Collected Poems, page 27
were English elms.
Others stood at the edge of farms,
twinned with the shapes of clouds
like green rhymes;
or cupped the beads of rain
in their leaf palms;
or glowered, grim giants, warning of storms.
In the hedgerows in old films,
elegiacally, they loom,
the English elms;
or find posthumous fame
in the lines of poems –
the music making elm –
for ours is a world without them . . .
to whom the artists came,
time upon time,
scumbling, paint on their fingers and thumbs;
and the woodcutters, who knew the elm
was a coffin’s deadly aim;
and the mavis, her filled nest unharmed
in the crook of a living, wooden arm;
and boys, with ball, bat, stumps
for a game;
and nursing ewes and lambs, calm
under English elms . . .
great, masterpiece trees
who were overwhelmed.
The Counties
But I want to write to an Essex girl,
greeting her warmly.
But I want to write to a Shropshire lad,
brave boy, home from the Army,
and I want to write to the Lincolnshire Poacher
to hear of his hare
and to an aunt in Bedfordshire
who makes a wooden hill of her stair.
But I want to post a rose to a Lancashire lass,
red, I’ll pick it,
and I want to write to a Middlesex mate
for tickets for cricket.
But I want to write to the Ayrshire cheesemaker
and his good cow
and it is my duty to write to The Queen at Berkshire
in praise of Slough.
But I want to write to the National Poet of Wales at Ceredigion
in celebration
and I want to write to the Dorset Giant
in admiration
and I want to write to a widow in Rutland
in commiseration
and to the Inland Revenue in Yorkshire
in desperation.
But I want to write to my uncle in Clackmannanshire
in his kilt
and to my scrumptious cousin in Somerset
with her cidery lilt.
But I want to write to two ladies in Denbighshire,
near Llangollen
and I want to write to a laddie in Lanarkshire,
Dear Lachlan . . .
But I want to write to the Cheshire Cat,
returning its smile.
But I want to write the names of the Counties down
for my own child
and may they never be lost to her . . .
all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire . . .
The White Horses
The earth’s heart hears hooves
under hillsides,
thunder in Wiltshire;
and the glistening rain, in wet hours,
all ears for the white horses, listens;
the wind, hoarse, gargles
breath and whinny and shriek.
The moon’s chalk face pines for her foals.
But the sky swears
the white horses
are dropped clouds;
the sea vows they came from a wave,
foamy, salt-maned, galloping inland;
death claims it will set them
to pulling a hearse,
and love
goes riding, all night, bareback,
hunting itself.
They dreamed them, the local dead,
ghosts of war-horses,
warriors’, heroes’,
asleep in the landscape;
woke to the white horses shining
high over woods and farms;
young ancestors working the fields,
naming them his, hers, ours.
They sensed them, pulling the county
deep into England,
harnessed, history’s;
their scent sweet on the air –
wheat, hops, hay, chalk, clay.
Then stars nailed shoes to their hooves.
The conservationists climb the hills
away from their cars,
new leucippotomists
with implements to scour and groom,
scrub and comb.
On a clear day,
from twenty miles,
a driver sees a white horse
printing its fresh, old form on turf
like a poem.
Luke Howard, Namer of Clouds
Eldezar and Asama Yama, 1783,
erupted violently; a Great Fogg
blending incredible skies over Europe.
In London, Luke Howard was ten.
The sky’s lad then.
Smitten,
he stared up evermore; saw
a meteor’s fiery spurt,
the clamouring stars;
what the moon wouldn’t do;
but loved clouds most –
dragons and unicorns;
Hamlet’s camels, weasels and whales;
the heads of heroes;
the sword of Excalibur, lit
by the setting sun.
Mackerel sky,
mackerel sky, not long wet,
not long dry.
And knew
love goes naming,
even a curl of hair – thus, Cirrus.
Cumulus. Stratus. Nimbus.
The Woman in the Moon
Darlings, I write to you from the moon
where I hide behind famous light.
How could you think it ever a man up here?
A cow jumped over. The dish ran away with
the spoon. What reached me were your joys, griefs,
here’s-the-craic, losses, longings, your lives
brief, mine long, a talented loneliness. I must have
a thousand names for the earth, my blue vocation.
Round I go, the moon a diet of light, sliver of pear,
wedge of lemon, slice of melon, half an orange,
silver onion; your human sound falling through space,
childbirth’s song, the lover’s song, the song of death.
