There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed
Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.
Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons
To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.
La Toilette
The white towelling bathrobe
ungirdled, the hair still wet,
first coldness of the underbreast
like a ciborium in the palm.
Our bodies are the temples
of the Holy Ghost. Remember?
And the little, fitted, deep-slit drapes
on and off the holy vessels
regularly? And the chasuble
so deftly hoisted? But vest yourself
in the word you taught me
and the stuff I love: slub silk.
Sloe Gin
The clear weather of juniper
darkened into winter.
She fed gin to sloes
and sealed the glass container.
When I unscrewed it
I smelled the disturbed
tart stillness of a bush
rising through the pantry.
When I poured it
it had a cutting edge
and flamed
like Betelgeuse.
I drink to you
in smoke-mirled, blue-black,
polished sloes, bitter
and dependable.
Away from it All
A cold steel fork
pried the tank water
and forked up a lobster:
articulated twigs, a rainy stone
the colour of sunk munitions.
In full view of the strand,
the sea wind spitting on the big window,
we plunged and reddened it,
then sat for hours in conclave
over the last of the claws.
It was twilight, twilight, twilight
as the questions hopped and rooted.
It was oarsmen's backs and oars
hauled against and lifting.
And more power to us, my friend,
hard at it over the dregs,
laying in in earnest
as the sea darkens
and whitens and darkens
and quotations start to rise
like rehearsed alibis:
I was stretched between contemplation
of a motionless point
and the command to participate
actively in history.
'Actively? What do you mean?'
The light at the rim of the sea
is rendered down to a fine
graduation, somewhere between
balance and inanition.
And I still cannot clear my head
of lives in their element
on the cobbled floor of that tank
and the hampered one, out of water,
fortified and bewildered.
Chekhov on Sakhalin
for Derek Mahon
So, he would pay his 'debt to medicine'.
But first he drank cognac by the ocean
With his back to all he travelled north to face.
His head was swimming free as the troikas
Of Tyumin, he looked down from the rail
Of his thirty years and saw a mile
Into himself as if he were clear water:
Lake Baikhal from the deckrail of the steamer.
That far north, Siberia was south.
Should it have been an ulcer in the mouth,
The cognac that the Moscow literati
Packed off with him to a penal colony –
Him, born, you may say, under the counter?
At least that meant he knew its worth. No cantor
In full throat by the iconostasis
Got holier joy than he got from that glass
That shone and warmed like diamonds warming
On some pert young cleavage in a salon,
Inviolable and affronting.
He felt the glass go cold in the midnight sun.
When he staggered up and smashed it on the stones
It rang as clearly as the convicts' chains
That haunted him. In the months to come
It rang on like the burden of his freedom
To try for the right tone – not tract, not thesis –
And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze
His slave's blood out and waken the free man
Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.
Sandstone Keepsake
It is a kind of chalky russet
solidified gourd, sedimentary
and so reliably dense and bricky
I often clasp it and throw it from hand to hand.
It was ruddier, with an underwater
hint of contusion, when I lifted it,
wading a shingle beach on Inishowen.
Across the estuary light after light
came on silently round the perimeter
of the camp. A stone from Phlegethon,
bloodied on the bed of hell's hot river?
Evening frost and the salt water
made my hand smoke, as if I'd plucked the heart
that damned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood –
but not really, though I remembered
his victim's heart in its casket, long venerated.
Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone
in my hand, staring across at the watch-towers
from my free state of image and allusion,
swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars:
a silhouette not worth bothering about,
out for the evening in scarf and waders
and not about to set times wrong or right,
stooping along, one of the venerators.
Shelf Life
1 Granite Chip
Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind.
Saying An union in the cup I'll throw
I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around
this bit hammered off Joyce's Martello
Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant
I keep but feel little in common with –
a kind of stone age circumcising knife,
a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith.
Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive
and exacting. Come to me, it says
all you who labour and are burdened, I
will not refresh you. And it adds, Seize
the day. And, You can take me or leave me.
2 Old Smoothing Iron
Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at anchor.
To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.
Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron
like a plane into linen,
like the resentment of women.
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass
through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
3 Old Pewter
Not the age of silver, more a slither
of illiteracy under rafters:
a dented hand-me-down old smoky plate
full of blizzards, sullied and temperate.
