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Swimming Chenango Lake

Page 13

by Charles Tomlinson


  That drain this valley. Those doors

  Might well be the entrance to some mine:

  How would you lift its liquid gold,

  How would you hold time that is travelling, too,

  In every gleam the light is wakening

  Over the waters’ face, asleep and flowing

  With its dream of flight towards what end

  The winter’s night awaits it with? Those strips

  Of flame, vibrant with the current bearing them,

  Inscribe our sign and presence here

  Who watch these waters jostling to their fate

  In the far-off, sharp sea air –

  Air of origin and end: on the gathered spate

  Rides a signature of fire holding its own.

  Skywriting (2003)

  Skywriting

  Three jets are streaking west:

  Trails are beginning to fray already:

  The third, the last set out,

  Climbs parallel a March sky

  Paying out a ruled white line:

  Skywriting like an incision,

  Such surgical precision defines

  The mile between it and the others

  Who have disappeared leaving behind

  Only their now ghostly tracks

  That still hold to the height and map

  Their direction with a failing clarity:

  The sky is higher for their passing

  Where the third plane scans its breadth.

  The mere bare blue would never have shown

  That vaultlike curvature overhead,

  Already evading the mathematics of the spot,

  As it blooms back, a cool canopy,

  A celestial meadow, needing no measure

  But a reconnaissant eye, an ear

  Aware suddenly that as they passed

  No sound accompanied arrival or vanishing

  So high were their flight paths on a sky

  That has gone on expunging them since,

  Leaving a clean page there for chance

  To spread wide its unravelling hieroglyphs.

  Death of a Poet

  i.m. Ted Hughes

  It was a death that brought us south,

  Along a roadway that did not exist

  When the friendship was beginning death has ended.

  How lightly, now, death leans

  Above the counties and the goings-on

  Of loud arterial England. I see

  A man emerge out of a tent,

  Pitched at a field’s edge, his back

  Towards the traffic, taking in

  The flat expanse of Sedgemoor, as if history

  Had not occurred, the drumming tyres

  Creating one wide silence.

  Oaks stand beside their early shadows.

  Sun makes of a man’s two shadow-legs

  Long blades for scissoring the way

  Across yet one more meadow, shortening it.

  Hardy’s rivers – Parrett, Yeo, Tone –

  Flash flood waters at us. Then,

  As the flatlands cede to patchwork Devon,

  Again you cannot quite foretell the way

  Dartmoor will rise up behind its mists,

  As solid as they are shifting. Sun,

  Without warning, sets alight the fields,

  In anticipation of that other unison

  As fire enters body, body fire,

  And every lineament gone, dissolves

  The seal and simplification of human limits.

  Mourners drift out of the church,

  Stand watching the slow cortège

  Of car and hearse wind through the street

  To that last unmaking. The net of lanes

  Entangles our departure, hedges

  Zapped spruce against the expectation

  Of another spring. Scarcely time

  To recall the lanes we walked in or the coast

  That heard our midland and his northern voice

  Against a wind that snatched their sounds.

  The small hawks caught the light

  Below us, crossing the Hartland bays

  Over endless metamorphoses of water.

  Voice-prints, like foot-prints, disappear

  But sooner; though more lingeringly

  They go on fading in the ear.

  We join the highway that is England now.

  The moon, a thin bronze mirror

  Reflecting nothing, a rush of cloud

  Suddenly effaces. The line of oaks

  That at morning stood beside their shadows

  Are shades themselves on our return.

  Cotswold Journey

  2001

  A day before the war and driving east,

  We catch the rasp of ignited engines –

  Planes practising combat above this shire

  Of Norman masonry, limestone walls.

  In their quiet, they seemed so permanent

  Under the changing light. But the tower

  We stand beneath is hacked by sound

  Out of the centuries it has inhabited

  With such certainty. After the flash

  We stand once more on stable ground

  Under chevroned arches, climb the stair

  Up to the dovecot where the priest

  Once fetched the victims down that he would eat.

  The form remains, the victims have all gone

  From nesting places squared in stone,

  Boxes of empty darkness now. The planes streak on

  Returning out of the unsteady brightness,

  The blue that rain could smear away

  But does not. Sun turns into silhouettes

  The gargoyles clinging to sheer surfaces

  That rise above us. Sun travels beside us

  As we penetrate deeper in, lose track

  Of the plane-ways that leave no vapour trails

  To decorate their passage through

  In abstract fury. Courteous walls

  Rise out of stone-crowned summits,

  Prelude and then surround a dwelling space

  With church and inn – for us the solace

  Of a now twilit afternoon. We explore

  Before we eat, the inn-yard and the street beyond,

  Where Saxon masons, raising arch and jamb,

  Cut leaves of acanthus whose weathered surfaces

  Hold onto fragile form. The night

  Slowly extinguishes their edges but bequeaths

  To the mind the lasting glimmer still

  Of stone come to life. The inn

  Recalls us through the village street

  And I remember how a friend once said,

  Speaking with a Yorkshireman’s conciseness,

  ‘A native gift for townscape, a parochialism

  But of a Tuscan kind.’ Our return

  Is silent although we travel by

  Lanes tracing the outlines of the airbase

  And, there, all we manage to decipher

  Is the gleam of wired restriction, barbs

  That bar us out from sterile acres

  Awaiting the future in a moonless quiet.

