Autor

John Burnside (1955) es un poeta y novelista escocés, merecedor del premio T. S.

Eliot de poesía. Entre sus novelas cabe destacar Las huellas del diablo o Glister.

Notas

[*] RESPONSES TO AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO <<

[*] I

DE CORPORIS RESURRECTIONE

for George Soule

 

The snowdrops are here;

 

and sometimes the dead we have washed

and buried:

 

the sweet mouthed, arthritic mothers we rarely noticed

polishing spoons in the small hours

polishing mirrors;

 

the men in our kitchens blurring with silicosis;

the gradual dead

drifting between the trees like gusts of wind

 

and finding a visible form

an approximate colour:

aconite; meltwater; cinnabar; Prussian blue;

 

the dead we have named and buried

breaking like waves

on sandstone and leaf

on tree-bark and rusted iron.

 

The snowdrops are an exercise in white:

not quite convincing

flowers that would have been green

in a world without shadows;

but only the dead are green

in the last days of winter;

 

only the dead we have numbered and set aside

will blossom again in ditch-moss and columns of ivy

 

replacing themselves in the lull of the visible world

with fingerprints; voices, blood blisters; rose tattoos.

 

* * *

 

Like turning aside and living a season or two

in another room:

 

snow at the window for days

and the heat in your fingers

 

leaching away through the glass

like remembered skin.

 

Or how you would turn for a moment

from what you were doing

 

to notice the dark

at three in the afternoon

 

and how the earth calls out for every death,

contriving apples, mole-runs, tiny birds

 

alive inside the gold japonica

and waiting for the moment to arrive

 

when song begins; the black

transformed to green.

 

* * *

 

I thought he would come at dawn:

dark feet crossing the yard or a lukewarm

shadow in the angle of the wall,

 

dew trails and traces of frost in a downstairs

cupboard, or an afterthought of myrrh

fading to mist in the mist of the bathroom mirror;

 

and, even now, when everything is cause

for doubt, I still imagine a return,

though never quite the god they talked about

 

in Sunday school: more atmosphere than flesh,

this almost taking form as frequency,

like static, or the fuzz of radio

 

that might have been the voice in everything:

a music I was promised in the sleep

of childhood, when the first snow reached the edge

 

of waiting and the constancy of this

– the still to come, the gracile revelation –

hovered between the looked-for and the given.

 

* * *

 

We weren’t prepared for this:

a shimmer of eyes

and the shore road blurring with sand

in the evening wind;

 

just as we’re never prepared

for the soul, when it happens:

the owl face stitched to the dark; the sudden burn;

 

or how a stairwell fills, some cloudless night,

with something like a held breath, or a voice

about to speak.

 

Only an hour after midnight

the cold tastes of cherries:

 

a slow thread of light in the stairwell

the still of the basement

patient and dark as the phantoms we carry away

from an edited life.

 

Out on the porch the wind chimes sing for themselves

but the sky is another room

in this dream of a house:

 

the sycamores framing the yard like a detail from Brueghel,

the line between wintering bark and the limelight of snow

the shift in a long conversation

or one of those games

 

where the nothing that happens in time

is the one thing we have

 

for keeps:

the seep of music through the bone;

a wavelength of owls, where everything is static.

<<

[*] II

AMA ET FAC QUOD VIS

for Piritta Maavuori

 

The God of Saint Paul, who is

'no respecter of persons'

 

might just as easily have been

the self

 

– that loves what it will

and watches us quicken and fade

with the passing of time

 

as calmly as we watch our shadows form

and lengthen, with each shift and slant of light.

 

* * *

 

Silence is argument carried on by other means.

ERNESTO GUEVARA

 

What we intend

and what we allow to happen

 

is anyone’s guess.

 

All week my voice was failing – first husky, then strained,

till it guttered away to a whisper

 

and disappeared;

guttered away

 

this morning, when the snow began to fall,

whiting out streets and gardens, muffling the cars,

 

until it seemed the only good reply

was silence:

 

the quiet of dismay,

but what Guevara thought of as the argument

continued – carried on

 

by other means – that cold and salty pact

the body makes with things unlike itself

 

– a snowfall, or a gust of Russian wind,

the evanescence of an upper room

that might be something new, or someone gone

 

a moment since:

and how it is transformed

by what it never finds:

no soul; no

shadow.

 

* * *

 

Propose what you like;

propose

 

causality

the notion of the self

how one thing follows another

in grim succession

 

it only takes a moment in the wind

to break that argument.

 

* * *

 

Consider the body: changeable, incomplete,

yet still continuous:

think how it holds the perfect likenesses

of all the former selves that it is not,

how casually it gathers and renews

the forms we have scarcely noticed – winter buds,

 

a flock of starlings turning on the air,

the bleached grass skirting the lake

or the snake-bark of maples –

 

and how, on a morning like this, with our everyday lives

suspended

in these white parentheses

 

we start again from scratch: the coming night;

the ferry that runs to the island;

the sullen ice;

 

the shapes we have scarcely noticed, bearing us on

o all we have yet to become

to the blank of a future.

 

* * *

I wake in the dark and the dream evaporates before I can grasp

the details

 

– something about a bell, and prints in the snow;

my dream self distinct from the person I seem in waking;

 

my dream self, bright and light-footed,

a holy, unclouded soul, tracking these prints

to the edge of a sycamore wood –

 

the details blurring and suddenly melting away

and only a moment’s afterlife of joy:

the body a solid again, the mind a distraction,

the net of the slipshod entangling the peregrine heart.

 

* * *

 

In the small hours

awake and alone,

 

waiting for snow, or watching the snow as it falls,

from an upper room,

 

as far as I am from home,

and as strange as I seem,

 

what could I really prefer

to the weight of the self?

 

its deftness, on nights like this,

its immutable grace,

the only means I have

of bearing witness.

 

* * *

 

This morning I followed a trail

to the edge of the woods,

 

then felt the shadow watching as I lost

my nerve:

a brightness

 

slipped behind the rain;

an aftermath

of lanolin and dust.

 

* * *

 

Now I look back from the warmth

of a scentless house

 

with something foreign

cradled in my chest

 

and wonder that I took its weight

for safety, all those nights I passed untouched

 

and dreaming,

like a calf lulled in the dark

 

while something sweet

unfolds along the blade,

 

lifeblood

or rapture

taken for a song.

<<

[*] III

DE LIBERO ARBITRIO

for Johanna Lane

 

– something that comes

from the dark

(not

self or not-self)

 

but something between the two

like the shimmering line

where one form defines another

yet fails to end;

 

look for the proof in snow

or the bleed of light

between the shorefront

and the harbour wall

 

this late December evening:

nothing there;

but listen, and it sounds

like wings arriving

quietly over the firth

 

and further out

the snow

is also falling

 

as surely as it falls upon the lawns

and hedges

in this narrow seaside town.

