Swimming Chenango Lake

by Charles Tomlinson

  Itself, while the light still holds,

  To a steady burning, a clarity

  Bordering the blue, deep fold of shadow:

  Cars, weaving the woodslope road,

  Glitter like needles through the layered leaves.

  The Door in the Wall

  i.m. Jorge Guillén

  Under the door in the wall

  the slit of sun

  pours out at the threshold

  such an illumination,

  one begins to picture

  the garden in there,

  making the wrinkled step

  seem shadowy, bare;

  but within the shadows

  an underfoot world puts forth

  in points of light

  its facets of worth –

  surfaces of such depth

  you have only to eye them,

  to find you are travelling

  a constellation by them;

  and the sun that whitens

  every lightward plane

  leaks up the stone jamb,

  reappears again

  where the flickering tangle

  of thick leaves covers

  the top of the wall and

  ivy piles over.

  So the garden in there

  cannot mean merely

  an ornamental perfection

  when the gardener lets be

  this climbing parasite

  within whose folds

  birds find a shelter

  against rain and cold.

  But let be the garden, too,

  as you tread and travel

  this broken pathway

  where the sun does not dazzle

  but claims company with

  all these half-hidden things

  and raising their gaze

  does not ask of them wings –

  fissures and grained dirt,

  shucked shells and pebble,

  a sprinkle of shatterings,

  a grist of gravel

  where the print and seal

  the travelling foot has set

  declares, Jorge Guillén,

  the integrity of the planet.

  Geese Going South

  Planing in, on the autumn gusts,

  Fleeing the inclement north, they sound

  More like a hunting pack, hound

  Answering hound, than fugitives from the cold:

  Flocks, skeining the air-lanes

  In stately buoyancy even seem

  To dance, but one’s weightless dream

  Of what they feel or are, must yield

  The nearer they approach. I sense the weariness

  Of wings that bring them circling down

  Onto this cut corn-field

  That offers small sustenance but rest

  Among its husks and straw. Rest –

  Yet they continue calling from extended throats

  As they did in flight, expending still

  Energies that they will not stint

  Crying to one another – is it? – encouragement.

  I break cover for a clearer sight, but they

  Instantly perceive this senseless foray

  No hunter would attempt: a thousand birds

  At the snap and spread of a great fan,

  A winnowing of wings, rise up

  Yelping in unison, weariness turned to power,

  And tower away to a further field

  Where others are arriving. I leave them there

  On the high ridge snow will soon possess.

  A moon that was rising as the birds came down

  Watches me through the trees. I too descend

  Towards the firefly town lights of the valley.

  What does a goose, I ask myself,

  Dream of among its kind, or are they all

  Of a single mind where moonlight shows

  The flight-lanes they still strain towards

  Even in sleep? … In sleep

  The town beside these transient neighbours

  Scarcely dreams of their nocturnal presence

  Awaiting dawn, the serpentine stirrings

  And restless moon-glossed wings,

  Numb at arrival, aching to be gone.

  Hamilton, USA

  Picking Mushrooms by Moonlight

  Strange how these tiny moons across the meadows,

  Wax with the moon itself out of the shadows.

  Harvest is over, yet this scattered crop,

  Solidifying moonlight, drop by drop,

  Answers to the urging of that O,

  And so do we, exclaiming as we go,

  With rounded lips translating shape to sound,

  At finding so much treasure on the ground

  Marked out by light. We stoop and gather there

  These lunar fruits of the advancing year:

  So late in time, yet timely at this date,

  They show what forces linger and outwait

  Each change of season, rhyme made visible

  And felt on the fingertips at every pull.

  Jubilation (1995)

  Down from Colonnata

  A mist keeps pushing between the peaks

  Of the serrated mountains, like the dust

  Off marble from the workings underneath:

  Down from Colonnata you can hear

  The quarrymen calling through the caves

  Above the reverberation of their gear

  Eating through limestone. We are moving

  And so is the sun: at each angle

  Of the descending road, the low light

  Meeting our eyes, surprises them whenever

  It reappears striking a more vivid white

  From the crests behind us. Down

  And on: the distance flashes up at us

  The flowing mercury of the sea below

  That we, passing Carrara, lose

  Until it shows once more backing the plain.

  But the sun has outdistanced us already,

  And reaching the level water, dipped

  Beneath it, leaving a spread sheen

  Under the final height dividing us,

  And across the liquid radiance there,

  A palpitation of even, marble light.

