What were we getting at, what were we using the real
things for when we climbed the wall
into the empty house next door,
made a study of two obsolete bicycles?
And what was it made us run the gauntlet of the iron-
jawed, finger-snatching postbox, or track the stream
through ferns in other people’s gardens to the ford?
Everything we saw was sign and was the definite
article: the marble statue in its deep blue velvet
cushioned summerhouse, its ogre owner,
the largesse of the stream, coining light.
The Grey Lady solid and circumstantial
on a bicycle down by Clare Pike’s house.
The dusk shaped like a bicycle, end-on.
What was it we were listening for when we went
up the bedroom stairs with palms pressed flat
against the dark –
metaphor before the word
metaphor, or our selves, the far side of the wall?
IV
If I give you this to read, will you say
I should tell how we ran off, aged four,
to paddle in Lily Brook in January?
How black chewing gum made us invisible,
how we flew with a tailwind and a parasol,
how you said we were in the novel of our lives
and I wrote stories where we all had pseudonyms?
Yesterday you sent an accidental voicemail
so there I was listening, half way up Ninetree Hill,
to the steam-iron sound of a printing press,
broken lines of a conversation in French.
And I thought of you telling the story to your daughter –
telling her all the stories, sketching in for her
something of the forms we fill. And of the word,
daughter: its promise and solidity, its dailiness.
And of a real errata slip: for exits, read exist.
V
This should be a conclusion – April,
thirty years on, Inez in a bundle
of clothes on your back.
We slip past the new-build, count
the steps down to the stream,
get the camera out.
This should be the full
circle, the final telling detail –
and so it is.
What to say of it?
We were here for a bit
and then we were cold
and on the bus back to Exeter.
But think of us dipping a toe
in the water, through and beside
those two girls, aged ten or so,
who are out posting a letter.
One in a hat and three jumpers,
the other with an umbrella.
The man walking his terrier
half-recognises them, half
swings his lead. He looks back,
sees they’re still there. Sees
nothing out of the ordinary.
VI
Open the dark.
The step to the back bedroom creaks.
Open the dark door. You know
there’s nothing there –
or nothing but boxes, crayons,
an ironing board.
The window is dark.
The sky is drawn in a slant
net curtain. The air
on the stairs is warm
by comparison, and shadows grow
full-skirted in the dark
by the window – at least dark
enough to imagine nothing
there, and the exact shape of it:
nothing but seeing through.
Revenant
I will go down by Jacob’s Ladder
by flip-flop, sea-salt and vanilla
I will go down by Taddyford
by frogspawn and a hole in my boot
I will go down by the canal
in my bridesmaid’s shoes of white satin
I will go down by St Erth
on a rope across the stream
I will go down by Dawlish
by a stone’s skimming quickstep
by the ocean’s erasures
And I will go down by Hope Cove
by pitch and slipway, by pampas grass
I will go down by Princess Pavilion
by grotto, night-light and sea-shell
I will go down by Budleigh Salterton
by mud, moss, one-legged postbox
by Lily Brook and Little Knowle
by water under the bridge
And I will go down by Cot Valley
by wheelhouse, llama and camellia
by lay-by where sleeping dogs lie
by sea, by swing, by beginning
Where I will go down by Lodge Hill
by elm, sledge and kaleidoscope
And I will go down by Gilgarran
by sunset, cowbell, ice cream van
And I will go down by Gilgarran
by myself, by name alone
Anecdote
Of course there was a house, but it wasn’t that
important. Past the ring road and through a gap
in the wall it was the cemetery we went for –
a burial ground of grass overtopping its stony
non-conformist dead and the past that hic iacet,
sacred. It was summer then and silent. Only
the house was more so: boarded and ivy-leaved,
a three-storeyed volume of dark that we ignored.
What the policeman saw was two girls elaborate
with petticoats and parasols who ran the length
of the graveyard and vaulted into a 12-foot fall.
Then nothing. Some children in the park on swings.
The pale sun lapidary. The sheer height of the wall.
And this was over thirty years ago. It was nothing.
And the house had no bearing on it at all.
Forecast
Some day they’ll stand here, the conservationists
of the future, small sable brushes pointilliste
in the dots and dashes of the walls. Familiar,
they’ll call the outlines, with a real resemblance.
Isn’t this the very house we’re standing in?
And look, they had cats with collars, just like ours.
But the inscriptions puzzle. What does it mean
to say that horses fly in a half-forgotten language?
Will fossil-hunters find signs of equine cartilage
notched for wings? Or, if they went with the wind
casually as with carriage, how did we descend
from those leaps and bounds to our literal-minded
amazement, fingering a whittled length of bone
and feather in an abandoned attic and enquiring
dumbly, how does this contraption go, again?
Ferryman
The jokers say, you’ll be for getting us across
by hook or by crook, but those aren’t the words
for this crank, this pulley or wrench I chuck
and clamp, chuck and clamp to the chain that spans
the river. The name for it’s nothing you’ll need
to remember on our passage just half a hundred
yards upstream from the weir’s sleek unravelling –
I don’t think of it, your life and death in my hands,
or between them for that small space when I free
the pulley and what’s holding the boat back from
the slipstream’s beyond me – a catch in the laws
of time? It’s as if she couldn’t grasp her freedom.
I start before dawn. You are so many, uniform
as children, pale faces all eye, or do I mean
all soul, individual only in the passing gesture
of a hand I can barely identify in the half-light
about my feet: one idly trailing a second wake
back to
the town we came from, others clasped –
not in prayer, I think, but eager for our landing
on the quay and dispersal to their apprenticeships
in silver, glass, and clay: each a visible way
of teaching fire its business of transformation.
