awareness of delight
I cannot name, I send these lines to you
In token of the prose I did not write.
The Littleton Whale
in memory of Charles Olson
What you wrote to know
was whether
the old ship canal
still paralleled the river
south
of Gloucester (England)…
What I never told
in my reply
was of the morning
on that same stretch
(it was a cold
January day in ’85)
when Isobel Durnell
saw the whale…
She was up at dawn
to get her man off on time
to the brickyard and
humping up over the banks
beyond Bunny Row
a slate-grey hill showed
that the night before
had not been there…
They both ran outside
and down to the shore:
the wind was blowing
as it always blows
so hard that the tide
comes creeping up under it
often unheard…
The great grey-blue thing
had an eye
that watched wearily
their miniature motions as they
debated its fate
for the tide
was already feeling beneath it
floating it away…
It was Moses White
master mariner
owner of the sloop Matilda
who said the thing to do
was to get chains and a traction engine
– they got two from Olveston –
and drag it ashore:
the thing was a gift:
before long it would be
drifting off to another part of the coast
and lost to them
if they didn’t move now…
And so the whale –
flukes, flesh, tail
trembling no longer
with a failing life –
was chained and hauled
installed above the tideline…
And the crowds came
to where it lay
upside down
displaying a
belly evenly-wrinkled
its eye lost to view
mouth skewed and opening into
an interior of tongue and giant sieves
that had once
filtered that diet of shrimp
its deep-sea sonar
had hunted out for it
by listening to submarine echoes
too slight
for electronic selection…
And Hector Knapp
wrote in his diary:
Thear was a Whal
cum ashore at Littleton Pill
and bid t
hear a fortnight
He was sixty eaight feet long
His mouth was twelve feet
The Queen claim it at last
and sould it for forty pound
Thear supposed to be
forty thousen pepeal to se it
from all parts of the cuntry…
The Methodist preacher
said that George Sindry
who was a very religious man
told himself when that whale came in
he’d heard so many arguments
about the tale of Jonah not being true
that he went to Littleton to
‘satisfy people’. He was a tall man
a six footer
‘but I got into that whale’s mouth’ he said
‘and I stood in it
upright…’
The carcass
had overstayed its welcome
so they sent up a sizeable boat
to tow it to Bristol
and put it on show there
before they cut the thing down stinking
to be sold
and spread for manure…
You can still see the sign
to Whale Wharf as they renamed it
and Wintle’s Brickworks became
the Whale Brick
Tile and Pottery Works…
Walking daily onto
the now-gone premises
through the ‘pasture land
with valuable deposits of clay thereunder’
when the machine- and drying sheds
the five kilns, the stores and stables
stood permanent in that place
of their disappearance
Enoch Durnell still
relished his part in all that history begun
when Bella shook
and woke him with a tale that the tide
had washed up a whole house
with blue slates on it into Littleton Pill
and that house was a whale…
The Flood
It was the night of the flood first took away
My trust in stone. Perfectly reconciled it lay
Together with water – and does so still –
In the hill-top conduits that feed into
Cisterns of stone, cisterns echoing
With a married murmur, as either finds
Its own true note in such a unison.
It rained for thirty days. Down chimneys
And through doors, the house filled up
With the roar of waters. The trees were bare,
With nothing to keep in the threat
And music of that climbing, chiming din
Swimming Chenango Lake Page 8