  Rain, with the clink of the lifted latch

  On our arrival, bursts from the darkness where

  East and west, preparing to unseam

  The sleeping world below that height,

  Downpour drops its curtain on the past

  And the cry of the muezzin infiltrates first light.

  If Bach Had Been a Beekeeper

  for Arvo Pärt

  If Bach had been a beekeeper

  he would have heard

  all those notes

  suspended above one another

  in the air of his ear

  as the differentiated swarm returning

  to the exact hive

  and place in the hive,

  topping up the cells

  with the honey of C major,

  food for the listening generations,

  key to their comfort<
br />
  and solace of their distress

  as they return and return

  to those counterpointed levels

  of hovering wings where

  movement is dance

  and the air itself

  a scented garden

  Cracks in the Universe (2006)

  Above the City

  It would be good

  to pass the afternoon

  under this lucid sky,

  strolling at rooftop level

  this city above the city,

  all the tubular protruberances,

  chimneys, triangular skylights,

  sheds that have lost their gardens

  spread before one. The details

  are not delicate up here

  among the pipes and stacks,

  the solid immovables, and yet

  each outcrop affords

  a fresh vista

  to the promeneur solitaire –

  though only the pigeons

  are properly equipped

  to go on undeterred

  by changes of level where

  one of their flat-footed

  number suddenly launches itself

  off the cornice sideways

  taking its shadow with it

  and bursts into dowdy flower,

  blossoms in feathery mid-air to become

  all that we shall never be,

  condemned to sit

  watching from windows

  the life of those airy acres

  we shall never inherit.

  New York

  Bread and Stone

  The fragment of a loaf, rejected, stale:

  As beautiful as any stone, it bears

  Seams, scars, a dust of flour and like a stone

  If it could unfold its history,

  Would speak of its time in darkness and of light

  Drawing it towards the thing it is,

  Hard to the hand, an obstacle to sight,

  Out of an untold matrix. If a son

  Ask bread of you, would stone be your reply?

  Let the differentiating eye

  Rest on this, and for the moment read

  The seed of nourishment in it as the sun

  Reveals this broken bread as textured stone,

  Served out as a double feast for us

  On the cloth of the commonplace miraculous.

  A Rose from Fronteira

  Head of a rose:

  above the vase

  a gaze widening –

  hardly a face, and yet

  the warmth has brought it forth

  out of itself,

  with all its folds, flakes, layers

  gathered towards the world

  beyond the window,

  as bright as features,

  as directed as a look:

  rose, reader

  of the book

  of light.

  The Holy Man

  In at the gate

  A tramp comes sidling up:

  ‘I called before,’ – it’s now eight –

  ‘But you were still sleeping.’ He smiles

  Like an actor who is perfectly sure

  His audience will approve of him, offers

  To tell us his story in exchange

  For provision (the word is his) and lists

  Tea, milk, candles and ointment:

  ‘I have been bitten by mosquitoes –

  I bless them. They give only a love bite.

  Did you see the moon last night? –

  I blessed that too. Did you see its halo?’

  I see the love bites on his wrists.

  Beard, missing teeth, chapped hands.

  ‘The Lord told me four years ago

  To take up a wandering life. I made a vow

  Of celibacy then, and I have broken it

  Only once. That was in Limerick.

  Now I am headed from Devon to the Hebrides.

  The voice of the Lord is a strange sound

  Both inside and out. I shall only know

  When I arrive where it is he wishes me to go.’

  He pauses, provision slung across one shoulder:

  ‘I’ve blessed the stream that crosses your garden’ –

  With this elate sidelong affirmation,

  Departing he leaves behind him an unshut gate.

  Eden

  There was no Eden

  in the beginning:

  the great beasts

  taller than trees

  stalked their prey through glades

  where the pathos of distance

  had no share in the life of vegetation:

  there was no eye

  to catch the rain-hung grass,

  the elation of sky

  or earth’s incalculable invitation:

  and when it came, that garden,

  who was it raised the wall

  enclosing it in the promise

  of a place not to be lost,

  guarded by winged sentries

  taller than trees,

  of an apple not to be eaten

  and the cost if it were?

  It was man

  made Eden.

