第5章 from WINTERING OUT (1972)

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Fodder

Or, as we said,

fother, I open

my arms for it

again. But first

to draw from the tight

vise of a stack

the weathered eaves

of the stack itself

falling at your feet,

last summer's tumbled

swathes of grass

and meadowsweet

multiple as loaves

and fishes, a bundle

tossed over half-doors

or into mucky gaps.

These long nights

I would pull hay

for comfort, anything

to bed the stall.

Bog Oak

A carter's trophy

split for rafters,

a cobwebbed, black,

long-seasoned rib

under the first thatch.

I might tarry

with the moustached

dead, the creel-fillers,

or eavesdrop on

their hopeless wisdom

as a blow-down of smoke

struggles over the half-door

and mizzling rain

blurs the far end

of the cart track.

The softening ruts

lead back to no

'oak groves', no

cutters of mistletoe

in the green clearings.

Perhaps I just make out

Edmund Spenser,

dreaming sunlight,

encroached upon by

geniuses who creep

'out of every corner

of the woodes and glennes'

towards watercress and carrion.

Anahorish

My 'place of clear water',

the first hill in the world

where springs washed into

the shiny grass

and darkened cobbles

in the bed of the lane.

Anahorish, soft gradient

of consonant, vowel-meadow,

after-image of lamps

swung through the yards

on winter evenings.

With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellers

go waist-deep in mist

to break the light ice

at wells and dunghills.

Servant Boy

He is wintering out

the back-end of a bad year,

swinging a hurricane-lamp

through some outhouse,

a jobber among shadows.

Old work-whore, slave-

blood, who stepped fair-hills

under each bidder's eye

and kept your patience

and your counsel, how

you draw me into

your trail. Your trail

broken from haggard to stable,

a straggle of fodder

stiffened on snow,

comes first-footing

the back doors of the little

barons: resentful

and impenitent,

carrying the warm eggs.

Land

I stepped it, perch by perch.

Unbraiding rushes and grass

I opened my right-of-way

through old bottoms and sowed-out ground

and gathered stones off the ploughing

to raise a small cairn.

Cleaned out the drains, faced the hedges,

often got up at dawn

to walk the outlying fields.

I composed habits for those acres

so that my last look would be

neither gluttonous nor starved.

I was ready to go anywhere.

This is in place of what I would leave,

plaited and branchy,

on a long slope of stubble:

a woman of old wet leaves,

rush-bands and thatcher's scollops,

stooked loosely, her breasts an open-work

of new straw and harvest bows.

Gazing out past

the shifting hares.

III

I sense the pads

unfurling under grass and clover:

if I lie with my ear

in this loop of silence

long enough, thigh-bone

and shoulder against the phantom ground,

I expect to pick up

a small drumming

and must not be surprised

in bursting air

to find myself snared, swinging

an ear-ring of sharp wire.

Gifts of Rain

Cloudburst and steady downpour now

for days.

Still mammal,

straw-footed on the mud,

he begins to sense weather

by his skin.

A nimble snout of flood

licks over stepping stones

and goes uprooting.

He fords

his life by sounding.

Soundings.

A man wading lost fields

breaks the pane of flood:

a flower of mud-

water blooms up to his reflection

like a cut swaying

its red spoors through a basin.

His hands grub

where the spade has uncastled

sunken drills, an atlantis

he depends on. So

he is hooped to where he planted

and sky and ground

are running naturally among his arms

that grope the cropping land.

III

When rains were gathering

there would be an all-night

roaring off the ford.

Their world-schooled ear

could monitor the usual

confabulations, the race

slabbering past the gable,

the Moyola harping on

its gravel beds:

all spouts by daylight

brimmed with their own airs

and overflowed each barrel

in long tresses.

I cock my ear

at an absence –

in the shared calling of blood

arrives my need

for antediluvian lore.

Soft voices of the dead

are whispering by the shore

that I would question

(and for my children's sake)

about crops rotted, river mud

glazing the baked clay floor.

The tawny guttural water

spells itself: Moyola

is its own score and consort,

bedding the locale

in the utterance,

reed music, an old chanter

breathing its mists

through vowels and history.

A swollen river,

a mating call of sound

rises to pleasure me, Dives,

hoarder of common ground.

Toome

My mouth holds round

the soft blastings,

Toome, Toome,

as under the dislodged

slab of the tongue

I push into a souterrain

prospecting what new

in a hundred centuries'

loam, flints, musket-balls,

fragmented ware,

torcs and fish-bones,

till I am sleeved in

alluvial mud that shelves

suddenly under

bogwater and tributaries,

and elvers tail my hair.

Broagh

Riverback, the long rigs

ending in broad docken

and a canopied pad

down to the ford.

The garden mould

bruised easily, the shower

gathering in your heelmark

was the black O

in Broagh,

its low tattoo

among the windy boortrees

and rhubarb-blades

ended almost

suddenly, like that last

gh the strangers found

difficult to manage.

Oracle

Hide in the hollow trunk

of the willow tree,

its listening familiar,

until, as usual, they

cuckoo your name

across the fields.

You can hear them

draw the poles of stiles

as they approach

calling you out:

small mouth and ear

in a woody cleft,

lobe and larynx

of the mossy places.

The Backward Look

A stagger in air

as if a language

failed, a sleight

of wing.

A snipe's bleat is fleeing

its nesting-ground

into dialect,

into variants,

transliterations whirr

on the nature reserves –

little goat of the air,

of the evening,

little goat of the frost.

It is his tail-feathers

drumming elegies

in the slipstream

of wild goose

and yellow bittern

as he corkscrews away

into the vaults

that we live off, his flight

through the sniper's eyrie,

over twilit earthworks

and wallsteads,

disappearing among

gleanings and leavings

in the combs

of a fieldworker's archive.