  Jubilación

  a letter to Juan Malpartida

  You ask me what I’m doing, now I’m free –

  Books, music and our garden occupy me.

  All these pursuits I share (with whom you know)

  For Eden always was a place for two.

  But nothing is more boring than to hear

  Of someone’s paradise when you’re not there.

  Let me assure you, robbers, rain and rot

  Are of a trinity that haunt this spot

  So far from town, so close to naked nature,

  Both vegetable and the human creature.

  Having said that, now let me give a sample

  Of how we make short northern days more ample.

  We rise at dawn, breakfast, then walk a mile,

  Greeting the early poachers with a smile

  (For what is poetry itself but poaching –

  Lying in wait to see what game will spring?).

  Once back, we turn to music and we play

  The two-piano version of some ballet,

  Sacre du Printemps or Debussy’s Faune,

  On what we used to call the gramophone,

  To keep the active blood still briskly moving

  Until we go from dancing to improving

  The muscles of the mind – ‘in different voices’

  Reading a stretch of Proust, a tale of Joyce’s.

  And so to verse. Today, the game lies low,

  And Brenda, passing, pauses at the window,

  Raps on the pane, beckons me outside. She

  Thinks, though we can’t plant yet, we still can tidy,

  Clear the detritus from the frosty ground

  With freezing fingers, and construct a mound

  Of weeds and wood, then coax
it to a red

  And roaring blaze – potash for each bed,

  As Virgil of The Georgics might have said.

  I signal back my depth of inspiration,

  The piece I’m finishing for Poetry Nation

  (What nation, as a nation, ever cared

  A bad peseta or a dry goose turd

  For poetry?). Our Shelley’s right, of course,

  You can’t spur on a spavined Pegasus

  Or, as he puts it, ‘There’s no man can say

  I must, I will, I shall write poetry.’ –

  Or he can say it and no verse appear.

  As you now see (or would if you were here)

  The winter sunlight sends its invitation

  To shelve these mysteries of inspiration

  And breathe the air – daybreak at noon, it seems,

  The swift de-misting of these British beams

  (Our watercolour school was full of such

  Transient effects – we took them from the Dutch).

  Strange how this wooded valley, like a book

  Open beneath the light, repays your look

  With sentences, whole passages and pages

  Where space, not words, ’s the medium that assuages

  The thirsty eye, syntactically solid,

  Unlike the smog-smudged acres of Madrid

  Boiling in sun and oil. You must excuse

  These loose effusions of the patriot muse.

  Not everybody’s smitten with this spot –

  When Chatwin lived here, he declared he was not,

  His cool, blue eye alighting only on

  Far distant vistas Patagonian,

  Untrammelled in the ties of local life,

  Lost to the county, to both friends and wife.

  We’d walk together, talking distant parts –

  He thought we all were nomads in our hearts.

  Perhaps we are, but I prefer to go

  And to return, a company of two.

  Hence jubilation at my jubilación

  That we, together, leave behind our nación

  And visit yours – or, just look up, you’ll see

  The vapour trails above us, westerly

  The high direction of their subtle line,

  Spun between Severn and Hudson, and a sign

  That we shall soon be passing at that height

  And, if the weather’s clear, catch our last sight

  Of Gloucestershire beneath us as we go.

  But I must use ‘la pelle et le râteau’

  (Things that were images for Baudelaire),

  And with the backache, spade and rake, prepare

  The soil to plant our crops in on returning.

  So I must pause from versing and start burning,

  To anticipate the time we’re once more here

  In the great cycle of the ceaseless year.

  Jubilación: the Spanish for ‘retirement’.

  The Shadow

  The sun flung out at the foot of the tree

  A perfect shadow on snow: we found that we

  Were suddenly walking through this replica,

  The arteries of this map of winter

  Offering a hundred pathways up the hill

  Too intricate to follow. We stood still

  Among the complications of summit branches

  Of a mid-field tree far from all other trees.

  Or was it roots were opening through the white

  An underworld thoroughfare towards daylight?

  There stretched the silence of that dark frontier,

  Ignoring the stir of the branches where

  A wind was disturbing their quiet and

  Rippled the floating shadow without sound

  Like a current from beneath, as we strode through

  And on into a world of untrodden snow,

  The shadow all at once gone out as the sun withdrew.