 

* * *

 

I wonder how we know the things we know

most surely

with no hope of evidence

and lacking a faith

that might extend to heaven

 

stopping from time to time,

on nights like this,

to see it all again

– the sky, the firth,

 

the empty street

where someone walks ahead

and leaves a trail of footprints

through the darkness –

 

* * *

 

Not that we ever return

but the people we were

remain in that snowlit room

with the distance between them.

 

The light on a cotton blouse

the scent of the garden

perhaps it has rained in the night

or a moment since

the absolute white of a sleeve

and a blackbird singing

somewhere among the shrubs

still wet with rain

 

or only the smell of coffee

whatever there was

persists

so it seems they are waiting

 

the people we were

who said

or omitted to say

the appropriate words

 

waiting for something to end

though it hasn’t begun

waiting for us to go back

with what we know now

 

to rescue them

one detail at a time:

a coffee cup, a bird,

the smell of rain

 

the word unspoken

silently deleted.

 

* * *

 

The shapes we mistake

for love

– a garden in summer;

that sound the wind makes

pausing in the leaves;

 

the shapes we mistake

for ourselves

 

at the edge of the water

– turning a moment

then slipping away to a depth

that never existed

 

that hint

of jadis et naguère

while the moment lasted

 

and always the sound

of a future we could have refused:

a household of card-games and desk-lamps,

a bed of carnations

 

the promise we made

even then

to continue alone.

<<

[*] IV

RETRACTATIONES

If, as he says,

the flaw in the weft of the soul

 

is how it tends, forever,

towards nothingness,

 

then might we not imagine it

as grace itself,

 

the way it teeters,

this side of extinction,

 

locked with a flesh

that is possibly not, after all,

 

as loathsome as he thought,

but just as much

 

illumined, steady,

pitched just at the point

 

where everything might stop,

and nothing happens;

 

* * *

 

and how it resembles love is the way

it might be the last occasion, sitting alone in the kitchen, as dusk filters in;

 

how any moment now, the known might end,

or end for me, at least, while, somewhere else,

someone is cooking a meal, or writing a letter.

 

Out in the garden, the shadows merge with the dark,

till all I have taken for granted – the half-truths of form,

the goodwill of definition –

 

is folded up, as matter always is,

falling away, like the undelivered soul,

toward nothingness.

 

As a child, I imagined the silence of the dead

was the silence of disapproval;

or else, a mild distaste for how I went on

 

living, not quite sure of shapes and colours.

Later, it seemed they had stumbled upon a world

so innocent of names, the whole event

 

was one enormous household, beasts and angels

simmering like rain against the skin,

as if the soul were not the uttered word,

 

as if the colours were those perfect forms

he always wanted: blithe, Platonic blues

and reds, and not the accidents of light

 

that shift and flicker in the fading lawn,

the dimming fire amidst the Deutzia,

antirrhinums, milkweed, evening primrose.

Yet surely the dead are soulless, not being here,

where souls are made

in shadows and greening leaves:

 

soulless, and poised at the rim

of chaos, they long to return,

to sit up alone all night, in kitchens like this,

 

remembering,

forgetting,

being lost.

 

As a child I imagined the life beyond this life

as one enormous room, all

mist and kinship,

 

now I would have to insist on walls and factions,

hidden compartments, corridors leading off

to secret gardens steeped in changing light,

 

not to be set apart, but to meet again

in the old way, coming together

by chance, on an aimless walk

 

through foxgloves, or Michaelmas daisies,

losing and winning back

the sense of the other,

 

sun on a stranger’s skin, and that quickening

when someone else is there,

as yet unseen:

* * *

 

and it isn’t a choice I would make,

to rise again,

 

but somewhere between

this one life and the next

 

I imagine a point

where the soul

 

is purified:

fogged water leaching through spawn

 

and the veins

of cowslips;

 

and this just another event

like an egg, or a sunrise,

 

a sense of someone waking in the dark

and dressing by a window, looking out

 

at stars, from time to time, a neighbour’s tree,

a sound in the distance like love, or a passing train,

 

as he teases a bone into place

or straightens a nerve,

 

preparing to happen again,

in a knowable world,

 

and all the while puzzled by something he ought to remember.

<<

[*] GIFT SONGS <<

[*] VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

I. SABBATHDAY

The christchild is no distraction

– the lotus blossom –

seed-pearls of tallow and ice

on the risen body.

 

Dark by mid-afternoon

when the snow closes in,

sifting us out

from this straggle of lamps and voices,

 

silence in what we remember,

silence in passing,

silence

in the closing of a door

 

as something more than light

slips through the gate

and follows the garden wall

past the anxious collie,

 

all we have left unimagined,

all that is forfeit,

quicksilver, empty as hunger

and never quite seen

 

when it enters

this cradle of fire

through a gap

in the scriptures

<<

[*] II. LITURGY

– the moment when we recognise ourselves

alone, with the blue of medlar, the gold of quince,

and those muslin bags in the half-light, white

as a deposition;

 

bletting the fruits in the shed

through the year’s caesura,

bruise-black and coarse to the touch

while we work and dream,

 

and all in pursuit

of an essence:

bittersweet-amber

distillate, not of summer, but of one

 

decisive morning

– dew-water; leaf-turn; chill –

fox-runs threading the lawn

with the promise of dying

 

but, further away, in the beet-fields,

the unforsaken:

folds in the green of the plural,

unworked, and beginning again.

<<

[*] III. PRAYER

We were born in the faultlines of paper:

gunpowder, petals of skin, and the white of the eye

dividing, like the flaw in expectation.

 

Forgive us this day, we said,

in our garment of ashes,

forgive us what is spilt, or not yet come

 

to pass: Oh, my

America, my new found land,

 

hoarse with the promise of song

and the grace notes of terror.

<<

[*] IV. PENANCE

Time to go back and read it all again,

whiting out the words you understand

till nothing else is visible but this:

 

shamefaced; gospel; prudent; inexact;

patrimony; silence; coup d’etat.

 

Time to refuse your fifteen minutes of fame,

the prize you’ve already won, but can never accept,

the small-print on the deed, the no-claims bonus.

 

Out in the dark, in the cold, in a glimmer of snow,

something you never expected returns to bear witness:

a shadow; a phantom; your double; or something else

 

that looks like you, or would, if you were there,

come to unravel the ghost of a burnt-out fire,

and raking through clinker and ash, to recover a heartbeat.

<<

[*] V. MARGINAL JOTTINGS ON THE PROSPECT OF DYING

It feels like a door in the light

through which the mind might pass at any moment,

 

arriving like an actor at a scene

you’ve long rehearsed:

 

a little market town, perhaps,

with rounds of cheese

 

and pigeons hung from twine

around the stalls;

 

a narrow alleyway that looks

familiar, on this rainy afternoon,

 

the glitter of the lights, the smell of bread,

the windows, with their naked mannequins

 

contorted and rapt,

like Gray’s anatomical drawings;

 

and, sometimes,

with a little luck or charm,

 

that inlet on the far side

of the island, where we swam

 

alone, among the fishes,

in a sea

 

so clear

we could imagine ourselves healed

 

and true again

to what we used to know:

 

the open sky,

the part-song of cicadas.

