Nightfall at Pagham Rife

A poetic vocation is born! Ted Hughes has much to answer for.
   Pagham Rife is a small river flowing into Pagham Harbour - now silted up and a nature reserve - a mile or so to the west of Bognor Regis on the West Sussex coast.

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Without sound, without movement,
Dusk put its gravecloth on the brow
Of the hills, the mouth of the sea.
A man stood in that great bowl of darkness
Listening to the river as it ambled off
To the marsh. A fish jumped unseen –
The sound of its ripple as involved and as lasting
As the birth and death of a dynasty.
This urban man, far from the cities
And with only his car keys for company,
Listened appalled to his own incomprehension.
The grandeur of night, the last light on a cloud –
The lintel of another existence –
Mocked his bundle of cells and jaded muscle.
The ticking of mud was a challenge
To make something of it.
He shrank into himself like a crouching tribesman
Waving a sharpened stick at the night.

But his hand on the bar of the sluice gate

Tightened its grip until the knuckles glowed white:

      It was a nebula

      Knotted and brilliant in the depths of space
      It was landscape
      Cooling to crags out of a nest of steam
      It was joy of the victor
      Fires of his army –
      History flowed through the household of his hand
      It was parchment
      Riotously covered with leaf of gold
      It was impulse, decision –
      Coriolanus shook the sluice
      And beat it into meaning.

Under the blackness, under the night,

He took off, like a king, the robe of disguise:
His arm was a sceptre of command.

He looked down and saw the swans on the Rife

      Silent as lions

      Epic as eagles
      O darkening eye of the sun –

Their plumage blazed magnificence.

They moved upstream
Turning the globe
With a foot on the riverbed:
Behind them were gasps of mud.
Assured as hierophants
They vanished through the curtain
Held by their courteous chamberlain, the night.
The man almost cried, “Take me with you!”
But realised that the domain into which he had come
Lay elsewhere. He turned aside, claimed his inheritance,

      And wrote this poem.

====================

© September 1978/Revised May 2012

Albion

Who would not have sailed with Brutus,
Searching for these islands
In the steely mists of the northern sea?
Or bootlegged for Elizabeth
With Drake and Ralegh,
Plunging through combers like a saw through wood?
That is what I think
When I stand in the Marches
Watching the west wind blot the grass,
The dog rose shiver red and white in the sun.
But at home
On sunny, windswept afternoons
I put aside grandeur,
Alone in my room.
I sit at the window
And watch just a simmering
Corner of garden –
The creosoted fence like black canvas,
Grainy and pulled very taut;
A passion flower climbing
With semaphore arms,
Pouring itself on a trellis;
And the ceaseless, piled activity
Of turbulent sky above.
Dove-bruises of cloud
Rush across the earth –
It is English weather –
Blue and gold enamelling
Giving way to blustering cloud,
As quickly dispelled
By a sudden shaft of sun.
The wind sings at my door,
And a shred of spider-web
Shakes on the pane like a trampoline.
It is an agitated honey-jar
This corner,
Become as a little Eden.
The fence has a sheen like a fly’s back;
At its foot are the gathered
Remnants of gardening –
Dusty old canes,
Flowerpots,
Remains of cacti crawled on by ants,
And an old mat
Gone anaemic in weather.
The garden swells with good things
Like a smile;
Vegetables fall over themselves,
All fingers and thumbs of growth;
And the passion flower flushes
Along its stem,
Its darkly-smiling leaves
Pursed like empty pea-pods.
It will be the highlight of summer
When it lusciously flowers:
Already its feelers
Are dizzily hugging themselves
With narcissistic glee.
And again the wind is in the corner,
Stirring things up like a stick in paint.
I am wholly at peace with myself,
Reconciled with the hung flesh
On my bones.
Warmth clambers through the window
Dressed in the primary colours of summer.
Brutus! Brutus!
Your land is fruitful as a bursting fig;
Call down protection on this demi-paradise!

====================

© July 1979/Revised April 2012

Works and Days

From my window on the world,
My back office sunk among
Part-roofs and fire escapes,
I can see into a courtyard
Where a sycamore tree
Is surrounded by a biscuit-blank wall.
The tree, thinly leaved
And wan from its lonely existence,
Raises its crown
In a howl of anguish;
Its trunk is weeping bark.
I try to spare some moments
Each day for the tree –
To study all its small changes –
Just as in the train at morning I stare
At the wedgwood bowl of the sky,
And the young embankment grass
Waxed by the sun,
Remembering a moment
By a forest pool
When waylaid to listen
I heard the damp earth
Buzzing and crackling in the morning heat –
Small sounds, too small to hear
Above engines and radios,
But unique as life
In the clear forest stillness.
I want these sounds
To tell me about myself,
But the blundering boy of speed,
In his clumsy boots of noise and routine,
Tears me from my thoughts
And lands me in the sump
Of another City day.