I love unshowy pewter, my soft option
when it comes to the metals – next to solder
that weeps at the touch of a hot iron;
doleful and placid as a gloss-barked alder
reflected in the nebulous lid of a pool
where they thought I had drowned one winter day
a stone's throw from the house, when the whole
country was mist and I hid deliberately.
Glimmerings are what the soul's composed of.
Fogged-up challenges, far conscience-glitters
and hang-dog, half-truth earnests of true love.
And a whole late-flooding thaw of ancestors.
4 Iron Spike
So like a harrow pin
I hear harness creaks and the click
of stones in a ploughed-up field.
But it was the age of steam
at Eagle Pond, New Hampshire,
when this rusted spike I found there
was aimed and driven in
to fix a cog on the line.
What guarantees things keeping
if a railway can be lifted
like a long briar out of ditch growth?
I felt I had come on myself
in the grassy silent path
where I drew the iron like a thorn
or a word I had thought my own
out of a stranger's mouth.
And the sledge-head that sank it
with a last opaque report
deep into the creosoted
sleeper, where is that?
And the sweat-cured haft?
Ask the ones on the buggy,
inaudible and upright
and sped along without shadows.
5 Stone from Delphi
To be carried back to the shrine some dawn
when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south
and I make a morning offering again:
that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood,
govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god
until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth.
6 A Snowshoe
The loop of a snowshoe hangs on a wall
in my head, in a room that is drift-still:
it is like a brushed longhand character,
a hieroglyph for all the realms of whisper.
It was to follow the snow goose of a word
I left the room after an amorous blizzard
and climbed up attic stairs like a somnambulist,
furred and warm-blooded, scuffling the snow-crust.
Then I sat there writing, imagining in silence
sounds like love sounds after long abstinence,
eager and absorbed and capable
under the sign of a snowshoe on a wall.
The loop of the snowshoe, like an old-time kite,
lifts away in a wind and is lost to sight.
Now I sit blank as gradual morning brightens
its distancing, inviolate expanse.
A Migration
About a mile above
and beyond our place,
in a house with a leaking roof
and cracked dormer windows
Brigid came to live
with her mother and sisters.
So for months after that
she slept in a crowded bed
under the branch-whipped slates,
bewildered night after night
by starts of womanhood,
and a dream troubled her head
of a ship's passenger lounge
where empty bottles rolled
at every slow plunge
and lift, a weeping child
kept weeping, and a strange
flowing black taxi pulled
into a bombed station.
She would waken to the smell
of baby clothes and children
who snuggled tight, and the small
dormer with no curtain
beginning to go pale.
Windfalls lay at my feet
those days, clandestine winds
stirred in our lyric wood:
restive, quick and silent
the deer of poetry stood
in pools of lucent sound
ready to scare,
as morning and afternoon
Brigid and her sisters
came jangling along, down
the steep hill for water,
and laboured up again.
Familiars! A trail
of spillings in the dust,
unsteady white enamel
buckets looming. Their ghosts,
like their names, called from the hill
to 'Hurry', hurry past,
a spill of syllables.
I knew the story then.
Ferry Glasgow–Belfast,
then to the Dublin train
with their cases and boxes,
pram and cassette machine,
and then they miss the bus,
their last Wicklow connection –
the young ones scared and cross
in the lit bus station,
the mother at a loss.
And so in desperation
they start out for the suburbs
and into the small hours.
How it sweetens and disturbs
as they make their homesick tour,
a moonlight flit, street arabs,
the mother and her daughters
walking south through the land
past neon garages,
night lights haloed on blinds,
padlocked entries, bridges
swelling over a kind
mutter of streams, then trees
start filling the sky
and the estates thin out,
lamps are spaced more widely
until a cold moonlight
shows Wicklow's mountainy
black skyline, and they sit.
They change the cassette
but now the battery's gone.
They cannot raise a note.
When the first drops of rain
spit in the dark, Brigid
gets up and says, 'Come on.'
Last Look
in memoriam E.G.
We came upon him, stilled
and oblivious,
gazing into a field
of blossoming potatoes,
his trouser bottoms wet
and flecked with grass seed.