<<

[*] VI. TOTEM

Only a moth at the glass,

or so it seems,

the animals further away

and indistinct,

 

wolverine

hitched to your skin

and the dreamed

coyote.

 

All night they ran in the woods,

till they came to this line

of fence-wire

and poisoned gravel,

 

desert

behind them,

prairie grass

burning for miles,

 

salt-flats

and rivers,

birch woods,

an ocean of stars,

 

but nothing there

to match

this baffled

sleep,

first light gilding the door

like a wayward angel,

day-lilies silvered with rain

in our picturesque yard.

<<

[*] VII. RELICT

Craneflies for millions of years,

unchanged, like a template;

 

gold matter folded in resin:

katydid silkworm

 

yet even under glass

we just make out

 

the fingerprint,

the single flake of skin,

 

a dusting of fugitive cells

or a hint of civet;

 

ten thousand miles

of heroin and myrrh.

<<

[*] VIII. CONVERSION

Whatever I hoped to believe,

I never imagined

the pitfall of consolation:

 

weak tea catching the light

in a presbytery kitchen,

 

the rest of my life – recovery,

restitution –

 

that room at the end of the hall

where they stored the vestments;

 

though surely it crossed my mind

on those autumn nights,

 

given the aubergine pall

on the turn of the stairs,

 

surely I saw, as only a child can see

the pleasure of making amends

in the lull of the evening,

 

telling my sins to a shadow,

reciting the penance,

 

rinsing my soul in His tears

before sinning again.

<<

[*] IX. THE ADEPT OWNS NOTHING BUT HAS THE USE OF EVERYTHING

The mice are back;

I leave them

crusts and pine-nuts

on the kitchen

counter,

leave them

treats they sometimes

miss,

experiments

with milk and berries,

spelt

and pumpkin seeds.

I like it

that I have

such neighbours

– not

invisible

but moving back and forth

between their world

and mine

discreetly;

I enjoy

their table manners

when I catch a glimpse

of something reddish-grey

that I have

interrupted

darting for the wall

though not from dread so much

as care

– an animal

propriety –

and what they leave behind

as guesswork,

what this vanishing suggests

is how a man might

prosper

if he dared

making himself at home

without a sound,

adept

unledgered

loyal to his burden.

<<

[*] X. AFTERLIFE

When we are gone

our lives will continue without us

 

– or so we believe and,

at times, we have tried to imagine

 

the gaps we will leave being filled

with the brilliance of others:

 

someone else gathering plums

from this tree in the garden,

 

someone else thinking this thought

in a room filled with stars

 

and coming to no conclusion

other than this –

 

this bungled joy, this inarticulate

conviction that the future cannot come

 

without the grace

of setting things aside,

 

of giving up

the phantom of a soul

 

that only seemed to be

while it was passing.

<<

[*] XI. LARES

All afternoon I have heard you

going from room to room, as if you would offer

the gift of a watchful presence, the gift of a look

to how the sunlight gathers in the folds

of curtains

how the shadows on the wall

flit back and forth, more sparrow, or swallow in flight

than birds would have been.

 

Like you I have felt it today, that space in our house

where doors might swing open

messengers appear:

the curve of a bowl, or the red in a vase of carnations

softly assuming the forms of a visitation.

 

We go for weeks and never catch ourselves

like this, the trace of magic we possess

locked in the work of appearing, day after day,

in the world of our making;

 

we go for months with phantoms in our heads

till, filling a bath, or fetching the laundry in,

we see ourselves again, at home, illumined,

folding a sheet, or pouring a glass of milk,

bright in the here and now, and unencumbered.

<<

[*] FIVE ANIMALS

I. ARCTIC FOX

It was luck, I suppose,

though it felt like something else

when I pulled off the road

and stopped in a covert of snow

to stretch my legs

 

and the Arctic fox

came silently out of the distance,

half-way to summer already, the silvery fur

threaded with auburn

and brown, the face

 

indifferent, although it caught my eye

and watched, for a minute

– scenting me,

sounding me out –

though only, I thought,

 

from politeness, and not

surprise,

accustomed,

as I was not,

to the rule of the tundra,

 

the logic of the wilderness that says

where nothing seems to happen

all the time

what happens is the chance

that something might.

<<

[*] II. ROCK PIPITS

When they sing from the harbour wall, amongst

the soured lines and ten-fathom creels,

it sounds like an apprenticeship for something more

auspicious

– fulmar, say,

for whom this salt-sweet air is neither

ate, nor home;

or half a mile inland, far in the shade

beneath a wind-glazed kirk, the mistle thrush

recalls itself, like something from a dream,

and closes softly on a purer song;

but why would they dream of rebirth, who are

intent on nothing, flitting back and forth

along the shore-front, in a tide of stones?

Everything feeds them: hairweed, shadows, light,

and every crevice is another house

of spice and water, echo to that twin

who wanders in the mountains, almost smoke

between the river and a sky of bone. <<

[*] III. EIDER HOUSE

For days I come and go

in a dream of feathers,

 

my fingers a flurry of light

as I fill the kettle,

 

my house the unsettled reflection

of what I have made

 

from off-cuts and leftover shingle

to house the birds.

 

At night, my wife lies down

among the saints,

 

while I sit late

and listen for a sound

 

beyond the wind,

beyond the creak of wings,

 

and as I wait, I know,

as blind men know

 

the distances

in long-familiar rooms,

 

how little she would care,

or understand,

 

if something more than warmth

returned with me

 

on such a night as this,

late in the year

 

– a rumour of flight,

a gift from the legible world –

 

lining the bed she has made

with a love beyond measure.

<<

[*] IV. COLLIE

Sunshine at Spalefields crossing;

small rain at Beley bridge;

gilthead hanging from the silvered dark

in the tanks of the fisheries lab.

 

Three men are cutting the hay

on the road to Kinaldy,

the scent of it filling the car

as I drive to work,

 

a tractor blocking the lane

and the post van waiting,

the dog from the cottages

havering back and forth

while the pheasants scatter.

 

Sometimes I think he knows

what nothing can know,

some future state of luck or bitterness

that lends a purpose to this sudden frenzy,

 

and I guess, for a while,

his whole world smells of miasma,

the intricate sweetness of oil,

the declensions of rain,

 

a pocket of mildew and hair

in the mole drain, flushed from its cover,

the animal that dips beneath the sickle, wed to the map of the grass

and unable to run.