The tree is so cramped

It scrapes at the wall with its branches.
But the wall is Polyphemus,
Irremediably stupid;
It would crunch a body
Like a bunch of radishes if it could.
I think the tree
In this solipsism of wall
Must sometimes doubt
The reality of its own existence.
But somehow it holds on to dignity,
Like elders in their robes,
Their hands clasped on wisdom,
Their heads serious in servitude –
O Israel, Israel,
City mud and wasted straw
Are our labour these generations.
I have sometimes thought of a gesture,
Some striking affirmation of self-hood,
But the spaces of morning frighten me.

Two things cheer my day:

The occasional whirlwind of sparrows,
Plump as corn on the cob,
Turning furious cartwheels
On the cobweb-grey hub of their heads –
The Lord God spoke out of whirlwinds;
And a certain self-hating satisfaction
When I see that the paving round the tree
Has split into grins,
Kneaded by the tree’s roots
Like fingers in dough
(Already old Cyclops
Has cracks in his boots).

I am surrounded

By the silly sheep
Of computer terminals,
Lulled to believe
That we have placed permanence
On the face of the earth
(It enables us to knuckle under,
To knock along with entertainment,
To ignore the questions under our ribs);
We have turned from the glory of life,
The super-charged moment
Caught in the hot flash
Of sunlight on water,
And dare not look over our shoulders.
But the marble columns have fallen,
The edifice is always cracking:
One day I think we shall be terrified
By a sudden access of sky.
And then –
Flashes the kingfisher water drop,
Replete with perfection,
Though we shall see it with a sticky eye.

My head has begun its descent

Into the dregs of afternoon;
The tree drapes its first shadow
Like gauze on a wound –
I am a row of ciphers.
The years lounge in my in-tray:
Its wire mesh fingers my face,               
Its long fingers finger my face.              

====================

© May 1979/ Revised April 2012

Country Music and the Sky

Ashford, Shoulder of Mutton and Stoner are all hills in Edward Thomas country in Hampshire.

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I wake to my neighbour’s country music
And the urgency of radio news.
They are treacherous things
For before you can look out of the window,
Or begin to think who you are,
They have stuffed you into pockets
Of unnecessary pleasures,
Bogus and irrelevant worries,
And put a grey hand on your brow.
I make an effort
And go out into the garden –
My blood sits up in its veins.
Dew tumbles across leaves like skiers on slopes,
Spider-web sparkles like lemonade;
The marigolds and alyssum
Crouch in their nightclothes.
Already the late rose is cuffing the wind,
Grass leans over to hear its own gossip,
And runner beans struggle out
From under the overcoats
They have piled against the night.
The sky blushes with gold, pales with white,     
It whispers of distances,
Almost echoing to the single bell
Which tolls the new day
In Alpine passes; its blue
Is that of a canticle.
A first hand of warmth
Dabs lotion on my gooseflesh,
And I am thrilled into life –
Not a feather’s flick
On the shillings and pence plumage
Of a tottering starling,
Nor the wine-gum stumble
Of a beetle on the path,
Can escape my wide attention –
The world grows through me like a root.

But toast and coffee crackle in the kitchen,

And my tie waits for the working day.
The country music pounds through the wall
Like a long-distance runner under punishment;
It mumbles again and again to itself –
“Inanition, inanition of inanities”.

I thought of a morning below Ashford Hill,

Tip-toeing through fern and nettle
To reach the edge of Ashford Stream.
The water was low,
Scarcely enough to shiver the cress,
And the flat mud of the bank
Revealed the delicate paw marks of fox,
Glistening beneath a film of water.
Freshly, they re-enacted
Its wary approach,
The hesitant sipping,
The chestnut glare over shoulders,
And the triumphant trot
Beneath the banner of its brush
Away into the undergrowth –
The water wandered on
Like a girl in a trance
Absent-mindedly waving its hands at me...
And later, on Shoulder of Mutton Hill,
Looking across towards Stoner,
A fox rushed out into the cornfields,
Pausing only to light the bonfire of himself
And turn his nose to the wind.
I watched him through field-glasses –
A stone in gold,
A brick-red sunspot
Exploding across the fiery face of the field.
He snickered along the hedgerows
And sat a long time,
Sniffing the corn.
From where I stood
Perspective and distance disappeared;
I looked over the blue of scabious
Into the blue bowl of distance beyond
And seemed to be safely upon a sea,
Lulled by the green-and-gold-reflecting water...
That morning was a pearl of great price:
I hold it to my skin like a charm.