Crowned blunt-headed weeds
that flourished in the verge
flailed against our car
but he seemed not to hear
in his long watchfulness
by the clifftop fuchsias.
He paid no heed that day,
no more than if he were
sheep's wool on barbed wire
or an old lock of hay
combed from a passing load
by a bush in the roadside.
He was back in his twenties,
travelling Donegal
in the grocery cart
of Gallagher and Son,
Merchant, Publican,
Retail and Import.
Flourbags, nosebags, buckets
of water for the horse
in every whitewashed yard.
Drama between hedges
if he met a Model Ford.
If Niamh had ridden up
to make the wide strand sweet
with inviting Irish,
weaving among hoofbeats
and hoofmarks on the wet
dazzle and blaze,
I think not even she
could have drawn him out
from the covert of his gaze.
Remembering Malibu
for Brian Moore
The Pacific at your door was wilder and colder
than my notion of the Pacific
and that was perfect, for I would have rotted
beside the luke-warm ocean I imagined.
Yet no way was its cold ascetic
as our monk-fished, snowed-into Atlantic;
no beehive hut for you
on the abstract sands of Malibu –
it was early Mondrian and his dunes
misting towards the ideal forms
though the wind and sea neighed loud
as wind and sea noise amplified.
I was there in the flesh
where I'd imagined I might be
and underwent the bluster of the day:
but why would it not come home to me?
Atlantic storms have flensed the cells
on the Great Skellig, the steps cut in the rock
I never climbed
between the graveyard and the boatslip
are welted solid to my instep.
But to rear and kick and cast that shoe –
beside that other western sea
far from the Skelligs, and far, far
from the suck of puddled, wintry ground,
our footsteps filled with blowing sand.
Making Strange
I stood between them,
the one with his travelled intelligence
and tawny containment,
his speech like the twang of a bowstring,
and another, unshorn and bewildered
in the tubs of his Wellingtons,
smiling at me for help,
faced with this stranger I'd brought him.
Then a cunning middle voice
came out of the field across the road
saying, 'Be adept and be dialect,
tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut,
call me sweetbriar after the rain
or snowberries cooled in the fog.
But love the cut of this travelled one
and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.
Go beyond what's reliable
in all that keeps pleading and pleading,
these eyes and puddles and stones,
and recollect how bold you were
when I visited you first
with departures you cannot go back on.'
A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing
I found myself driving the stranger
through my own country, adept
at dialect, reciting my pride
in all that I knew, that began to make strange
at that same recitation.
The Birthplace
I
The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain,
the single bed a dream of discipline.
And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants
of thick light: the unperturbed, reliable
ghost life he carried, with no need to invent.
And high trees round the house, breathed upon
day and night by winds as slow as a cart
coming late from market, or the stir
a fiddle could make in his reluctant heart.
II
That day, we were like one
of his troubled pairs, speechless
until he spoke for them,
haunters of silence at noon
in a deep lane that was sexual
with ferns and butterflies,
scared at our hurt,
throat-sick, heat-struck, driven
into the damp-floored wood
where we made an episode
of ourselves, unforgettable,
unmentionable,
and broke out again like cattle
through bushes, wet and raised,
only yards from the house.
III
Everywhere being nowhere,
who can prove
one place more than another?
We come back emptied,
to nourish and resist
the words of coming to rest:
birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash,
flagstone, hearth,
like unstacked iron weights
afloat among galaxies.
Still, was it thirty years ago
I read until first light
for the first time, to finish
The Return of the Native?
The corncrake in the aftergrass
verified himself, and I heard
roosters and dogs, the very same
as if he had written them.
Changes
As you came with me in silence
to the pump in the long grass
I heard much that you could not hear:
the bite of the spade that sank it,
the slithering and grumble
as the mason mixed his mortar,
and women coming with white buckets
like flashes on their ruffled wings.
The cast-iron rims of the lid
clinked as I uncovered it,
something stirred in its mouth.
I had a bird's eye view of a bird,
finch-green, speckly white,
nesting on dry leaves, flattened, still,
suffering the light.
So I roofed the citadel
as gently as I could, and told you
and you gently unroofed it
but where was the bird now?