The townspeople looking down from their hill
wonder at the small red wings that flicker indistinctly
behind the veil they call windows each time we lift
a melting globe of glass on its staff and quench it
in the river to make a vessel you could drink from,
cupping between your hands all you’ll ever remember.
Child at a Museum
It’s the eyes she notices, the bearded stag and boar
watching her darkly, in partial recognition.
It’s the likeness and not the caption, Forest Fire,
though overhead the birds are winging it in all
directions and those human-hearted animals
lift their heads slow to scent the source of the danger.
The flame is floreate, burns discreetly off-centre.
We’ve seen it so often, that speaking picture:
the cattle’s silent glossolalia, the dumb beasts
standing with their hearts in their mouths and little
people running about, wise after the horse. But its
sea and sky meet lightly still, as they always do –
as we might answer each other in a close-to-true
likeness or as, in a forest, four eyes touch and go.
Juxtaposition
As a child, mezzanine was a solid, barred
and angular in the palm of my hand.
A platform for viewing the real live dead
giraffe and mirror-length portrait of a lady
whose black and silver scarf unscrolled
in embroideries of esprit d’escalier.
I thought there were no pictures without words.
But today when that russet dog ran the length
of the island’s grasses like the wind feathering
its backbone, fleet didn’t begin – nor flute,
with the wind, over the hills and far.
But like the child in the vestibule spelling O
altitudo, like the question I meant to ask you –
Is it the real thing? Do you feel it too,
this sudden escalation, I mean this fall? –
yesterday, in passing on the stairs, it’s gone.
Night-watch
Somewhere tonight is a frontier
between languages, our sentries darkly
passing watchwords, lip to lip.
Alongside the world is talking quietly
to itself about roadworks and batsmen
hanging on – when Bridge Street’s closed –
upside down in Australia, its voices
spinning the curvature of the globe
while between us at our fingertips
the words dear heart and welcome pass
and pass again too quick for sense –
or is it nothing but, this limber
linguistic cat’s cradle of mistaking
one tongue for another, as when h and t
are silent in my word in your ear?
Tremolo
(for Paul)
The world is everything that is not the case.
There are too many ways about it.
Take that house: white, turreted, standing
so roundly out on the cliff, day after day,
summer after summer, it was stability
made thatch and fortified, a perfect suppose:
embowered, we said, and sleeping beautifully
among briars and imagined marble fountains.
Contrariwise, it came and went with the sun,
was out of reach and inevitably too close
to the edge as a poem for what’s vanished
or the vanished sense of things existing
in their places has too much grammar –
and this is not that poem. Between ourselves,
suppose no before or after. There’s the house,
seamless on its cliff in Devon for just as long
as you keep reading, and then some: sealed
on its dominions of kitchen and porch and hall.
And here in the mindslip is the cracked lintel,
the walls riffling outward, the sun breezing in
to where someone might stand on its awkwardly
enjambed threshold and claim in view of the sky’s
sudden excess lucidity that the two things are equal
and equally true – which is, and is not, impossible.
There’s a road
that runs like a caption to the coast.
The land shows its workings, as we do.
Off Gurnard’s Head, a herd of cows:
arrhythmic gait and tails’ switchback
no oil painting.
Omissions. Two donkeys tethered
out of sight. Whatever we talked about,
it wasn’t that. Parsimony, or was it
truth-telling, the painter’s habit
of erasure? That, perhaps.
The problems of starting over.
From the boot, a smell of turps.
And the road, its ellipses
a half-remembered quotation.
How did it go again?
It should have been early,
but it was late, driving back,
we saw those cows on the verge
so singular and matter of fact:
tawny, Friesian, black and tawny
filing the brow of the hill along
the top of the windscreen
and into their yard, one by one,
that evening like every other
putting the action to the words
and coming home –
or so we said, driving on.
Natural History
There was a cave.
???
A tin chest, half-embedded.
Protruding, the spines of – a windlass?
Rotary.
Round the headland, ammonites – entailed
embryonic not-quite birds in the hand.
Near the cave, the form of a harbour.
A flux of stones that stopped the river’s mouth.
There was a cliff-fall: soused red
sandstone tumbling slowly to its weight.
The cave was sealed off.
In its walls, the crass score-keeping:
Tracy 4 Ben, Trish is a slag.
In my grandparents’ house, in water-colour:
Chit Rock before its rock-wreck and erasure
from the pools where we fished for limpets –
an oblique angle on the human perspective.
???
On terraces up by the beach huts were girls
and boys, grown ones, smoking at full stretch.
There was a low-key transistor.
There was the time they dived from the white
ladder the beach is named for, angled skyward
as if shoulders, ankles or wrists could feather –
then involved, shell-like, at the tipping point
ripping into the downdraft so fast sgraffito
was the sound for it and for the tiding over.
They surfaced impossibly far out –
not fish-tailed, nothing so relatable.
Sure of itself, the sea said Ahhh, ssshhh.
Like Truth
Verily, that contradiction in terms, is like the view
from Trencrom: its two distinct coastlines rimmed
in the iris of one horizon. North, Rorschach heads
of gorse, the sun, and a sky so absolutely blue
it’s singing (or so I’d say) where a boy flies a kite
whose tail strings together three neat full stops
in complete ellipsis…
South, the mist’s thi
n
as if a painter had worked her brushes out to let
canvas show through the long-drawn-out call-signs
of gulls, rising.
Two outlooks, equally distinct
and distinctly apart: verily, like truth, we always
come down one side or the other, though that kite
overhead weaves from north to south so fluidly
it’s like a cat crossing the hill without thought
of pleasing you – and like the cat, it’s fabulous
(or so I’d say) and also – verily – absolutely true.
Translations
Silent in Finisterre Page 2