One Thousand Nights and Counting
Page 8
It’s Monday noon and everything’s behind us.
Rose and Peter took the six-fifteen,
As George and Jenny meant to. They at last
Boarded the nine o’clock, George in a dream
He started telling as the engine hissed,
Commissioning them for London. So I’m left
Abandoned to restore the place to how
It looked on that bright morning we arrived,
That seems so long ago. Time is so slow
Without you. Then again
The moment that I shut the door, no doubt
You’ll reach the gate and grin and ask me when
My friends are coming. I’ll ask you about
Your poems, as if you’d say,
Knocking the ashes from your favourite clay.
6
To punish you I threw the note away
I wrote you in your kitchen. Now my thanks
Are scribbled among strangers as we sway
Through Hampshire towards town, and the sun blinks
Behind the poplars. Edward Thomas, great
Unknowable, omniscient, your cottage
Waits for you: no sign we ever sat
Around your fire, no trace of pie or porridge,
Nor dreg of George’s ale remains. No talks
Of ours will last the time you take to light
Your clay, and your first steps will make our walks
As brief and viewless as a shower at night.
These are our heartfelt thanks. We could have haunted
Many houses where we wouldn’t see you.
At yours we thought it likely to be granted
Sight or sound, but it was not to be. You
Were needed in the field,
By hawk or hedge, who knows, their need was greater
Than ours, who wanted names for things revealed
That we should know by now or may ask later.
And reason not my need,
Who writes what nobody but she will read.
7
Poem to Mr Thomas and Mr Frost,
Created by a dandelion you passed
As you in talk about a stanza crossed
Half Herefordshire, till you sat at last
In silence. I’m the dandelion that saw
Two aspens shake and shed in a quick wind,
And tried to loose her own leaves to the floor
Like they did and did manage in the end,
When they were both long gone in the great storm.
One to the west and one to the east, away
Towards the blood-commander in the dawn
And all his soldiers, pink becoming grey.
And you won’t see this, if you live as long
As what you sent me: ‘A s the team’s head-brass’
It starts but isn’t titled. If I’m wrong
And your great hands one day are holding these
Dandelion hairs,
The storm would not have come, the trees have kept
Their ground, and through the hearts of all the shires
Would Mr Thomas and Mr Frost have stepped
And war like a rough sky
Been overlooked in talk, and blown on by.
8
Poem for Mr Edward Eastaway,
Who lives here care of me, so no one knows
His name is Rumpelstiltskin and by day
He rips your verse to pieces in great prose.
By night he turns his prose to poetry
Because a poet told him to who saw
A mighty fine recruit for poverty
And wrote the line that opened his front door.
They have rejected Edward Eastaway
Again: the letter came this afternoon.
One knows precisely what a fool will say
Somehow. We’ve many stars to the one moon
In our night sky, but all that makes a face
Of that recurring rock is the one sun
It likes, without which it must find its place
To hide behind, or make believe it’s gone.
Edward Eastaway,
Whose name that isn’t and whose time it ain’t,
Who’s living here or was just yesterday,
Or in Wales, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire or Kent,
The rumour’s that you crossed
The Channel. Stanza-break, growls Mr Frost.
9
Dear Father Thomas, every Christmas Eve
Good children of the world are quite as shy
As I am to write Dear and then believe
For twenty lines our goodness could be why
It’s worth our time. Our faith turns to this thread
That shuttles downward while the mischievous
Need nothing but a coal-sack by the bed,
And wake to the same carols. Each of us
Is writing, Edward, asking the great space
Below us what is missing still, what gift
Will make us whole again. We fold and place
Our answers in the chimney and are left
These pink embarrassed authors by the fire.
We all talk tommy-rot we understand.
Somebody coughs, politely to enquire
Did they not kick a ball on No Man’s Land
Two years ago? ‘That’s so,’
Smiles Peter, adding: ‘Not tonight, I fear.’
And I hear George’s voice say: ‘Cricket, though,
So Edward gets a knock.’ But he’s not here,
George, he’s where you are,
Restless tonight like all good children are.