There was a single egg, pebbly white,
and in the rusted bend of the spout
tail feathers splayed and sat tight.
So tender, I said, 'Remember this.
It will be good for you to retrace this path
when you have grown away and stand at last
at the very centre of the empty city.'
An Ulster Twilight
The bare bulb, a scatter of nails,
Shelved timber, glinting chisels:
In a shed of corrugated iron
Eric Dawson stoops to his plane
At five o'clock on a Christmas Eve.
Carpenter's pencil next, the spoke-shave,
Fretsaw, auger, rasp and awl,
A rub with a rag of linseed oil.
A mile away it was taking shape,
The hulk of a toy battleship,
As waterbuckets iced and frost
Hardened the quiet on roof and post.
Where is he now?
There were fifteen years between us two
That night I strained to hear the bells
Of a sleigh of the mind and heard him pedal
Into our lane, get off at the gable,
Steady his Raleigh bicycle
Against the whitewash, stand to make sure
The house was quiet, knock at the door
And hand his parcel to a peering woman:
'I suppose you thought I was never coming.'
Eric, tonight I saw it all
Like shadows on your workshop wall,
Smelled wood shavings under the bench,
Weighed the cold steel monkey-wrench
In my soft hand, then stood at the road
To watch your wavering tail-light fade
And knew that if we met again
In an Ulster twilight we would begin
And end whatever we might say
In a speech all toys and carpentry,
A doorstep courtesy to shun
Your father's uniform and gun,
But – now that I have said it out –
Maybe none the worse for that.
A Bat on the Road
A batlike soul waking to consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.
You would hoist an old hat on the tines of a fork
and trawl the mouth of the bridge for the slight
bat-thump and flutter. Skinny downy webs,
babynails clawing the sweatband … But don't
bring it down, don't break its flight again,
don't deny it; this time let it go free.
Follow its bat-flap under the stone bridge,
under the Midland and Scottish Railway
and lose it there in the dark.
Next thing it shadows moonslicked laurels
or skims the lapped net on a tennis court.
Next thing it's ahead of you in the road.
What are you after? You keep swerving off,
flying blind over ashpits and netting wire;
invited by the brush of a word like peignoir,
rustles and glimpses, shot silk, the stealth of floods
So close to me I could hear her breathing
and there by the lighted window behind trees
it hangs in creepers matting the brickwork
and now it's a wet leaf blowing in the drive,
now soft-deckled, shadow-convolvulus
by the White Gates. Who would have thought it? At the White Gates
She let them do whatever they liked. Cling there
as long as you want. There is nothing to hide.
A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann
The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon
just out of the water
is gone just like that, but your stick
is kept salmon-silver.
Seasoned and bendy,
it convinces the hand
that what you have you hold
to play with and pose with
and lay about with.
But then too it points back to cattle
and spatter and beating
the bars of a gate –
the very stick we might cut
from your family tree.
The living cobalt of an afternoon
dragonfly drew my eye to it first
and the evening I trimmed it for you
you saw your first glow-worm –
all of us stood round in silence, even you
gigantic enough to darken the sky
for a glow-worm.
And when I poked open the grass
a tiny brightening den lit the eye
in the blunt cut end of your stick.
A Kite for Michael and Christopher
All through that Sunday afternoon
a kite flew above Sunday,
a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.
I'd seen it grey and slippy in the making,
I'd tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,
I'd tied the bows of newspaper
along its six-foot tail.
But now it was far up like a small black lark
and now it dragged as if the bellied string
were a wet rope hauled upon
to lift a shoal.
My friend says that the human soul
is about the weight of a snipe
yet the soul at anchor there,
the string that sags and ascends,
weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.
Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.
The Railway Children
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.
Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.
We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,
Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled
We could stream through the eye of a needle.
Sweetpea
'What did Thought do?'
'Stuck
a feather in the ground and thought
it would grow a hen.'
Rod
by rod we pegged the drill for sweetpea
with light brittle sticks,
twiggy and unlikely in fresh mould,
and stalk by stalk we snipped
the coming blooms.
And so when pain
had haircracked her old constant vestal stare
I reached for straws and thought:
seeing the sky through a mat of creepers,
like water in the webs of a green net,
opened a clearing where her heart sang
without caution or embarrassment, once or twice.