In the city the sky is thinking

Of the day ahead;
It points upwards into zero
And sideways into doing –
I am ready to rush for my train.
Country music punches holes in my walls;
It snivels like a child over his knuckles.
Another day, O Lord, another day.
The sky smiles and says nothing.

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© September 1979/ Revised April 2012

"The Old Stone Wall, Honey-Red..."

The old stone wall, honey-red,
Baked in the sun
Beneath black-faced ivy,
Wearing it like improvised headgear.
A dog-rose climbed on the buttress,
Its delicate faces of linen
Lazy as ensigns in the fitful breeze.
The afternoon stretched into time,
Before and behind,
Ignored by the fingering moss
And crumbling pointing
As they mulled intensely over themselves.
Many lives had walked this lane
Mopping their eyes of the goad of sweat –
Its black pepper in the brilliant air.
But now there was only a silent stillness,
And my boot scuffing the turf.
Grizzled, sprawling, blunt as a gun,
This wall will survive
My translation to dust,
The years when I shall be kneaded
Into rich paste for brick.
It is ancient and lasting
As strong-walled Uruk –
That clamorous declamation
To the dust-and-khaki sky,
Sanctuary for cedars of Lebanon,
Water loud in its precincts.
Water was somewhere behind the wall,
Chronicling the passing of moments,
Clearing its throat of mud and leaf.
Uruk has gone into dust,
Snatched by Irkalla into the house of talons;
But the idea of England
Still lingered on this finger of land
Purpled by summer in the northern sea –
The grasshopper busy with screwdrivers,
The blackbird tugging at the worm of its song;
And the old stone wall, honey-red,
Smiling its tough smile
In the sunlight.

====================

© July 1979

The Ridgeway Above Wroughton

Wroughton is a village outside Swindon, Wilts, nestling under the flank of the Downs.
   Again, I had to revise this poem to remove the windy nothings; I cannot claim to have removed them all.

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I.
The ant researching the damp, black earth,
Trickling through grass like a drop of oil,
And the man stumbling across divots
Of chalk, shriven by the thumping shiver
Of wind, are one
Beneath the huge, worked quarry of the sky.
Distance humbles your lifted head,
Swallowing the Ridgeway like a river,
Opaque as honey.
It is all more ancient than breathing.
Here the philosopher’s aching skull
Can ease in the sugar-warm brew of air
Where hawthorns like eremites
Stoop upon truth,
And grass turns the page of itself.
Sunlight like lenses
Tramps across land,
Igniting the suede glow of a hayfield;
Its dazzle is shattered gold on your eyes
By which the woad flanks of the Downs,
The drifting cloud,
The quick lark singing in the basin of heaven,
Are moments apprehended
In the turning of a wheel –
A sky of fire,
Scarlet as mist in a twilit rain-forest,
Revolving on an eye
Unknowably calm,
Blinding as light in light –
The vision is here and gone in a stunning second.
Where have I known it before?
It was the long moment of the waterfall,
The seamless music of its ebony string
Whispering shadows
To the mystery of sunken stones –
A sound not drowned out by noise,
Flecking the blue, flecking the green,
Enamelled by light.

II.

When I go down it will be
To the furious surf of men,
The slurry of suburb and industrial estate
Nosing the flanks of the Downs.
There the sky is cellophane,
Wrapping up streets.
The sullen shriek of combustion
Plasters a violent haze in the air.
What trash of metal!
What fat-cheeked rhetoric of delivery vans!
The punk bulk of factory and warehouse,
Bulbous as bellies in khaki sweatshirts,
Sprawls across this field of folk
Embroiled in the fake exigencies
Of cash and carry.
We finger greedily the obliging soil
And rummage in it like a chocolate box,
Smearing ourselves with affluence.
Cities like fever
Spawn upon the earth;
They offer the starlit frenzy of heroin,
And the hopeless grief of concrete in rain.
Quarantined, men are puzzled
By a flurry of dust in their eyes.

III.

Stare down, stare down – this land
Is solemn as an eyebrow.
Wind pirouettes in silence.
History is under the stones;
The air is full of waiting.
Sound of cattle on a gentle breeze,
Elastic clashing of flanks;
Shouts and a face
Just caught in light – it is gone.
Furs and a grunt, a warm covering of dirt,
Easing along the uplands
With a watchful eye
On the dragon-forest below –
A scurry of wind wipes the slate.
Warlord Arthur rides from Badon
With a clatter of heavy cavalry;
Hoof-mark clangs in rock,
Classic, ancient – our Dioscuri.
Old highway,
History is battered
Into your deeps and bruises,
Breeding the English rose at your feet –
Your scars are very grey.
Dust scatters to an empty afternoon.
The Downland birds toboggan on silence.
 
