New and Selected Poems
Page 14
Your envied beauty, your much-desired beauty
Your hardly-used beauty
Of lifting away yourself
From yourself
And weeping with the ache of the effort
*
Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning,
Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning,
Like the flushed gossip
With the tale that kills
Sometimes it strengthens very slowly
What is already here –
A tree darkening the house.
The saviour
From these veils of wrinkle and shawls of ache
Like the sun
Which is itself cloudless and leafless
Was always here, is always as she was.
*
Calves harshly parted from their mamas
Calves harshly parted from their mamas
Stumble through all the hedges in the country
Hither thither crying day and night
Till their throats will only grunt and whistle.
After some days, a stupor sadness
Collects them again in their field.
They will never stray any more.
From now on, they only want each other.
So much for calves.
As for the tiger
He lies still
Like left luggage.
He is roaming the earth light, unseen.
He is safe.
Heaven and hell have both adopted him.
*
A bang – a burning –
A bang – a burning –
I opened my eyes
In a vale crumbling with echoes.
A solitary dove
Cries in the tree – I cannot bear it.
From this centre
It wearies the compass.
Am I killed?
Or am I searching?
Is this the rainbow silking my body?
Which wings are these?
*
At the bottom of the Arctic sea, they say.
At the bottom of the Arctic sea, they say.
Or ‘Terrible as an army with banners’.
If I wait, I am a castle
Built with blocks of pain.
If I set out
A kayak stitched with pain
*
Your tree – your oak
Your tree – your oak
A glare
Of black upward lightning, a wriggling grab
Momentary
Under the crumbling of stars.
A guard, a dancer
At the pure well of leaf.
Agony in the garden. Annunciation
Of clay, water and the sunlight.
They thunder under its roof.
Its agony is its temple.
Waist-deep, the black oak is dancing
And my eyes pause
On the centuries of its instant
As gnats
Try to winter in its wrinkles.
The seas are thirsting
Towards the oak.
The oak is flying
Astride the earth.
from REMAINS OF ELMET
Football at Slack
Between plunging valleys, on a bareback of hill
Men in bunting colours
Bounced, and their blown ball bounced.
The blown ball jumped, and the merry-coloured men
Spouted like water to head it.
The ball blew away downwind –
The rubbery men bounced after it.
The ball jumped up and out and hung on the wind
Over a gulf of treetops.
Then they all shouted together, and the ball blew back.
Winds from fiery holes in heaven
Piled the hills darkening around them
To awe them. The glare light
Mixed its mad oils and threw glooms.
Then the rain lowered a steel press.
Hair plastered, they all just trod water
To puddle glitter. And their shouts bobbed up
Coming fine and thin, washed and happy
While the humped world sank foundering
And the valleys blued unthinkable
Under depth of Atlantic depression –
But the wingers leapt, they bicycled in air
And the goalie flew horizontal
And once again a golden holocaust
Lifted the cloud’s edge, to watch them.
Stanbury Moor
These grasses of light
Which think they are alone in the world
These stones of darkness
Which have a world to themselves
This water of light and darkness
Which hardly savours Creation
And this wind
Which has enough just to exist
Are not
A poor family huddled at a poor gleam
Or words in any phrase
Or wolf-beings in a hungry waiting
Or neighbours in a constellation
They are
The armour of bric-à-brac
To which your soul’s caddis
Clings with all its courage.
Leaf Mould
In Hardcastle Crags, that echoey museum,
Where she dug leaf mould for her handfuls of garden
And taught you to walk, others are making poems,
Between finger and thumb roll a pine-needle.
Feel the chamfer, feel how they threaded
The sewing machines.
And
Billy Holt invented a new shuttle
As like an ant’s egg, with its folded worker,
As every other.
You might see an ant carrying one.
And
The cordite conscripts tramped away. But the cenotaphs
Of all the shells that got their heads blown off
And their insides blown out
Are these beech-bole stalwarts.
And oak, birch,
Holly, sycamore, pine.
The lightest air-stir
Released their love-whispers when she walked
The needles weeping, singing, dedicating
Your spectre-double, still in her womb,
To this temple of her Missa Solemnis.
White-faced, brain-washed by her nostalgias,
You were her step-up transformer.
She grieved for her girlhood and the fallen.
You mourned for Paradise and its fable.
Giving you the kiss of life
She hung round your neck her whole valley
Like David’s harp.
Now, whenever you touch it, God listens
Only for her voice.
Leaf mould. Blood-warm. Fibres crumbled alive
Between thumb and finger.
Feel again
The clogs twanging your footsoles, on the street’s steepness,
As you escaped.
Moors
Are a stage
For the performance of heaven.
Any audience is incidental.
A chess-world of top-heavy Kings and Queens
Circling in stilted majesty
Tremble the bog-cotton
Under the sweep of their robes.
Fools in sunny motley tumble across,
A laughter – fading in full view
To grass-tips tapping at stones.
The witch-brew boiling in the sky-vat
Spins electrical terrors
In the eyes of sheep.
Fleeing wraith-lovers twist and collapse
In death-pact languor
To bedew harebells
On the spoil-heaps of quarries.