<<

[*] V. COYOTES (SONORA)

It takes imagination not to wish

for something, when the darkness fills with voices;

 

but why, when they call, do I want to hurry outside,

leaving the door wide open, the lamp still lit,

the radio lulled to sleep

in an empty room?

 

The chill fills my shirtsleeves, the fingerless, desert chill

of one enormous nightfall on the skin,

 

and still I hurry on, towards some

epicentre, where the angel waits,

real or implied, to make its annunciation.

 

Nothing can disappoint me, light begins

and ends, I hurry on,

the desert flickers out, then comes again

 

elsewhere

– a gust of wind; a thread of green –

and I keep walking, while the kettle boils,

or something founders by remote control,

 

the voices calling from the present tense,

restoring me to where the mind leaves off,

the nothing of the self,

the here and now.

<<

[*] FOR A FREE CHURCH

I. THE BODY AS METAPHOR

We only imagine it ends

like childhood, or rain:

fever, the purl in the bone, the amended

lustre of the self, all shell and glitter,

 

as if it had long been decided

that flesh is a journey,

something immense in the blood,

like a summer of locusts,

 

or something not quite visible, but quick

as birchseed, or the threading of a wire

through sleep and rapture, gathering the hand

that reaches from the light, to close, or open.

<<

[*] II. SI DIEU N’EXISTAIT PAS, IL FAUDRAIT L’INVENTER

No one invents an absence:

cadmium yellow, duckweed, the capercaillie

– see how the hand we would name restrains itself

till all our stories end in monochrome;

 

the path through the meadow

reaching no logical end;

nothing but colour: bedstraw and ladies’ mantle;

nothing sequential; nothing as chapter and verse.

 

No one invents the quiet that runs in the grass,

the summer wind, the sky, the meadowlark;

and always the gift of the world, the undecided:

first light and damson blue ad infinitum.

<<

[*] III. PRAYER

Give me a little less

with every dawn:

colour, a breath of wind,

the perfection of shadows,

 

till what I find, I fin

because it’s there,

gold in the seams of my hands

and the night light, burning.

<<

[*] IV. WANDERLUST

Last day of harbour;

rain, and the lull of gospel

 

clouding the sweet hiatus

of home and kirk.

 

Mice in the oat-bin,

honey bees snagging the nets,

 

and, slowly,

rom the stockyards in the town,

 

the scent of beasts arrives;

the biblical;

 

rudderless gazes

turned to a farmer’s sky.

<<

[*] FOUR QUARTETS <<

[*] SAINT-NAZAIRE

 

In history, as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life.

KARL MARX

 

I. L’IMPASSE DE L’OCÉAN

Plane leaves drift through the wynds

around the Catholic church

in Saint-Nazaire,

 

freeze-dried, silent, wrapping-paper brown,

they gather in the nooks between abandoned

hair salons and shuttered pharmacies,

 

or swirl around in broken alleyways

till everything is powder – leaves and stalks

and sand-drift, all

 

in pulverem, except

the rock-cress in the kerbstones and the char-black

ganglia of fallen Judas pods.

 

I'm walking through the windless innertown,

–breeze-blocks, mongrels, smashed glass, chantiers –

walking towards the sky, and the smell of the tide

 

and reading the names from a map, rue Lumière,

impasse de Toutes Aides,

impasse de l’Océan.

 

Somewhere a bell is ringing,

though whether it comes from the church

or out to sea

 

I cannot tell;

when evening falls, the water bleeds away

towards a rose horizon where the boats

 

go out to fishing grounds and other

port-towns much like this;

the lights are only brilliant

 

in the distance, and no matter where we are,

the sea is somewhere else. The constancy

of gulls and harbour seals

 

belongs to elsewhere, when the moon comes out

and floats above the squalls of Europop,

the neon bars, the hyper Champion,

 

the kids racing bikes through disused

U-boat hangars, engine roar strafing the walls,

exhaust fumes wreathing the bays

 

of blue-lit water.

On the bridge to Petit Maroc,

a legend: VAGUER LA NUIT

 

DANS DES LUMIÈRES NARRATIVES,

an invocation, maybe, or a prayer,

but, really, all there is is what it says:

 

the wind in my eyes

and the cold making light of the air,

as I wander from lamp to lamp, to the edge of the night,

and stand on the quai des Marées

looking out

to the ocean.

<<

[*] II. IMMORTELLE DES SABLES

As much as anything, I love the pines

that grow along the seafront, making green

the harbour towns and docks

and narrow squares

of dust and shadow, wandering between

the sailors’ mission and the Harbour bar;

 

or, spilled across the duneland in the wind:

sea holly, stonecrop; panicaut, orpin blanc:

sand orchid, eel-green and purple: orchis bouc

and orchis bouffon, fat on its silvered stem;

 

though if I had to choose among them all,

without a doubt, I’d take this common pearl,

 

this straggled beauty: immortelle des sables,

its dry, gold buds

vivid against the sand

as nothing is, dug in and everlasting.

<<

[*] III. NOCTURNE

The last dusk clings to the walls

of the Hotel de Ville;

 

at Fleurs du Large,

the Christmas wreaths are out,

 

fairy lights silver the leaves

of ivy and fir,

 

the little window

is a memory

 

of childhood

in the happy-ever-after;

 

but now they’re closing up:

time for the bars

 

or the absolute quiet of home

when you first turn the key

 

and everything

that loves an empty room –

 

dust mote, angel,

hourglass, shadow-play –

 

settles, or disappears

when you throw the switch

 

and something,

not quite light, but like

 

a narrative of light,

a simulacrum, golden, intricate,

 

resumes, the way a story i

s resumed:

 

table, mirror,

rose bowl, photograph.

 

On the rue de Saillé

a sapling gingko stands

 

in its own

luminescence;

 

headlamps

turn through the dark

 

and find the sea,

white on the water,

 

moonshine, cobalt blue,

the glowing satsuma

 

or cherry

of warning lights,

 

the last mauve of the evening

burning out

 

along the horizon: nightfall;

endlessness.

<<

[*] IV. ANNONCES

To live here is to wait for messengers,

though why the angel takes such differing forms

is always a surprise: cowlicks of snow

on the threshold, the print of a leaf,

tomorrow’s shipwreck gusting through the town

as life continues: shopping, memory,

crossing the road in the colourless wake of the dead;

 

and why does it never happen as it does

in picture books, the categorical,

the diffident stranger poised at the end of the bed,

the wash of the sea at the window, tomcats and birds

about their business on the jewelled lawn?

 

They quickly forget our names, stillborn and drowned

and second cousins rolled in on the tide,

and everything that lives must fill that space:

the photographs, the stones, the books of salt,

the branches of yarrow, preserved in the leaves of a bible.