A New Song

I met a girl from Derrygarve

And the name, a lost potent musk,

Recalled the river's long swerve,

A kingfisher's blue bolt at dusk

And stepping stones like black molars

Sunk in the ford, the shifty glaze

Of the whirlpool, the Moyola

Pleasuring beneath alder trees.

And Derrygarve, I thought, was just:

Vanished music, twilit water –

A smooth libation of the past

Poured by this chance vestal daughter.

But now our river tongues must rise

From licking deep in native haunts

To flood, with vowelling embrace,

Demesnes staked out in consonants.

And Castledawson we'll enlist

And Upperlands, each planted bawn –

Like bleaching-greens resumed by grass –

A vocable, as rath and bullaun.

The Other Side

Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds,

a neighbour laid his shadow

on the stream, vouching

'It's as poor as Lazarus, that ground,'

and brushed away

among the shaken leafage.

I lay where his lea sloped

to meet our fallow,

nested on moss and rushes,

my ear swallowing

his fabulous, biblical dismissal,

that tongue of chosen people.

When he would stand like that

on the other side, white-haired,

swinging his blackthorn

at the marsh weeds,

he prophesied above our scraggy acres,

then turned away

towards his promised furrows

on the hill, a wake of pollen

drifting to our bank, next season's tares.

For days we would rehearse

each patriarchal dictum:

Lazarus, the Pharaoh, Solomon

and David and Goliath rolled

magnificently, like loads of hay

too big for our small lanes,

or faltered on a rut –

'Your side of the house, I believe,

hardly rule by the Book at all.'

His brain was a whitewashed kitchen

hung with texts, swept tidy

as the body o' the kirk.

III

Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging

mournfully on in the kitchen

we would hear his step round the gable

though not until after the litany

would the knock come to the door

and the casual whistle strike up

on the doorstep. 'A right-looking night,'

he might say, 'I was dandering by

and says I, I might as well call.'

But now I stand behind him

in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers.

He puts a hand in a pocket

or taps a little tune with the blackthorn

shyly, as if he were party to

lovemaking or a stranger's weeping.

Should I slip away, I wonder,

or go up and touch his shoulder

and talk about the weather

or the price of grass-seed?

Tinder

(from A Northern Hoard)

We picked flints,

Pale and dirt-veined,

So small finger and thumb

Ached around them;

Cold beads of history and home

We fingered, a cave-mouth flame

Of leaf and stick

Trembling at the mind's wick.

We clicked stone on stone

That sparked a weak flame-pollen

And failed, our knuckle joints

Striking as often as the flints.

What did we know then

Of tinder, charred linen and iron,

Huddled at dusk in a ring,

Our fists shut, our hope shrunken?

What could strike a blaze

From our dead igneous days?

Now we squat on cold cinder,

Red-eyed, after the flames' soft thunder

And our thoughts settle like ash.

We face the tundra's whistling brush

With new history, flint and iron,

Cast-offs, scraps, nail, canine.

The Tollund Man

Some day I will go to Aarhus

To see his peat-brown head,

The mild pods of his eyelids,

His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country nearby

Where they dug him out,

His last gruel of winter seeds

Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for

The cap, noose and girdle,

I will stand a long time.

Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her torc on him

And opened her fen,

Those dark juices working

Him to a saint's kept body,

Trove of the turfcutters'

Honeycombed workings.

Now his stained face

Reposes at Aarhus.

I could risk blasphemy,

Consecrate the cauldron bog

Our holy ground and pray

Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed

Flesh of labourers,

Stockinged corpses

Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth

Flecking the sleepers

Of four young brothers, trailed

For miles along the lines.

III

Something of his sad freedom

As he rode the tumbril

Should come to me, driving,

Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

Watching the pointing hands

Of country people,

Not knowing their tongue.

Out there in Jutland

In the old man-killing parishes

I will feel lost,

Unhappy and at home.

Nerthus

For beauty, say an ash-fork staked in peat,

Its long grains gathering to the gouged split;

A seasoned, unsleeved taker of the weather

Where kesh and loaning finger out to heather.

Wedding Day

I am afraid.

Sound has stopped in the day

And the images reel over

And over. Why all those tears,

The wild grief on his face

Outside the taxi? The sap

Of mourning rises

In our waving guests.

You sing behind the tall cake

Like a deserted bride

Who persists, demented,

And goes through the ritual.

When I went to the Gents

There was a skewered heart

And a legend of love. Let me

Sleep on your breast to the airport.

Mother of the Groom

What she remembers

Is his glistening back

In the bath, his small boots

In the ring of boots at her feet.

Hands in her voided lap,

She hears a daughter welcomed.

It's as if he kicked when lifted

And slipped her soapy hold.

Once soap would ease off

The wedding ring

That's bedded forever now

In her clapping hand.

Summer Home

Was it wind off the dumps

or something in heat

dogging us, the summer gone sour,

a fouled nest incubating somewhere?

Whose fault, I wondered, inquisitor

of the possessed air.

To realize suddenly,

whip off the mat

that was larval, moving –

and scald, scald, scald.

Bushing the door, my arms full

of wild cherry and rhododendron,

I hear her small lost weeping

through the hall, that bells and hoarsens

on my name, my name.

O love, here is the blame.

The loosened flowers between us

gather in, compose

for a May altar of sorts.

These frank and falling blooms

soon taint to a sweet chrism.

Attend. Anoint the wound.

III

Oh we tented our wound all right

under the homely sheet

and lay as if the cold flat of a blade

had winded us.