Wounded champions lurch out of sunset
To gurgle their last gleams into potholes.
Shattered, bowed armies, huddling leaderless
Escape from a world
Where snipe work late.
Chine
se History of Colden Water
A fallen immortal found this valley –
Leafy conch of whispers
On the shore of heaven. He brought to his ear
The mad singing in the hills,
The prophetic mouth of the rain –
These hushings lulled him. So he missed
The goblins toiling up the brook.
The clink of fairy hammers forged his slumber
To a migraine of headscarves and clatter
Of clog-irons and looms and gutter water
And clog-irons and biblical texts.
Till he woke in a terror, tore free, lay panting.
The dream streamed from him. He blinked away
The bloody matter of the Cross
And the death’s-head after-image of ‘Poor’.
Chapels, chimneys, roofs in the mist – scattered.
Hills with raised wings were standing on hills.
They rode the waves of light
That rocked the conch of whispers
And washed and washed at his eye.
Washed from his ear
All but the laughter of foxes.
Rhododendrons
Dripped a chill virulence
Into my nape –
Rubberized prison-wear of suppression!
Guarding and guarded by
The Council’s black
Forbidding forbidden stones.
The policeman’s protected leaf!
Detestable evergreen sterility!
Over dead acid gardens
Where blue widows, shrined in Sunday, shrank
To arthritic clockwork,
Yapped like terriers and shook sticks from doorways
Vast and black and proper as museums.
Cenotaphs and the moor-silence!
Rhododendrons and rain!
It is all one. It is over.
Evergloom of official titivation –
Uniform at the reservoir, and the chapel,
And the graveyard park,
Ugly as a brass-band in India.
Sunstruck
The freedom of Saturday afternoons
Starched to cricket dazzle, nagged at a theorem –
Shaggy valley parapets
Pending like thunder, narrowing the spin-bowler’s angle.
The click, disconnected, might have escaped –
A six! And the ball slammed flat!
And the bat in flinders! The heart soaring!
And everybody jumping up and running –
Fleeing after the ball, stampeding
Through the sudden hole in Saturday – but
Already clapped into hands and the trap-shout
The ball jerked back to the stumper on its elastic.
Everything collapsed that bit deeper
Towards Monday.
Misery of the brassy sycamores!
Misery of the swans and the hard ripple!
Then again Yes Yes a wild YES –
The bat flashed round the neck in a tight coil,
The stretched shout snatching for the North Sea –
But it fell far short, even of Midgley.
And the legs running for dear life, twinkling white
In the cage of wickets
Were cornered again by the ball, pinned to the crease,
Blocked by the green and white pavilion.
Cross-eyed, mid-stump, sun-descending headache!
Brain sewn into the ball’s hide
Hammering at four corners of abstraction
And caught and flung back, and caught, and again caught
To be bounced on baked earth, to be clubbed
Toward the wage-mirage sparkle of mills
Toward Lord Savile’s heather
Toward the veto of the poisonous Calder
Till the eyes, glad of anything, dropped
From the bails
Into the bottom of a teacup,
To sandwich crusts for the canal cygnets.
The bowler had flogged himself to a dishclout.
And the burned batsmen returned, with changed faces,
‘Like men returned from a far journey’,
Under the long glare walls of evening
To the cool sheet and the black slot of home.
Curlews
I
They lift
Out of the maternal watery blue lines
Stripped of all but their cry
Some twists of near-inedible sinew
They slough off
The robes of bilberry blue
The cloud-stained bogland
They veer up and eddy away over
The stone horns
They trail a long, dangling, falling aim
Across water
Lancing their voices
Through the skin of this light
Drinking the nameless and naked
Through trembling bills.
II
Curlews in April
Hang their harps over the misty valleys
A wobbling water-call
A wet-footed god of the horizons
New moons sink into the heather
And full golden moons
Bulge over spent walls.
For Billy Holt
The longships got this far. Then
Anchored in nose and chin.
Badlands where outcast and outlaw
Fortified the hill-knowle’s long outlook.
A far, veiled gaze of quietly
Homicidal appraisal.
A poverty
That cut rock lumps for words.
Requisitioned rain, then more rain,
For walls and roof.
Enfolding arms of sour hills
For company.
Blood in the veins
For amusement.
A graveyard
For homeland.
When Men Got to the Summit
Light words forsook them.
They filled with heavy silence.
Houses came to support them,
But the hard, foursquare scriptures fractured
And the cracks filled with soft rheumatism.
Streets bent to the task
Of holding it all up
Bracing themselves, taking the strain
Till their vertebrae slipped.
The hills went on gently
Shaking their sieve.
Nevertheless, for some giddy moments
A television
Blinked from the wolf’s lookout.
The Canal’s Drowning Black
Bred wild leopards – among the pale depth fungus.
Loach. Torpid, ginger-bearded, secret
Prehistory of the canal’s masonry,
With little cupid mouths.
Five inches huge!
On the slime-brink, over bridge reflections,
I teetered. Then a ringing, skull-jolt stamp
And their beards flowered sudden anemones