<<

[*] V. LA BRIÈRE

It turns out, what we thought of as the soul

is mostly sound;

not song, but like a memory of birds

or running water,

the churn of a paddle, the flicker and dip

of an oar,

narrow boats butting the land

on their quiet tethers,

 

so death will be a slower, surer fade

than any we imagine;

no mere extinction, like the evening’s hush

before the ducks come, dipping to the marsh

in threes and fours, to find the darker ground,

no moment’s pause, but absolute decay

where absence is a form

of generation.

 

Out in the dark, tonight,

our voices drift and sway

like hunting bees,

nothing to those who are going, but the place

they started from:

a given name, a word, a subtle variance

from what endures, the bright unspeakable,

not sky, not earth or flesh,

but finer still,

a call across the lake you half-believe is nothing, though it happens all the time,

end and beginning,

footfall, leaf-fall, silence.

<<

[*] BY PITTENWEEM

 

One knows

There is no end to the other world,

no matter where it is.

CHARLES WRIGHT

 

I. HOME

We studied to love the cold,

to make a friend of it, to call it home,

 

since nothing else

was altogether true,

 

steeple, or pithead,

bellflower, grandmother’s ring;

 

yet still we were expert

in thaw,

 

mapping the wetlands,

waiting for crowsfoot to blossom,

 

fighting the pull of rivers

on April nights,

 

till all the dreams we had

were dreams of water.

 

Now, on the fields

and the thrawn trees lining the ditch,

the new sun gathers and runs

like clarified butter,

 

and, perched on a fence post,

a buzzard extends its wings,

 

then settles back;

I’m not a threat to him:

a man without a gun, without a dog,

 

walking his boundary, measuring,

making good,

 

I’m not really bound to this place, but

here by choice:

 

pledged to the first thaw; visible;

out in the open;

 

accustomed to secrets

and keeping the best of myself

 

for private use:

a cold blade clenched in my fist

 

or a length of twine,

my body mapped and measured by the heft

 

of work that must be done

no matter what.

 

Springtime again:

the news all news of flood

and death by drowning,

a levee crumbling away,

a boat going under,

 

women and children

with faultlines of dread in their faces,

 

bloated bodies

sprawled on limbs of sand;

 

and yet, from a distance,

it’s hard not to notice the beauty,

 

the stillness that falls,

the everyday chaos of flotsam,

 

and, out on a bridge of sandbags,

wed to the rain,

 

the rescue teams, still working in the dark,

each with his secret, and keeping the best of himself

 

for hope

the way the coldest things

give hope:

 

floodwater, blizzard,

the numb girl pulled from the wreck

 

still breathing,

in the only home we have:

 

bone-cold, starlit,

plotted with kill-sites and whispers,

buzzards and starlings

drawn in, then turning away,

 

spawn in a dew-pond,

stitching the grass with desire.

<<

[*] II. YIRD

There was something I heard in the wind,

geese, or the call of a vixen,

or something else, beyond vocabulary;

 

and sometimes, at night, I feel myself

alone in the dark and looking to see what there is

between the near field and the kitchen door:

 

the old familiars shifting in the grass

beyond the garden; mute ghosts come from the sea;

the gods that only stones and bulbs recall

 

rising like smoke and waiting to be found

in the cry of a bird, or the promise of midnight frost;

though nothing will come in a form I could recognise,

 

no story book figure, no cold face pressed to the glass,

no girl in the attic, weeping, or clutching a doll,

no eerie singing, out along the hedge

 

some August afternoon.

Tonight, when I stop to imagine, nothing is there,

or only a mist of rain on the left-over pea-sticks,

 

a glint of light, or something like a cry

that might be nothing;

only the other world

unending, yet lost throughout time

 

in a circle of light,

a murmur that comes through the wind,

a hand’s-breadth, a wingspan,

 

arriving from nowhere, or conjured up out of the dark

between the near field and the kitchen door,

to sound me out, to comfort me with nothing.

<<

[*] III. DIRT ROAD

Something that runs to copper

or cornflower blue,

 

a live creature bounding away

from the glare of my headlamps

 

and, when the engine stops, a sudden

quiet that waits to be filled

 

by owls, or cicadas;

though somebody else would say

 

it’s only in the afterlife we get

to talk about such things:

 

the scent of diesel

misting on our fingers,

 

a motion in the sky

that never stops,

 

and how the brimming undergrowth is laced

with boundaries, the softness underfoot

 

a terminus

that shifts

and wanders,

 

though the end is all it seems:

another colour, not quite red, or mauve,

a trace of cold

more urgent than a kiss,

 

arriving, like some homespun messenger,

to isolate this waking from the dark.

<<

[*] IV. HISTORY

Pilots and whalers, authorised privateers,

fugitives, botanists, ships’ surgeons, makers of maps,

sailing from here, or further along the coast,

to parts unknown;

or, half a mile inland,

the old-time celebrants

of seed and weather: tradesmen in their gloves

and aprons; blacksmiths, burnished by the heat

of dark, unending fires; the wandering

haberdasher, cycling round the farms

with cotton twills and satins for a dance;

 

for all of them, the predicate was home,

if not the world of others, then the world

of all they left unsaid; that inwardness:

the house behind the houses in their dreams,

the house of cold, the rooms of fern and bone,

the refuge in a squall, the proof in storms.

 

All afternoon I waited for the snow,

the horses in the near field staring off

to somewhere memorised: some open plain,

ice in the grass, the grass mapped out in song.

The old potato track, the Lochty line,

is frost and brambles now,

the rattle of old trains sealed in the wood

of fence posts, or that singing in the wires

that mark each neighbour’s plot

of whins and stones.

 

I picture them, shipped in from tenements

and mining towns: mothers and eldest sons,

the casually employed, in hats and scarves,

wet hands numb with the cold

as they follow the tractors,

the life without end of lives that history

finds interchangeable:

 

my mother, say,

in her damp coat and hand-knitted sweater,

leading the way; me, stumbling over the clods

and wishing I was home beside the stove,

clothes hanging up to dry in our steaming kitchen,

the radio playing, those voices from somewhere else

announcing the songs we would hum,

as we counted the hours,

crossing the field, unseeing

and bright with the cold,

everything bleeding away,

to pulp and rain.

 

All afternoon, I waited for the ghosts

I wanted to find, shapes

shifting in the white

of blizzard,

ghosts

not altogether dead, just cold and gone;

but when it came, the snow fell urgently

and for the sake of urgency alone,

empty and clear and quick, erasing the road, erasing the deer-runs and verges, remaking the land

as something unknown and familiar, some holy ground:

the house behind the houses in my dreams,

standing apart, a little cube of lights

and singsong: music; voices from afar;

wind in the phone lines;

the hum of an idling machine.

<<

[*] V. BEGINNING

The worst is to reach the end

and never know:

my mother,

 

dying, say,

pretending the future

 

existed, when all she had

was an infinite present,

 

a foreknowledge circling her eyes,

like cold, or soot,

 

a burial

rehearsed between her fingers;

 

or this old buzzard on the disused

railway line, unravelling his kill,

 

the winter that might be his last

unfolding around him:

 

sheep-tracks

and muddled snow,

 

and the deep sky over his head

unfastened

 

by the first true white

of stars.

