New and Selected Poems (21 page)

I

 

When I hoked there, I would find

An acorn and a rusted bolt.

   

 

If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney

And a dormant mountain.

   

 

If I listened, an engine shunting

And a trotting horse.

   

 

Is it any wonder when I thought

I would have second thoughts?

II

 

When they spoke of the prudent squirrel’s hoard

It shone like gifts at a nativity.

   

 

When they spoke of the mammon of iniquity

The coins in my pockets reddened like stove-lids.

   

 

I was the march drain and the march drain’s banks

Suffering the limit of each claim.

III

 

Two buckets were easier carried than one.

I grew up in between.

   

 

My left hand placed the standard iron weight.

My right tilted a last grain in the balance.

   

 

Baronies, parishes met where I was born.

When I stood on the central stepping stone

   

 

I was the last earl on horseback in midstream

Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.

The tightness and the nilness round that space

when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect

its make and number and, as one bends his face

   

 

towards your window, you catch sight of more

on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent

down cradled guns that hold you under cover

   

 

and everything is pure interrogation

until a rifle motions and you move

with guarded unconcerned acceleration –

   

 

a little emptier, a little spent

as always by that quiver in the self,

subjugated, yes, and obedient.

   

 

So you drive on to the frontier of writing

where it happens again. The guns on tripods;

the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

   

 

data about you, waiting for the squawk

of clearance; the marksman training down

out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

   

 

And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed,

as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall

on the black current of a tarmac road

   

 

past armour-plated vehicles, out between

the posted soldiers flowing and receding

like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

The wintry haw is burning out of season,

crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,

wanting no more from them but that they keep

the wick of self-respect from dying out,

not having to blind them with illumination.

   

 

But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost

it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes

with his lantern, seeking one just man;

so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw

he holds up at eye-level on its twig,

and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,

its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,

its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.

I

 

When I landed in the republic of conscience

it was so noiseless when the engines stopped

I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

   

 

At immigration, the clerk was an old man

who produced a wallet from his homespun coat

and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

   

 

The woman in customs asked me to declare

the words of our traditional cures and charms

to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

   

 

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.

You carried your own burden and very soon

your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

II

 

Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning

spells universal good and parents hang

swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.

   

 

Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells

are held to the ear during births and funerals.

The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.

   

 

Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.

The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,

The hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

   

 

At their inauguration, public leaders

must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep

to atone for their presumption to hold office –

   

 

and to affirm their faith that all life sprang

from salt in tears which the sky-god wept

after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

III

 

I came back from that frugal republic

with my two arms the one length, the customs woman

having insisted my allowance was myself.

   

 

The old man rose and gazed into my face

and said that was official recognition

that I was now a dual citizen.

   

 

He therefore desired me when I got home

to consider myself a representative

and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

   

 

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere

but operated independently

and no ambassador would ever be relieved.

I

 

My cheek was hit and hit:

sudden hailstones

pelted and bounced on the road.

   

 

When it cleared again

something whipped and knowledgeable

had withdrawn

   

 

and left me there with my chances.

I made a small hard ball

of burning water running from my hand

   

 

just as I make this now

out of the melt of the real thing

smarting into its absence.

II

 

To be reckoned with, all the same,

those brats of showers.

The way they refused permission,

   

 

rattling the classroom window

like a ruler across the knuckles,

the way they were perfect first

   

 

and then in no time dirty slush.

Thomas Traherne had his orient wheat

for proof and wonder

   

 

but for us, it was the sting of hailstones

and the unstingable hands of Eddie Diamond

foraging in the nettles.

III

 

Nipple and hive, bite-lumps,

small acorns of the almost pleasurable

intimated and disallowed

   

 

when the shower ended

and everything said
wait
.

For what? For forty years

   

 

to say there, there you had

the truest foretaste of your aftermath –

in that dilation

   

 

when the light opened in silence

and a car with wipers going still

laid perfect tracks in the slush.

When he stands in the judgment place

With his stick in his hand and the broad hat

Still on his head, maimed by self-doubt

And an old disdain of sweet talk and excuses,

It will be no justice if the sentence is blabbed out.

He will expect more than words in the ultimate court

He relied on through a lifetime’s speechlessness.

   

 

Let it be like the judgment of Hermes,

God of the stone heap, where the stones were verdicts

Cast solidly at his feet, piling up around him

Until he stood waist deep in the cairn

Of his apotheosis: maybe a gate-pillar

Or a tumbled wallstead where hogweed earths the silence

Somebody will break at last to say, ‘Here

His spirit lingers,’ and will have said too much.

So a new similitude is given us

And we say: The soul may be compared

   

 

Unto a spoonbait that a child discovers

Beneath the sliding lid of a pencil case,

   

 

Glimpsed once and imagined for a lifetime

Risen and free and spooling out of nowhere –

   

 

A shooting star going back up the darkness.

It flees him and it burns him all at once

   

 

Like the single drop that Dives implored

Falling and falling into a great gulf.

   

 

Then exit, the polished helmet of a hero

Laid out amidships above scudding water.

   

 

Exit, alternatively, a toy of light

Reeled through him upstream, snagging on nothing.

In memoriam M.K.H., 1911–1984
 

She taught me what her uncle once taught her:

How easily the biggest coal block split

If you got the grain and hammer angled right.

   

 

The sound of that relaxed alluring blow,

Its co-opted and obliterated echo,

Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,

   

 

Taught me between the hammer and the block

To face the music. Teach me now to listen,

To strike it rich behind the linear black.