An Aisling in the Burren
A time was to come when we yearned
for the eel-drugged flats and dunes
of a northern shore, its dulse and its seabirds,
its divisions of brine-maddened grass
pouring over dykes to secure
the aftermath of the reign of the meek.
That was as much of hope that the purest
and saddest were prepared to allow for.
Out of those scenes she arrived, not from a shell
but licked with the wet cold fires of St Elmo,
angel of the last chance, teaching us
the fish in the rock, the fern's
bewildered tenderness deep in the fissure.
That day the clatter of stones
as we climbed was a sermon
on conscience and healing,
her tears a startling deer
on the site of catastrophe.
Widgeon
for Paul Muldoon
It had been badly shot.
While he was plucking it
he found, he says, the voice box –
like a flute stop
in the broken windpipe –
and blew upon it
unexpectedly
his own small widgeon cries.
Sheelagh na Gig
at Kilpeck
I
We look up at her
hunkered into her angle
under the eaves.
She bears the whole stone burden
on the small of her back and shoulders
and pinioned elbows,
the astute mouth, the gripping fingers
saying push, push hard,
push harder.
As the hips go high
her big tadpole forehead
is rounded out in sunlight.
And here beside her are two birds,
a rabbit's head, a ram's,
a mouth devouring heads.
II
Her hands holding herself
are like hands in an old barn
holding a bag open.
I was outside looking in
at its lapped and supple mouth
running grain.
I looked up under the thatch
at the dark mouth and eye
of a bird's nest or a rat hole,
smelling the rose on the wall,
mildew, an earthen floor,
the warm depth of the eaves.
And then one night in the yard
I stood still under heavy rain
wearing the bag like a caul.
III
We look up to her,
her ring-fort eyes,
her little slippy shoulders,
her nose incised and flat,
and feel light-headed looking up.
She is twig-boned, saddle-sexed,
grown-up, grown ordinary,
seeming to say,
'Yes, look at me to your heart's content
but look at every other thing.'
And here is a leaper in a kilt,
two figures kissing,
a mouth with sprigs,
a running hart, two fishes,
a damaged beast with an instrument.
The Loaning
I
As I went down the loaning
the wind shifting in the hedge was like
an old one's whistling speech. And I knew
I was in the limbo of lost words.
They had flown there from raftered sheds and crossroads,
from the shelter of gable ends and turned-up carts.
I saw them streaming out of birch-white throats
and fluttering above iron bedsteads
until the soul would leave the body.
Then on a day close as a stranger's breath
they rose in smoky clouds on the summer sky
and settled in the uvulae of stones
and the soft lungs of the hawthorn.
Then I knew why from the beginning
the loaning breathed on me, breathed even now
in a shiver of beaded gossamers
and the spit blood of a last few haws and rose-hips.
II
Big voices in the womanless kitchen.
They never lit a lamp in the summertime
but took the twilight as it came
like solemn trees. They sat on in the dark
with their pipes red in their mouths, the talk come down
to Aye and Aye again and, when the dog shifted,
a curt There boy! I closed my eyes
to make the light motes stream behind them
and my head went airy, my chair rode
high and low among branches and the wind
stirred up a rookery in the next long Aye.
III
Stand still. You can hear
everything going on. High-tension cables
singing above cattle, tractors, barking dogs,
juggernauts changing gear a mile away.
And always the surface noise of the earth
you didn't know you'd heard till a twig snapped
and a blackbird's startled volubility
stopped short.
When you are tired or terrified
your voice slips back into its old first place
and makes the sound your shades make there …
When Dante snapped a twig in the bleeding wood
a voice sighed out of blood that bubbled up
like sap at the end of green sticks on a fire.
At the click of a cell lock somewhere now
the interrogator steels his introibo,
the light motes blaze, a blood-red cigarette
startles the shades, screeching and beseeching.
The Sandpit
1 1946
The first hole neat as a trapdoor
cut into grazing and
cut again as the heft and lift
begin, the plate scrabs field-stones
and a tremor blunts in the shaft
at small come-uppances meeting
the driven edge.
Worms and starlight,
mould-balm on the passing cyclist's face.