Devoted as words to things, I gaze, gawp, glare; deserts
where forests were, sick seas. When night comes,
I see you gaping back as though you hear my Darlings,
what have you done, what have you done to the world?
Parliament
Then in the writers’ wood,
every bird with a name in the world
crowded the leafless trees,
took its turn to whistle or croak.
An owl grieved in an oak.
A magpie mocked. A rook
cursed from a sycamore.
The cormorant spoke:
Stinking seas
below ill winds. Nothing swims.
A vast plastic soup, thousand miles
wide as long, of petroleum crap.
A bird of paradise wept in a willow.
The jewel of a hummingbird shrilled
on the air.
A stork shawled itself like a widow.
The gull said:
Where coral was red, now white, dead
under stunned waters.
The language of fish
cut out at the root.
Mute oceans. Oil like a gag
on the Gulf of Mexico.
A woodpecker heckled.
A vulture picked at its own breast.
Thrice from the cockerel, as ever.
The macaw squawked:
Nouns I know –
Rain. Forest. Fire. Ash.
Chainsaw. Cattle. Cocaine. Cash.
Squatters. Ranchers. Loggers. Looters.
Barons. Shooters.
A hawk swore.
A nightingale opened its throat
in a garbled quote.
A worm turned in the blackbird’s beak.
This from the crane:
What I saw – slow thaw
in permafrost; broken terrain
of mud and lakes;
peat broth; seepage; melt;
methane breath.
A bat hung like a suicide.
Only a rasp of wings from the raven.
A heron was stone; a robin blood
in the written wood.
So snow and darkness slowly fell;
the eagle, history, in silhouette,
with the golden plover,
and the albatross
telling of Arctic ice
as the cold, hard moon calved from the earth.
Telling the Bees
When I went to read
the bulletin about broken holy beads
to the bees,
the beads were the bees themselves . . .
(though once I’d been
a bairn with a bamboo-cane,
keen to follow the beekeeper
down to the hives, tap and tell
all news – whose bride, who lied, who’d died –
and had seen the bees as a rosary, girdling,
garden by garden, the land;
or had heard their hard devotional sound
in the ears of flowers
as I barely breathed, beheld
their bold, intimate touch . . . )
for a scattered bracelet of bees
lay on the grass by their burgled hive.
So how could I tell the bees?
Black blood in the sea.
Corn buttercup brought to its knee.
No honey for tea.
Dorothy Wordsworth is Dead
who came to lose every tooth in her head;
fierce maid, who saw the crowfoot
as a spinster friend; found, in the russet fronds
of Osmunda ferns, fervour;
feared cows;
on all fours crawled
home through a thunderstorm;
walked five miles each way, each day,
in hope of letters; thin scrap, work-worn,
her black frock mud-hemmed;
Dorothy,
green gold of moss in her loose purse, gatherer,
who thought strawberry blossom brave
in its early grave of rock; had quick birds
for her own eyes from watching them:
the robin’s blushing bounce,
the magpie’s funeral chic,
the heron’s grief,
grief . . .
whose tongue travelled her empty gums
on her long lake treks;
but was loved yet,
sharp lass, noticer; all ears, years,
for the wind’s thumb on the latch;
first to spy – o sister –
the moon’s eye at the glass,
two stars squinting . . .
and cold in her bed
uttered flowers, hepatica, daffodil, anemone,
crocus,
as a corpse in its manner does
in St. Oswald’s churchyard under the yews
her brother planted;
and trudged or lay by him till he kindled.
Cockermouth and Workington
No folk fled the flood,
no flags furled or spirits failed –
one brave soul felled.
Fouled fortune followed,
but families filed into the fold
for a fire flared.
They were floored,
a few said fooled; no – fuelled
by fellow-feeling, hearts full.
New bridge now, small fords;
farmhands in foaled fields.
Spell
Yes, I think a poem is a spell of kinds
that keeps things living in a written line,
whatever’s lost or leaving – lock of rhyme –
and so I write and write and write your name.
Simon Powell
What was your appeal, Simon Powell?
Your silver smile;
how you held your face aloft,
a trophy, when you laughed.
You had style,
swooping towards Swansea
on your Moto Morini,
brave, bravo!, pale rider.
Whom did you beguile, Simon Powell,
on that ferry in Liverpool?