  Walks

  The walks of our age

  are like the walks of our youth:

  we turned then page on page

  of a legible half-truth

  where what was written

  was trees, contours, pathways –

  and what arose as we read them

  half conversation, half praise –

  and the canals, walls, fields

  outside of the town

  extended geographies

  that were and were not our own

  to the foot of the rocks

  whose naked strata threw

  their stone gaze down at us –

  a look that we could not look through.

  That gaze is on us now:

  a more relenting scene

  returns our words to us,

  tells us that what we mean

  cannot contain

  half the dazzle and height

  surrounding us here:

  words put to flight,

  the silence outweighs them

  yet still leans to this page

  to overhear what we talk of

  in the walks of our age.

  The Vineyard above the Sea (1999)

  The Vineyard Above the Sea

  This frontal hill falls sheer to water,

  Rugged forehead whose rhythmic folds

  Are of stone, not flesh – walls

  That hold up the soil and the vines between,

  Whose final fruit, essence and asperity,

  Is wine like daylight, tasting of the sea.

  I lift a glass of it towards the sun

  Catching, within, the forms essentialized

  Of these cliff-edge vine-rows –

  Cables hoisting a harvest to the summit –

  And beyond the ripple of rock-shoulders

  Bearing the load of grapes and stone,

  The town itself – almost a woman’s name –

  Corniglia, as tight-gripped to its headland

  As to their heights these walls, floating

  Along the contours like the recollection

  Of a subsided ocean that has left behind

  The print of waves. Windows, doors

  In the heaped façades cast a maternal glance

  Over a geology festooned, transformed,

  Where through the centuries it hunched a way

  Towards these cube-crystals of the houses,

  This saline precipice, this glass of light.

  Drawing Down the Moon

  I place on the sill a saucer

  that I fill with water:

  it rocks with a tidal motion,

  as if that porcelain round

  contained a small sea:

  this threshold ocean

  throws into confusion

  the image that it seizes

  out of the sky – the moon

  just risen, and now in pieces

  beneath the window: the glass

  takes in the image at its source,

  a clear shard of newness,

  and lets it into the house

  from pane to pane

  riding slowly past:

  when I look again

  towards the sill, its dish

  of moonlight is recomposing:

  it lies still, from side to side

  of the ceramic circle

  curving across the water,

  a sleeping bride:

  for the moon’s sake

  do not wake her,

  do not shake the saucer.

  The First Death

  in memoriam Bruce Chatwin

  The hand that reached out from a painted sleeve

  When you sensed that you were dying, gathered you

  Into the picture: clothes, furs, pearls,

  Bronze of a vessel, silver of a dish

  From which the grapes were overflowing. Tangible

  The minute whiteness of those pearls, the galaxies

  They strung; the velvets, sleeves, the welcome

  Among convivial company; the offered hand,

  All those glistening appearances tha
t now

  Were to declare the secret of their surfaces –

  Surfaces deep as roots. You told

  How you were led at that first death

  Through the Venetian plenitude of a room

  Across which a glance confirmed the presence there

  Of windows spilling light on this festivity,

  And running beyond them, a silhouette –

  The columns of a balustrade – then sky.

  You were let into the anteroom of your heaven

  By the eye, moving and attending, finding good

  Those textures it had grazed on like a food.

  The second time you died without remission,

  Leaving no report on the lie of the land

  Beyond that parapet’s stone sill, beyond the gloss

  On all surfaces, rich and indecipherable.

  In Memoriam Ángel Crespo (1926–1995)

  All things engender shadow –

  the rose, the rose-arch and the meadow

  sombre among surrounding trees

  newly in leaf: shadow

  is a continual flow

  in the soliloquy we weave

  within ourselves, and this

  makes the diamond of the day

  unreal when it insists

  on permanence: but then it takes

  a slow and spreading shade

  from the contrasting undertone that makes

  each facet seem

  to both gleam and darken,

  changing like the surface of a stream

  whose points of light

  advancing, dance

  on the ripple

  pulling them forward

  over sunless depth. Listen

  and you can hear

  at the root of notes

  a darker music giving form

  to a music already there

  filling the innocent ear

  with only half its story.

  By Night

  Lights from the hillside farm by night

  Open three doors of fire

  Across the swollen stream. It is travelling

  Freighted with the weight a season’s rain

  Unburdens down all the waterways