10
One dead was sent a Valentine, so both
Were spared their lover’s blushes. What I write
Is on its way nowhere, is less than breath,
So might be anything, as nothing might.
It’s that there’s nothing now that doesn’t seem
As if it’s where it ended. All the paths
Beyond this word or this become the same:
Thickets, or a handing-down of deaths
As by a school official, not a teacher,
A visiting official by one gate.
Now all the hope there is is in a picture
Of P. E. Thomas gone, because my fate
Is never to foresee, believed or no.
Is to be wrong. These words are packing up
And going. Words I mean you not to know
Don’t see why they should move in any step
I fix them with. So go,
You English words, while he’s alive, and blow
Through all of him so Englishmen will know
You loved him and who cares how long ago,
And hide him from the light
He’ll strike and hold until his clay’s alight.
11
Dear Edward, when the war was over, you
Were standing where a wood had been, and though
Nothing was left for you to name or view
You waited till new trees had hidden you.
Then you came home and in a forest called
The Times your name was found, and not among
The officers but in a clearing filled
With verses, yours. Then your new name was sung
With all the old. And children leafing through,
And old men staring and their daughters stilled
With admiration: all this happened too,
Or had already by the time you pulled
The book I hide this in from your top shelf
And blew its dust away. The year is what,
1930? ’80? Please yourself,
But do remember as you smile and sit
That everything’s foreseen
By a good reader, as I think I am
On David’s Day of 1917,
Reaching for blotting-paper. Now’s the time
To fold this work away
And find me on this bleak or brilliant day.
12
Choose me, Sie deutsche Worte. This is the first
Of all the letters you will never read,
Edward. I was shy in my own west
Always, so you never read a word
I sent, but this is written with as clear
A mind as has been opened like a shell.
‘Greatly loved in the battery,’ writes this dear
Major Lushington, who says you fell
In early morning with some battle won
And all the soldiers dancing. You were loved
In the battery and in the morning sun
Brought out the blessed clay, when something moved
Like cloud perhaps. The major asked us round
To tell us you knew nothing. That your book
Of Shakespeare’s sonnets that they knelt and found
Was strangely creased and the clay didn’t break
Which Helen gave your son,
And Robert’s North of Boston in your kit
They gave to me, not needing it. And when
They reached you you were not marked, not hit,
Breeze blowing in your hair,
Chosen. What had stopped your heart was air.
13
Dear Edward, now there’s no one at the end
There’s nothing I can’t say. Some eight or nine
I have by heart. Your farmer-poet friend
Is flying around the world on a fine line
That starts in you, or grows out from the days
You passed together. England is the same,
Cheering to order, set in its new ways
It thinks are immemorial. The Somme
Has trees beside it but some shovel-work
Will bring the dead to light. There’s so much more
I want to say, because the quiet is dark,
And when the writing ends I reach a shore
Beyond which it’s so cold and that’s what changed,
Edward, on that Easter Monday. You
Were land to me, were England unestranged,
Were what I thought it had amounted to,
But look at the fields now,
Look eyelessly at them, like the dug men
Still nodding out of Flanders. Tell them how
You walked and how you saw, and how your pen
Did nothing more than that,
And, when it stopped, what you were gazing at.
14
Dear Edward Thomas, Frost died, I was born.
I am a father and you’d like the names
We gave our girl. I’m writing this at dawn
Where Robert lived, in Amherst, and your poems
I keep by his, his house-brick to your tile.
I teach you to my students, and aloud
I wonder what you would have come to. While
I wonder they look out at a white cloud
And so we pass the time. Perhaps I’ll guess
Which one will ask me what they always ask:
Whom do I write for? Anybody? Yes,
You. And I’ll walk home in the great dusk
Of Massachusetts that extends away
Far west and north, the ways you meant to go
To save your life. A good end to the day,
That’s going to be. It’s going to be cool, though,
I see out in the town,
And start to turn the trees to what the world
Comes flocking here to see: eight shades of brown
Men never saw, and ninety-nine of gold,
More shades than can have names,
Or names to bring them back when the snow comes.
And Indians
They made a word for light when it went out,
Then many words for dark, if not such dark
As fell and spread among them like a doubt.
