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第1章 The Underground

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.

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