  Epilogue

  The Door

  Too little

  has been said

  of the door, its one

  face turned to the night’s

  downpour and its other

  to the shift and glisten of firelight.

  Air, clasped

  by this cover

  into the room’s book,

  is filled by the turning

  pages of dark and fire

  as the wind shoulders the panels, or unsteadies that burning.

  Not only

  the storm’s

  breakwater, but the sudden

  frontier to our concurrences, appearances,

  and as full of the offer of space

  as the view through a cromlech is.

  For doors

  are both frame and monument

  to our spent time,

  and too little

  has been said

  of our coming through and leaving by them.

  from American Scenes and Other Poems (1966)

  Afterword

  David Morley

  Charles Tomlinson was born on 8 January 1927 at his family home 34 Penkhull New Road, Stoke-on-Trent, the only child of Alfred and May Tomlinson. In 1930 the family moved to Gladstone Street in Etruria Vale, at the heart of The Potteries. It was for the young poet: ‘a land / Too handled to be primary – all the same, / The first in feeling’. He found it full of unsuspected possibilities: the shining surfaces of flooded marl pits, furnace-light reflected on canals, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in a dentist’s waiting room.

  Stoke itself was heavily polluted. The house had for its view ‘the biggest gasometer in England’. Tomlinson’s mother and father took their son to a farm in Great Haywood where they would fish. Walking and fishing opened his eyes to the natural world, and to the notion that patience, contemplation, and ‘wishing the fish into the net’ had much in common with writing poems, an image for “capturing” he shared with his later great friend Ted Hughes.

  Tomlinson’s health suffered as a child. Aged ten, pleurisy and rheumatic fever kept him off school for two years and in bed for nine months. During his illness, he wrote some early poems after seeing squirrels from his window. His doctor diagnosed he would have a ‘tired heart’ for the rest of what he expected would be a shortened life. But Tomlinson recovered and, during the war years, attended Longton High School, Staffordshire, [motto: Renascor ‘I am born again’]. Education opened up a fresh world beyond the Midlands town. As Tomlinson commented to The Paris Review in 1998, ‘You need two good teachers in any school, which is what we had, to get through the message of civilization—the role schools are there to fulfil’. Gerhardt Kuttner, a German Jew and a refugee from Hitler, taught him German; and a Scot, Cecil Scrimgeour, taught him French. As a teenager, Tomlinson’s mind was op
ened to Racine, Corneille, Molière, Hugo, Baudelaire, Gautier and Verlaine; and to Schiller, Heine, Kleist, Carossa, Kant, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Thomas Mann. It was a challenging but invigorating curriculum that led Tomlinson to comment later in life, ‘It was that sense of belonging to Europe, which took root early in my imagination’. His fluency in German, French, Spanish, and Italian would later lead to him becoming the foremost champion of translated poetry in Britain, and an outstanding translator of poems by, among others, Attilio Bertolucci, Octavio Paz, Cesar Vallejo and Antonio Machado. The excellence of his schoolteachers informed his own virtuosity and generosity as a university teacher later at Bristol.

  While a teenager, Tomlinson met the head girl from the neighbouring school at an SPCK meeting and, later, at a dance on VE night. Brenda Raybould (b. 1928) went on to read history at Bedford College, London, followed by graduate work in art history at the Warburg and Courtauld institutes where her teachers included Ernst Gombrich, and the notorious spy, Anthony Blunt. Tomlinson himself won an exhibition in 1945 to Queens’ College, Cambridge, to read English and arrived ‘with Rilke in his pocket’. However, compared to the rich curriculum of school, Cambridge was an intellectual disappointment and his tutor disparaged Tomlinson’s passion for pan-European literature.

  Disheartened, he considered leaving to pursue a freelance career writing film scripts. Brenda, with whom he was in daily written communication, persuaded him to stay until he got his degree. The poet and critic Donald Davie returned from war service in the navy and became his tutor in his final year. Davie introduced him to a range of modernist American poets, including Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens (his ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ became talismanic to the young poet), unleashing Tomlinson’s lifelong sense for the possibilities of a transatlantic poetry. Davie and Tomlinson formed a lifelong friendship (Tomlinson called Davie DAD, after the initials of his full name). Sharing their respective interests in modernist and foreign work and becoming allies in their advocacy for a more ambitious, international poetry, they taught each other.

  But what Davie chiefly taught Tomlinson was how to articulate the energy of English syntax: to develop and unfold ideas over sinuous and keenly-designed verse sentences: ‘to think via syntax’. In a later interview Tomlinson reflects that the power of the sustained sentence that he derived from his reading of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Cowper, came from ‘playing tunes on the verbal piano, variations on grammatic possibilities’. Tomlinson never forgot his debt to Davie, dedicating the poem ‘Instead of an Essay’:

 

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