It’s not a date we celebrate, but then
There’s no one day to ring or week to mark.
It happened and keeps happening to them.
Nothing to make a song or dance about.
Nothing to be the theme of a third act.
They had no argument and show no sign
Of coming back to make one. They were them,
And death is in that word like its own wine
Gone acid and eroding them to then.
Then to the fled allotment of a time.
Then to the listed ruin of a fact.
On a Devon Road
Whatever thoughts there were for me on a Devon road,
nothing knotted them suddenly to one spot
like what lay up ahead, flopped and brownish,
too much of it for a bird, too much for a fox;
one wound as I went by its snouted head
had trickled; the slightest movement was beyond it.
It was a badger. I looked back over my shoulder
twice at it and a third time turned, I was staring:
its stillness had a force and a beat that nothing
green remotely had. It was pulsing
with having been. It was not what was around it.
Where it and the world met was a real edge –
like someone thumping ‘badger’ to the page
with a finger and old Remington had banged
a hole with b clean through, and couldn’t mend it,
that dumb dot in his title word, and had to
use his hand to stop light coming through it.
Dawn on the Midi
In the one pink hour these villas
have to themselves before the English voices;
in the time before the couple
start winding back the eyelids of the windows,
I pass as close as one who needs to see them
can pass to the lost owners
who are riding the end carriage
of the Blue Train, to the sheet of light they’d fashioned
to flutter for a time
between them and a future that was waiting
politely by, with hands as disinclined
to mercy as a clock’s are,
or smiling at the window
of the First Class then running backwards waving
saddened into smoke though –
two sights she wakes from on a lip of light
and ribbon and remembers where she is now,
mid-afternoon in heaven,
and soon to be seen stepping
the marble staircase, all the hood and fuss
with the viewfinder crucial,
while the twelve at lunch, or whist, beside the palm-tree
go quiet as now, passing as close as any
who won’t see you can pass
to you who note them plainly,
or me in this bird-yellow hour these houses
have to themselves, while the breeze
has breath enough to puff the toys in races
across our idle and impulsive pool,
stone-deaf to the sea breaking.
from Time’s Fool
[from Book 1: The Chance in Hell]
When the train stopped I started and woke up.
Was nowhere, as before, no change in that.
Nothing new in trundling to a stop
where nothing seemed to call for one. The light
was winter afternoon, with ‘afternoon’
a term for darkness. In the cold and wet
were trees beside the line, grey evergreen
unknown by name. And not a soul to hail,
I said again and with a smile so thin
it died before its life. And not a soul,
I called. The sky was murk, its memory
of sunshine like my memory of school,
of sunshine in the morning. Next to me
my hands were inching off the dirty felt
towards each other, meeting gingerly,
lovers twining, brothers known and held,
then strangers upright like the poor in prayer.
My eyelids met in secret, my eyes filled
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br /> with vision, then reopened on nowhere.
I craned against the glass to see ahead
and did see lights along the way so far,
but into nothing known, and I sat forward,
hands set on my knees, and, weighed down
with swallowing, I scanned them. What I said
when I was ready I had voiced alone
so many times. I said: ‘This is the day
of freedom. If the day will prove me wrong,
the day will never come and I’m away
forever.’ This I said, these were the words
I had. I said my name was Edmund Lea,
to stitch a little wing on my few words
so they could fly. Then I was on my feet,
glancing out again at the rainy woods
and the rain beyond the window scribbling it.
I made my way to the men’s. An hour had come
I’d waited for like an island for a boat
that never comes, like a boatman for a home
he doesn’t have, and where did I have to be?
– I giggled as I wiped – in the white room.
‘The day will never come and I’m away,’
I called into the flush, ‘for all of Time.
I hope I’m home. My name is Edmund Lea,
I stand before you every day the same,
I stand before the emptiness, I lean,
I kneel to it, I beg to be brought home.’
I curled into a fold of prayer, my frame
I curled into that type of form. The lights
came on along the carriage one by one
as if to bid me to regain my wits,
and I rose and shuffled back in a dull shame
at my poor prayer towards the numbered seats.
And there he was, there’s where I found him,