No doubt the earth

forgets us, as we pass

 

from here to there:

the living and the dead

 

consanguine, vagrant,

blurring along the walls

 

like snowdrifts, or some

flicker in the wind,

 

but this

is neither end

 

nor resurrection,

only the subtler work

 

of being:

birth

in mutabilitie,

 

the black

between the pinion and the snow;

 

the scattered flesh,

the sweet slur in the dew,

 

arriving

at a natural conclusion:

 

logos and water, navelwort,

singing bones,

scavenger warmth

emerging from the cold.

<<

[*] LE CROISIC

 

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.

It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant

oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

G.K. CHESTERTON

 

I. SACRED

December; the wind from the point;

nobody here but an old man walking his dog

and a jogger, tuned to the venom

of Eminem.

 

A flat-boat sits in the harbour, like a lost

sarcophagus: burnished,

abandoned;

a solitary tourist – Japanese, out-of-season –

 

walks with her trolley-bag to the empty station

to wait for the TGV

while she drinks a soda.

This is the terminus; this is the end of the line:

 

empty and sacred, a scatter of bells and lights

at the ocean’s rim,

and everything else implied: the salt-marsh, the water,

Egyptian ibis, breeding in the dams

 

and wetlands, hieratic, and far too precise

in their shapes and colours:

an alien species, eternally, wordlessly pledged

to the alien dead.

 

Nothing is certain here; it’s all implication;

in winter, the houses are shuttered

and empty, the antique furniture

still as the wardrobes and chairs

 

a man sees, when he rises from a dream

of childhood, and his house is strange again,

a borrowed space to shelter from the night,

brimming with insects and shadows, scented with loam,

 

a simmer of dust in the pipe-work, the guttering candles

and slut’s hair of a foreign memory,

smudges of chalk on a mirror, the rust-red or sallow

weathermarks that once were flocks of birds

 

or ghostly angels, rising through the plaster.

Here, in the off-time, the angels flare from a space

that nobody owns: the moonlight glazing a floor;

the chiming of a clock, still running down

 

between a locked door

and a flight of stairs

– it’s all

 

annunciation,

one way or another,

 

here, where the fog comes in

from the white Atlantic,

sea-fog, salt-fog,

white on the white of the walls,

voices and wings seeping in

through a broken shutter:

 

annunciation,

waiting to be seen

 

and heard

– though only in due course:

the householder back from the city in early summer,

unshrouding the tables and desk-lamps, lighting a fire

and finding spots of dust, fogged smears of wax,

 

smudges of oil on the paintwork,

a hum in his fingers

and something like music

suspended above the rafters.

 

Nobody sees the angel face

to face, it’s mostly induction, a reading of clues and signs

as, after the fact, he remembers the sea as it was

on a specified morning, two or three seasons ago:

 

how something was there, all along,

in the afternoon light,

the path leading down to the inlet spotted with vetch

and orchids, the flex of the sacred

 

as faint as a faraway voice

on the shimmering water,

though all that matters now, in this quiet arrival,

is learning to live as a guest in the house he inherits;

<<

[*] II. IDIR EATHARA

and still the dead are with us,

every day,

 

coming inland from the point: the meagre dead,

touched with the salt of distance,

marked with the blue

 

of oyster beds

their faces glimpsed and lost

along the treeline, on another shore;

 

and surely those others are here,

the still unborn,

the scent of a world to come

on their eyelids and fingers,

 

the names they will acquire and wear away

swelling to fit the wind, or burnt by the sun;

 

though nothing shows: the still of afternoon

continues, while a man in overalls

 

works on his boat;

a girl walks to the beach,

pushing a wheelchair: her mother, say,

or a friend

 

of the family, timeworn and empty handed

and leaning

just a little

into something

 

faraway: a frequency,

a sky

that no one else can see,

another time

 

unfolding in the light that finds her out

and passes through the needle of her eye:

a form

 

as colourless as birth

or memory.

Maybe she knows she is going

 

to meet them again, and maybe she knows their names:

children who drowned in the ocean at Port aux Rocs,

 

the great-aunt who fell through a dream

of apples and new-washed linen

 

at Le Paradis.

The man at the edge of the water sets aside

 

his tools, pulls off

his goggles, and looks to see

 

how much there is still to do: paint-stains and oil

on his fingers, his sea-coloured eyes

 

deepened with the years

of ocean light;

 

he belongs to another time, to the guesswork and craft of some old clan of seafarers, ready to leave

 

at a moment’s notice, given up for lost

so often, they were traded to the sky

 

in every song or prayer they left behind

for others to sing or whisper in the dark,

 

while they sailed on, with the dead

and the unconceived,

 

betrothed to the space they had glimpsed,

but could never explain

 

a mile from all they knew: the chapel; the harbour;

the laughter of women; the music of midsummer’s eve.

<<

[*] III. GWENN HA DU

I remember the song they would sing

all the way home from the Woodside, my uncles and cousins,

tarred with the mines and the shipyards, cradled in smoke

and bawling it out, on rain-deadened streets and wynds,

to hear the echo turning in the stones

like déjà vu

– and still I live in hope to see

the holy ground once more –

 

What they were looking for, then,

was another beginning,

the black that occasions white, the white in black,

an older soul, exhumed from flesh and bone

to carry on the ancient narrative

of manhood as a song, the savage joy

of bagpipe music, pagan memories,

a host of kinfolk rising from the sea,

a house looming out of the fog and becoming home.

 

I think, now, of their disembodied love

and that animal sense I share, in the nerve and the bone

of something urgent, straining from the veins

of holy ground: the hard quotidian;

pit-shafts and docks, harbours and open meadows,

the gap in the hedge, the whisper of running water,

an acre of fog and brambles where something I lost

returned in another form, and was barely remembered.

No permanence is here; no planned Imperium;

this is the holy ground, where nothing happens,

a place we can take for home, when we understand

that it cannot be held, it cannot be taken or given:

egret and cormorant, ibis, the shore birds and waders;

the Japanese tourist; the girl from the waterfront bar;

the clan ghosts and latter-day saints, and the self-appointed

keepers of song and war; the unblinking dead:

everything passes through – but the passing through

is what we think of, now, as sanctuary;

 

and, sometimes,

nothing will happen:

the world that was ebbing away turns back on itself,

a gust of wind, the sidestreet bagadou,

children’s voices

gathered in a cypress;

what matters now is not the narrative,

what matters is not the event, but the light-frayed hem

of the moment’s annunciation;

what matters is the point where nothing matters:

the gap in the hedge, an acre of fog and brambles

and how the sacred – hard quotidian –

returns to us in songs and superstitions,

an ember that burns in the nerves and the reasoning brain,

a guttering flame, that nothing will ever extinguish –

<<

[*] IV. SALT

You see it best from the air:

how salt perpetuates itself, turned from the sea

to whiten the marais salants, graded and sieved

and laid in ice-white drifts beneath the sun;

 

the way you see bonfires or house lights

glimmering in the dark, between the lakes

and cities; marshland dotted here and there

with lanterns; eel boats moving in the dams;

 

nightfishers coming home with another catch,

the gleam of the deck

and the absolute cold of the nets

deduced, not given.