IV.
Cloud on cloud,
Cloud seeping across cloud,
Sparkling like sea-water beneath farthest blue –
The Downs disappear in the funnel of distance.
To look at such distance
Is strangely like grasping a hand.
It is the spaces –
Sun-flecked sea, albino desert,
Spongy dip of a moor –
Which release us from ourselves:
Where else can the spirit journey in its flesh,
Flee to a question, return with an insight?
The prophet,
Hurrying through miles of dusty sunrise,
And lonely Gawain,
Clashing his way across fire of ice,
Are like a morning wind
Scouring the winter unease of the city;
For the truth is always intruding,
Sudden as visions of the plague pit.
It is like time obliterating a monument.
There was a day when Britain
Like a foetus under sea
Drifted across the equator,
And these Downs were a thin rain in water.
Years were as many as waves of the sea,
Enthralling the sky with silence.
And now,
The sea is at the coast, all day long,
Wolfing it down.
The wind is at the mountain,
Night and day,
Slicing it like ham:
The moment of the Downs will pass
And will be as a second.
But their time is not our time,
And their long persistence,
Cradling bones,
Reconciles us to impermanence.

The world is a peony after summer rain,

Lip-red and full of water.
To hold one is like holding a chalice;
To put your face
Into the cool maze of its heart
Is to find an eternal moment,
In desert, at sea, in the rain-forest.
And now, and in England,
The Ridgeway like a patient teacher 
Calls us back to ourselves:
See! It is lit with the furnace
Of evening, a fire which burned
On the oily swamp, and will burn
On the last rocks above water.
I am content to wear
The slight frown of a monk
Listening to the pulse in his temples;
And the smile of a child
When day bursts on the Downs,
Basting them with sunlight of gold.

====================

© June 1979/ Revised December 2011

Ashford Stream

Ashford Stream is in the parish of Steep, Hampshire - Edward Thomas country. I got to know the area very well all those years ago, tramping it to match up Thomas's poems with the landscape.
   Barbary Castle is the great Iron Age earthwork on the Ridgeway outside Swindon - a truly magnificent site.
   I had to do some work on this poem, and on others written around the same time and which I shall shortly post, to remove windy apostrophizing to great but abstract 'eternal things' - an unfortunate failing of mine at the time.

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It was a dull, overcast day,

The sky dank on the land like fox fur,
Gone grey as a horror.
My nose itched and my clothes clung
As I climbed through beech trees
In the chilly air,
Making for the top of Ashford Hill.
All round was a silence centuries deep
As if the world had eaten poppies.
But then, like the turn of a leaf in light,
There sprang a sound mixed in
With the brush of my legs in fern,
The soft crunch of mould underfoot –
It was the sound of water running,
Filling the tent-like spaces of the wood
With its blackbird song,
Swelling and fading in the afternoon gloom.
It always surprises me, Ashford Stream;
It stays hidden, then abruptly leaps out at you,
Like a child in a crowd,
In a mixture of anxiety and manners,
Clear and freckled with pebbles.
I stood a long time, listening to its song,
Though I cannot remember
That time seemed to pass.
Its muffled bells and bird calls
Were a ceaseless music,
Inhabiting the twilit world
Of tree and creeper caverns.
When I left,
Brushing the green lichen from the trees,
I looked back,
But could see only shadows
Lifting their ears to the sibilance of the stream
Like monks at duskfall
With their cowls thrown back
Rapt in appropriation of that unruffled note.

The sound of water running –

It is the purest sound I know.
I have stood on Barbary Castle,
Watching the breeze make sorties in the grass,
Staring at the wide, bronze offering
Of cornland and grassland around;
I have listened to audible time
Booming quietly in my ears
As the wind flowed round me
Engrossing me in a pulse of movement;
And I have felt better able
To seize that into words
Than this binary, self-contained water language
Which is the music at the heart of music.
On the Russian steppe, on the Mexican plain,
In snow, in scree,
This music laces the air –
It trembles like starlight in the deep of night,
It surprises the traveller at dusty noon,
And when he leaves it behind
He walks away from himself
For it is the sound of homecoming,
Of journeys done,
Of tribulations weathered.

That day on Ashford Hill

The sky hung like the death of all tone
With only an occasional thrush-call
Sharping the air;
But no dull day can remit my joy
When I stand by Ashford Stream
Like a father by his child
To be told with a gravity that breaks the heart
That all shall be well,
And all manner of thing shall be well.
I cannot describe it, this water music,
Can only experience it,
Standing at the lip of the world –
It is the form and sound of eternity;
Existence at peace with itself.

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© September 1979/ Revised December 2011