The rat's nose in the plastered verge
where they walked to clean their boots.
2 The Demobbed Bricklayer
A fence post trimmed and packed
into place, but out of place:
the soldier
not a soldier any more and never
quite a soldier, what has he
walked into? This is not the desert
night among cold ambulances,
not the absolute sand
of the world, the sun's whip
and grid –
this sand,
this lustre in their heavy land
is greedy coppers hammered
in the wishing tree of their talk,
the damp ore of money.
Freckled
and demobbed, worked on like the soil
he is inhaling, he stands
remembering his trade, the song
of his trowel dressing a brickbat,
the tock and tap of its butt, the plumb-
line's certitude, the merriment
in the spirit level's eye.
3 The Sand Boom
A fortune in sand then. Sandpits and sandbeds.
River gravel drying in the brickyards.
Clay-scabbed flints, skimming stones of slate,
sandstone pebbles, birds' eggs of flecked granite
all rattled in the caked iron mouth
of the concrete mixer.
The first spadeful I saw
pitched up, the handful of gravel
I flung over the cribs,
until they burn in the fireball
or crumble at the edge of the blast
or drink the rain again on their flattened site,
are bonded and set to register
whatever beams and throbs into the wall.
Like undead grains in a stranded cockle shell.
Boulders listening behind the waterfall.
And this as well:
foxgloves and saplings
on the worked-out pit floor, grass on the cracked
earth face, anglers nested in an overgrown
loading bay above the deepened stream.
4 What the Brick Keeps
His touch, his daydream of the tanks,
his point of vantage on the scaffolding
over chimneys and close hills at noontime,
the constant sound of hidden river water
the new estate rose up through –
with one chop of the trowel he sent it all
into the brick for ever.
It has not stopped travelling in
in the van of all that followed:
floors hammered down, the pipes' first
gulping flow, phone wires and flags
alive on the gable, a bedhead
thumping quickly, banged doors shaking
the joists, rippling the very roof tank.
And my own hands, the size of a grandchild's,
go in there, cold and wet, and my big gaze
at the sandpit opening by the minute.
The King of the Ditchbacks
for John Montague
I
As if a trespasser
unbolted a forgotten gate
and ripped the growth
tangling its lower bars –
just beyond the hedge
he has opened a dark morse
along the bank,
a crooked wounding
of silent, cobwebbed
grass. If I stop
he stops
like the moon.
He lives in his feet
and ears, weather-eyed,
all pad and listening,
a denless mover.
Under the bridge
his reflection shifts
sideways to the current,
mothy, alluring.
I am haunted
by his stealthy rustling,
the unexpected spoor,
the pollen settling.
II
I was sure I knew him. The time I'd spent obsessively in that upstairs room bringing myself close to him: each entranced hiatus as I chainsmoked and stared out the dormer into the grassy hillside I was laying myself open. He was depending on me as I hung out on the limb of a translated phrase like a youngster dared out on to an alder branch over the whirlpool. Small dreamself in the branches. Dream fears I inclined towards, interrogating:
— Are you the one I ran upstairs to find drowned under running water in the bath?
— The one the mowing machine severed like a hare in the stiff frieze of harvest?
— Whose little bloody clothes we buried in the garden?
— The one who lay awake in darkness a wall's breadth from the troubled hoofs?
After I had dared these invocations, I went back towards the gate to follow him. And my stealth was second nature to me, as if I were coming into my own. I remembered I had been vested for this calling.
III
When I was taken aside that day
I had the sense of election:
they dressed my head in a fishnet
and plaited leafy twigs through meshes
so my vision was a bird's
at the heart of a thicket
and I spoke as I moved
like a voice from a shaking bush.
King of the ditchbacks,
I went with them obediently
to the edge of a pigeon wood –
deciduous canopy, screened wain of evening
we lay beneath in silence.
No birds came, but I waited
among briars and stones, or whispered
or broke the watery gossamers
if I moved a muscle.
'Come back to us,' they said, 'in harvest,
when we hide in the stooked corn,
when the gundogs can hardly retrieve
what's brought down.' And I saw myself
rising to move in that dissimulation,
top-knotted, masked in sheaves, noting
the fall of birds: a rich young man
leaving everything he had
for a migrant solitude.