 

You see it travelling through: a passenger,

guided from point to point by an unknown hand,

an idling web of memory and salt

turning to glance at the earth, as it slides away

 

and the slow clouds thicken and gather

beneath the plane.

Below, it’s different: the air is wired

with birds and weather; old spills

 

fester in the ditches; sacred

ibis haunt the marshlands in their

thousands, calling softly back and forth

to wake the shadows of forgotten kings.

Below, on the Place Dinan,

the market is a broken theatre,

tourists go round in circles, looking for gifts

and souvenirs, for little bags of salt

 

and books of recipes, galettes and honeyed crêpes

they’ll never cook, CDs

of bagadou, knitwear and books,

blanched postcards of the salt marsh from the air:

 

those perfect shapes, those neat, well-managed dams,

those circles of water, dark-blue, like a Celtic

knot, a pattern, conjured from the air

in lines of salt that might be infinite;

<<

[*] V. PENINSULA

or a view of La Côte Sauvage: le rocher de l’ours,

the road to Paradise, the Ocearium,

Baie de Cailloux, Plage de Port-Lin,

La Pierre Longue.

Nothing is as it was, even the past

is changing, renewed by a sense

of the past, the presqu’île reclaimed

for tradition: bagad

and salt marsh, standing stone

and tomb.

 

The cliff-top houses wait like refugees

from Hopper paintings: boxes filled with light

and silence

and the people I imagine

 

walking from room to room, or gazing out

across their wind-stripped gardens, semi-nude

or sitting upright on a sunlit bed,

are people from another place and time,

women in rose-pink dresses, or yellow slips,

old men with faces like birds,

huddled into their bourbon.

 

This is tradition now: bookplates and posters;

the recognisable; the universal;

scenes from a film I saw in the first year of college

and barely remember: Vertigo, or something by Tati, a cinematographer’s light

on the cypress trees and whitewashed

houses; sand

from brochures; sand

and water, where the lovers disappear

in moonlight

or the dead girl washes up

 

intact, her beauty

incorruptible.

 

Nobody meets the messengers face to face;

but sometimes I enter the room

they have just abandoned,

or, crossing the sand, in the quiet of afternoon,

I hear the voice that whispered in my head

a lifetime ago, before the angels turned

to choirboys with wings

 

and I know what it is we are losing, moment by moment,

in how the names perpetuate the myth

 

of all they have replaced: windmill and dolmen,

meadow and fishermen’s wharf:

a country relearned and forgotten, like the dead

who walk among us, waiting for the day

to light them, on their journey from the known

to the newly strange: to chapel and harbour and hearth,

that slow return from memory to birth

and everything in between: the sea, the sky,

the laughter of women; the music of midsummer mornings.

<<

[*] NY-HELLESUND

 

There’s not a shadow of a doubt about it, the First Cause is just unknowable to

us, and we’d be sorry if it wasn’t.

D. H. LAWRENCE

 

I. NÅR VI DØDE VÅGNER

A man hears a boat in the sound

and looks up:

his wife is coming home from Kristiansand,

his wife, or a neighbour, or someone he wasn’t expecting,

a friend from the city, a niece from the neighbouring island,

a girl he has never seen, in a borrowed boat,

crossing his line of sight, then disappearing;

 

a man hears an engine crossing the narrow sound

and the beautiful loneliness ends, as the woods shift behind him;

there was something he wanted to fix, there was something he loved,

but no matter how long he sits, or how early he wakes,

the gap between darkness and light has already vanished,

sliding away through the woods,

from island to island,

 

so all that remains in his room at the top of the house

is the scent on his skin, a scent he mistakes for the spirit,

the smoke from last night’s fire, the earth, the grass,

and what the body offers of itself

to any journey, any secret thing

that passes in the dark and flits away:

not self, but history; not self, but place.

A man hears a boat in the sound

and it feels like a gift:

maybe he has lived here all his life

and this is why he knows the commune well,

knows its waters, knows its old stone fences,

knows how, on midsummer nights, when the bonfires are burning,

some pledge in the world recurs, some seamless gift,

 

so everything comes again, in another form,

not in the shapes we leave

to the tideless water,

not in the phantoms haunting the summer quays

like long-dead forebears, fixed in glass and silver,

holding the pose of a self, through an already

shifting regard, as something away to the left

 

catches the eye – a shadow, an animal presence –

and whatever they thought they could not do without

is quietly abandoned, while the film

still runs;

or like a drunkard, on the long walk home,

who finds himself stooping

into a hedge of bees

to catch an injured bird and toss it skyward:

 

everything comes again, in another form,

much as a mind that is lost

survives through the panic

and comes out, neither fearless nor intact,

but turning back to see a slant of light

and find instruction there: an injured bird, a fire burning out on the rocks, that blind

<<

[*] II. CONTINUUM

– Mor, gi’ mig solen –

A freshening rain;

then the sun and the birds

return;

 

sung and illumined, the island falls into place,

like the raising of the curtain

in a theatre: light

and voices

 

and the sense that sometimes comes

of having been gone from the world

while the story continued.

 

It comes of love and hurt;

it comes of fear:

that sudden, immaculate stutter in the heart

 

as you turn from the path

and everything fades into brightness

– harbour and storm-cloud; memory; companions –

 

till only the self remains,

an appointed space

where anything might founder;

 

and sometimes it comes from joy – not

pleasure, or the notion of a life

re-entered, but the panic sinking in as something happens, like a shifting gear,

or like that moment in a Fifties film

when everyone turns to look, and the stranger is there,

 

striking a match,

or brushing the snow

from his collar;

 

and, really, it’s not what you meant

by being alone;

no matter how it comes, there’s always the chill

 

as something bleeds out in the mind

and you stand abandoned:

wind in the leaves, the new rain spotting your face,

 

the light on the quay

like a presence that never arrives

and never quite decays

 

to greenery.

Imagine a god who appears

from nothing, jagged

 

scrapings in the heart, a ragged nail

tracking the glint of the eye,

or the thrill of the marrow,

 

and ask yourself

how prayer is possible,

if not to something alien and tidal:

 

the skitter of a leaf across a window,

a maddened skin

unfolding in the dark;

 

and whether these prayers arise

from fear, or some extended form

of longing, like the sound the seabirds make

 

at nightfall,

calling out

along the shore;

 

whether we pray

to a god, or the weight of an absence,

what matters is the way the story runs

 

forever,

through the fields of transformation:

terror, a measureless step

 

on the way to concealment;

concealment, a hidden door

to the currents beyond.