A poetry girl. Well, well,
you were always poetry’s proud pal;
she was bound to chime with you
eventually,
vowel to pure vowel –
poetry and Simon Powell.
Our days continue to delight us, or appal,
like yours: the birth of sons,
the death of Siân;
then to your Indian wedding on a horse,
your thousand nights; blessed, you told us,
Simon Powell, in your wives,
the seeded futures of your three boys’ lives;
as we by thee, dear Simon; Simon Powell.
Cold
It felt so cold, the snowball which wept in my hands,
and when I rolled it along in the snow, it grew
till I could sit on it, looking back at the house,
where it was cold when I woke in my room, the windows
blind with ice, my breath undressing itself on the air.
Cold, too, embracing the torso of snow which I lifted up
in my arms to build a snowman, my toes, burning, cold
in my winter boots; my mother’s voice calling me in
from the cold. And her hands were cold from peeling
and pooling potatoes into a bowl, stooping to cup
her daughter’s face, a kiss for both cold cheeks, my cold nose.
But nothing so cold as the February night I opened the door
in the Chapel of Rest where my mother lay, neither young, nor old,
where my lips, returning her kiss to her brow, knew the meaning of cold.
The Bee Carol
Silently on Christmas Eve,
the turn of midnight’s key;
all the garden locked in ice –
a silver frieze –
except the winter cluster of the bees.
Flightless now and shivering,
around their Queen they cling;
every bee a gift of heat;
she will not freeze
within the winter cluster of the bees.
Bring me for my Christmas gift
a single golden jar;
let me taste the sweetness there,
but honey leave
to feed the winter cluster of the bees.
Come with me on Christmas Eve
to see the silent hive –
trembling stars cloistered above –
and then believe,
bless the winter cluster of the bees.
Decembers
The single bed
was first a wooden boat;
stars translated for me
as I drifted away –
our cargoed winter house
dark and at anchor –
and then a Russian Doll
where I stilled in my selves;
six secrets or presents
under a thrilled tree.
I saw a coffin, shouldered
through snow, shrouded
in its cold, laced sheet.
Now, delirious bells
shaking this small spare room
on Christmas morning.
Winter’s Tale
Tell she is well in these arms;
synonymous, her heartbeat to mine;
the world a little room; undone
all hurt; her inbreath, breath,
love where death, where harm, hope,
flesh where stone; my line – O
she’s warm! – charm, blessing, prayer,
spell; outwith dream, without time;
enchantment tell, garden from grave
to garland her; above these worms,
violet, oxlip, primrose, columbine;
she wakes, moves, prompted by her name.
Snow
Then all the dead opened their cold palms
and released the snow; slow, slant, silent,
a huge unsaying, it fell, torn language, settled;
the world to be locked, local; unseen,
fervent earthbound bees around a queen.
The river grimaced and was ice.
Go nowhere –
thought the dead, using the snow –
but where you are, offering the flower of your breath
to the white garden, or seeds to birds
from your living hand. You cannot leave.
Tighter and tighter, the beautiful snow
holds the land in its fierce embrace.
It is like death, but it is not death; lovelier.
Cold, inconvenienced, late, what will you do now
with the gift of your left life?
Crunch
It’s snowing! Twelve, she runs outside into the cold.
I follow from the kitchen, in my hand an apple
I was about to peel and core. She squeals, loud,
snowflakes melting on her tongue, then topples
down, cartoon joyful, brightly young. Here come the dogs,
hilariously perplexed, barking at the ghosts of plants,
biting the sky. Last weekend, burglars came – Be drugs,
the policeman said, or credit crunch – taking their chance,
the Visa, chequebook, presents underneath the tree,
laptop, TV. I watch snow deepen, settle hard,
like . . . which simile? Like debt? Like poverty? . . .
imagine some gloved hand insert my useless cards
into the wall, that other life; then What’s for lunch?
she bawls. I throw the apple, happy, hear the crunch.
A Goldfish
I bought, on a whim, a goldfish for a good girl.
It swam in an antique bowl in the kitchen there,
creative among the lentils and the marmalade,
painting itself over and over, self-portrait in liquid;
learning its letter, O for oxygen, for only.
It seemed fulfilled;
the halo of its constant swim unrolling a pond
below willow trees, an imperial palace garden
where the poet sat, floating on silence; a mouth opening
to gold: walking towards her, carrying fragrant tea,
her beloved, favourite child.
