New and Selected Poems (2 page)

My father worked with a horse-plough,

His shoulders globed like a full sail strung

Between the shafts and the furrow.

The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

   

 

An expert. He would set the wing

And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.

The sod rolled over without breaking.

At the headrig, with a single pluck

   

 

Of reins, the sweating team turned round

And back into the land. His eye

Narrowed and angled at the ground,

Mapping the furrow exactly.

   

 

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,

Fell sometimes on the polished sod;

Sometimes he rode me on his back

Dipping and rising to his plod.

   

 

I wanted to grow up and plough,

To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

All I ever did was follow

In his broad shadow round the farm.

   

 

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,

Yapping always. But today

It is my father who keeps stumbling

Behind me, and will not go away.

I sat all morning in the college sick bay

Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

   

 

In the porch I met my father crying –

He had always taken funerals in his stride –

And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

   

 

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

When I came in, and I was embarrassed

By old men standing up to shake my hand

   

 

And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.

Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

Away at school, as my mother held my hand

   

 

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived

With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

   

 

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him

For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

   

 

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

   

 

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

For Marie
 

Love, I shall perfect for you the child

Who diligently potters in my brain

Digging with heavy spade till sods were piled

Or puddling through muck in a deep drain.

   

 

Yearly I would sow my yard-long garden.

I’d strip a layer of sods to build the wall

That was to keep out sow and pecking hen.

Yearly, admitting these, the sods would fall.

   

 

Or in the sucking clabber I would splash

Delightedly and dam the flowing drain

But always my bastions of clay and mush

Would burst before the rising autumn rain.

   

 

Love, you shall perfect for me this child

Whose small imperfect limits would keep breaking:

Within new limits now, arrange the world

And square the circle: four walls and a ring.

For Michael Longley
 

As a child, they could not keep me from wells

And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

   

 

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.

I savoured the rich crash when a bucket

Plummeted down at the end of a rope.

So deep you saw no reflection in it.

   

 

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch

Fructified like any aquarium.

When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch

A white face hovered over the bottom.

   

 

Others had echoes, gave back your own call

With a clean new music in it. And one

Was scaresome for there, out of ferns and tall

Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

   

 

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Bespoke for weeks, he turned up some morning

Unexpectedly, his bicycle slung

With a light ladder and a bag of knives.

He eyed the old rigging, poked at the eaves,

   

 

Opened and handled sheaves of lashed wheat-straw.

Next, the bundled rods: hazel and willow

Were flicked for weight, twisted in case they’d snap.

It seemed he spent the morning warming up:

   

 

Then fixed the ladder, laid out well-honed blades

And snipped at straw and sharpened ends of rods

That, bent in two, made a white-pronged staple

For pinning down his world, handful by handful.

   

 

Couchant for days on sods above the rafters,

He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched all together

Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,

And left them gaping at his Midas touch.

When you have nothing more to say, just drive

For a day all round the peninsula.

The sky is tall as over a runway,

The land without marks so you will not arrive

   

 

But pass through, though always skirting landfall.

At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,

The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable

And you’re in the dark again. Now recall

  

 

The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,

That rock where breakers shredded into rags,

The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,

Islands riding themselves out into the fog

   

 

And drive back home, still with nothing to say

Except that now you will uncode all landscapes

By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,

Water and ground in their extremity.

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley –

No kitchens on the run, no striking camp –

We moved quick and sudden in our own country.

The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.

A people, hardly marching – on the hike –

We found new tactics happening each day:

We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike

And stampede cattle into infantry,

Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.

Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.

Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

They buried us without shroud or coffin

And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

When I had spread it all on linen cloth

Under the hedge, I called them over.

The hum and gulp of the thresher ran down

And the big belt slewed to a standstill, straw

Hanging undelivered in the jaws.

There was such quiet that I heard their boots

Crunching the stubble twenty yards away.

   

 

He lay down and said ‘Give these fellows theirs,

I’m in no hurry,’ plucking grass in handfuls

And tossing it in the air. ‘That looks well.’

(He nodded at my white cloth on the grass.)

‘I declare a woman could lay out a field

Though boys like us have little call for cloths.’

He winked, then watched me as I poured a cup

And buttered the thick slices that he likes.

‘It’s threshing better than I thought, and mind

It’s good clean seed. Away over there and look.’

Always this inspection has to be made

Even when I don’t know what to look for.

   

 

But I ran my hand in the half-filled bags

Hooked to the slots. It was hard as shot,

Innumerable and cool. The bags gaped

Where the chutes ran back to the stilled drum

And forks were stuck at angles in the ground

As javelins might mark lost battlefields.

I moved between them back across the stubble.

They lay in the ring of their own crusts and dregs

Smoking and saying nothing. ‘There’s good yield,

Isn’t there?’ – as proud as if he were the land itself –

‘Enough for crushing and for sowing both.’

And that was it. I’d come and he had shown me

So I belonged no further to the work.

I gathered cups and folded up the cloth

And went. But they still kept their ease

Spread out, unbuttoned, grateful, under the trees.