<<

[*] III. VARGTIMMEN

In those stories where one life

shuffles towards another:

child into raven, women to wandering swans,

even the boy in the crawl-space becoming the bear

that finds him by chance

in adventures we scarcely believe,

as no one believes,

to begin with,

in transformation,

the moment we see

as decisive, the point of the telling,

is when the changeling peers back at himself

through mist, or rain,

or the haze of a sunlit highway,

and understands that what he leaves behind

is neither the life he possessed, nor his

to abandon,

only a story he learned

as the present unfolded,

setting his hand to the tiller and looking behind him,

or fleshing out the rumours of a death

he’d always known about: the sudden fall;

the gas leak in the night; the epidemic;

some loophole in the memory of water;

the boy who crawled into the jaws

of a sheltering bear

and died, while a foot overhead

his mother was stitching a hem

or setting out dinner.

Or say it went like this: he grew up tall

and married; bought a trawler;

raised his children;

say he grew old

and still never turned to the mirror

at nightfall, when the gloaming on the quay

had settled down

to just that shade of blue

where everything that’s lost is rendered

visible,

the god of silt and shipwrecks smeared across

the clouded glass, as if a hand had reached

to wipe his face away

and make him

otherwise:

what if he lived his life as he’d always expected,

no more, no less,

no spectre at the gate, no hidden beauty,

no suspect bowls, set out and then forgotten,

filled with the subtler blue

of an alien nightfall?

surely the changes wait, and will settle in

at the moment he least expects them:

a grand-daughter’s wedding; a stop on the way home from market;

surely the shape he fears will arrive to claim him,

beyond all the stories he knows, and the world he possesses,

unbinding his logic, proposing some ancient <<

[*] IV. UN TERRORE DI UBRIACO

after Montale

joy –

which is neither happiness, nor triumph,

and cannot come from anything

but passing through the white of dissolution;

 

perhaps, on a day like this, the morning air

like cut-glass, I will turn around to see

the miracle:

 

the nothing at my shoulder, utter void

caught in the sudden twist

of a drunkard’s terror;

 

perhaps, like the beginning of a film,

the world will come again: houses and trees

 

and nuzzling hills, returning one by one

for the grand illusion;

 

though by then it will be too late

as I hurry on,

among those who have never looked back

with my given secret;

 

or shot rhubarb clogging the ditch,

harbouring blackness, shaping the pull of the water;

goldfinches tracking the verge as a car runs on

and, almost asleep at the wheel, the driver slides into beauty:

seed drift and dipping flight, and the shift of the charm

as it gathers and turns, then, all of a sudden,

is gone, while he wakes to the cats’ eyes’

calibrated

judder;

wakes,

 

though not to what he knows:

the daylight altered, nothing at the windscreen,

lit trees lining the road

at the edge of the storm.

 

Sometimes the only tool we have

is panic,

not what was wanted, perhaps, but something to work with,

a shape at the edge of vision, a spill in the gut,

a colour we cannot name, though it seems familiar

 

I'll sing you five, O

Green grow the rushes, O

What are your five, O?

Five for the symbols at your door,

Four for the Gospel makers,

Three, three, the rivals,

Two, two, the lily-white boys,

Dressed up all in green, O

One is one and all alone

And evermore shall be so

 

and there it is once more, the freshening rain,

better than all he has lost, and beyond his keeping:

<<

[*] V. GUISING

In the dreams I remember

of childhood,

 

we cross to the far side of town

to begin among strangers,

 

shy of asking favours from the folk

we know, and thinking these others

 

rich, for their pot-pourri

and antimacassars,

 

though what I like best is going, as someone else,

in the flow of the wind,

 

to stand, in my pirate shirt, at a foreign door

and catch the scent of someone else’s house,

 

coffee and gelatine, rose petals, sickness, books,

the trace of powder on a printed shawl

 

left draped across a chair, that lampshade smell

of winter evenings, everything they took

 

for granted: glacé

cherries, candlewax,

 

the slow fade of themselves

grown old, or too long paired

 

with childhood sweethearts: disappointments shared so quietly, they came, each Halloween,

 

to seem a little more

like blessings, when they lingered at the door

 

to bear us witness:

damp eyes peering out

 

to find us in the dark, like long-lost friends

– a pirate child, a chimney sweep, a king –

 

come from the first chill of winter

and dusted with nothing.

<<

[*] VI. GOING BACK

The corn is full of skylarks;

the last of the daylight

simmers above the wood

 

where chiffchaff and warblers

parley from shade to shade,

becoming the air

in a song that exists for nothing.

 

Everything maps its world

and what world there is

is the current sum

of all our navigation:

networks of panic and longing,

road maps in gorse,

the river at twilight

vanishing into the sway

of cattle and bees;

 

and nothing is ever as true as the darkness of home:

the porch-lights we know by name, the pea-fields and crossroads;

deer-run and spawn-pool, birdwalk and dead man’s curve,

the wide night running away

to campsites and dairies,

or junior hockey teams, in red and blue,

rehearsing the perfect game

in a circle of rainfall.

This is a map of forever, all pitfalls and tremors, a glister of stars in the distance, a body of fire,

eels on a towpath, charting the grass between rivers,

the thinning beauty of the long way home

and, somewhere in the dream beyond this dream,

the house behind the houses I remember,

frog-house, star-house, house of silk and tuber,

 

the tribes of visitants who come and go,

touched with the green of the woods, or the green of water:

shapes I have seen in glimpses, through panic and joy:

palms and glances sliding through the headlamps,

stickle-bones, whiter than chalk, in the faultlines of weather

 

and somewhere in the dream behind this dream

an acre or so of pine and sycamore;

where people go out in the gloaming,

for no good reason,

trading secrets, trading hurt and longing,

or, solitary, raking out a stash

of dirty pictures: dreams of flesh and steel

and headstrong women, waiting to be mastered

 

but home is where everything happens: panic and joy,

the meeting with the god, that stink of goat;

hairless angels stepping from the rain;

here, in a strip of woodland, driving north,

through everything I’ve seen and heard before

 

though nothing I see is ever seen enough,

nothing is heard for certain, even the rain

as it falls through the glamour

of streetlamps and dormer windows a mile from my destination: everything seen

and heard, everything known

resembles the self, or rather, that sense of a self

that might have been, at one remove from here,

perfect, like the rumoured fall of snow

that no one ever witnessed, though they say

it happened, just a block or two away,

and sensible people, people much like ourselves,

abandoned what they were doing and ran outside

in their shirt sleeves, drawn by instinct to the place

where bodies formed, great waves of sound and light

becoming fingers, eyelids, shoulders, hair.

<<