Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (4 page)

I drew a line:

this far, and no further,

never will I go further than this.

When I went further,

I drew a new line,

and then another line.

The sun was shining

and everywhere I saw people,

hurried and serious,

and everyone was drawing a line,

everyone went further.

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Near evening, in Fairhaven, Massachusetts,

seventeen wild geese arrowed the ashen blue

over the Wal-Mart and the Blockbuster Video, 

and I was up there, somewhere between the asphalt

and their clear dominion – not in the parking lot,

its tallowy circles just appearing,

the shopping carts shining, from above,

like little scraps of foil. Their eyes

held me there, the unfailing gaze 

of those who know how to fly in formation,

wing-tip to wing-tip, safe, fearless.

And the convex glamour of their eyes carried 

the parking lot, the wet field

troubled with muffler shops

and stoplights, the arc of highway

and its exits, one shattered farmhouse

with its failing barn… The wind

a few hundred feet above the grass 

erases the mechanical noises, everything;

nothing but their breathing

and the perfect rowing of the pinions, 

and then, out of that long, percussive pour

toward what they are most certain of,

comes their – question, is it? 

Assertion, prayer, aria – as delivered

by something too compelled in its passage

to sing? A hoarse and unwieldy music 

which plays nonetheless down the length

of me until I am involved in their flight,

the unyielding necessity of it, as they literally 

rise above
, ineluctable, heedless,

needing nothing… Only animals

make me believe in God now 

– so little between spirit and skin,

any gesture so entirely themselves.

But I wasn’t with them, 

as they headed toward Acushnet

and New Bedford, of course I wasn’t,

though I was not exactly in the parking lot 

either, where the cars nudged in and out

of their slots, each taking the place another

had abandoned, so that no space, no desire 

would remain unfilled. I wasn’t there.

I was so filled with longing

– is that what that sound is for? – 

I seemed to be nowhere at all.

One evening in February I came near to dying here.

The car skidded sideways on the ice, out

on the wrong side of the road. The approaching cars –

their lights – closed in. 

My name, my girls, my job

broke free and were left silently behind

further and further away. I was anonymous

like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies. 

The approaching traffic had huge lights.

They shone on me while I pulled at the wheel

in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.

The seconds grew – there was space in them –

they grew as big as hospital buildings. 

You could almost pause

and breathe out for a while

before being crushed. 

Then something caught: a helping grain of sand

or a wonderful gust of wind. The car broke free

and scuttled smartly right over the road.

A post shot up and cracked – a sharp clang – it

flew away in the darkness. 

Then – stillness. I sat back in my seat-belt

and saw someone coming through the whirling snow

to see what had become of me.

I have been walking for a long time

on the frozen Östergötland fields.

I have not seen a single person. 

In other parts of the world

there are people who are born, live and die

in a perpetual crowd. 

To be always visible – to live

in a swarm of eyes –

a special expression must develop.

Face coated with clay. 

The murmuring rises and falls

while they divide up among themselves

the sky, the shadows, the sand grains. 

I must be alone

ten minutes in the morning

and ten minutes in the evening.

– Without a programme. 

Everyone is queuing at everyone’s door.

Many.

One.

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Although it is a cold evening,

down by one of the fishhouses

an old man sits netting,

his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,

a dark purple-brown,

and his shuttle worn and polished.

The air smells so strong of codfish

it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.

The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs

and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up

to storerooms in the gables

for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.

All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,

swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,

is opaque, but the silver of the benches,

the lobster pots, and masts, scattered

among the wild jagged rocks,

is of an apparent translucence

like the small old buildings with an emerald moss

growing on their shoreward walls.

The big fish tubs are completely lined

with layers of beautiful herring scales

and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered

with creamy iridescent coats of mail,

with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Up on the little slope behind the houses,

set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,

is an ancient wooden capstan,

cracked, with two long bleached handles

and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,

where the ironwork has rusted.

The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.

He was a friend of my grandfather.

We talk of the decline in the population

and of codfish and herring

while he waits for a herring boat to come in.

There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.

He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,

from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,

the blade of which is almost worn away. 

Down at the water’s edge, at the place

where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp

descending into the water, thin silver

tree trunks are laid horizontally

across the gray stones, down and down

at intervals of four or five feet. 

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

element bearable to no mortal,

to fish and to seals…One seal particularly

I have seen here evening after evening.

He was curious about me. He was interested in music;

like me a believer in total immersion,

so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.

I also sang ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’.

He stood up in the water and regarded me

steadily, moving his head a little.

Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge

almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug

as if it were against his better judgment.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

the clear gray icy water…Back, behind us,

the dignified tall firs begin.

Bluish, associating with their shadows,

a million Christmas trees stand

waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended

above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,

slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,

icily free above the stones,

above the stones and then the world.

If you should dip your hand in,

your wrist would ache immediately,

your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn

as if the water were a transmutation of fire

that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. 

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it. 

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various. 

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge

     roses.

Even now there are places where a thought might grow –

Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned

To a slow clock of condensation,

An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter

Of wild flowers in the lift-shaft,

Indian compounds where the wind dances

And a door bangs with diminished confidence,

Lime crevices behind rippling rain-barrels,

Dog corners for bone burials;

And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford, 

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,

Among the bathtubs and the washbasins

A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.

This is the one star in their firmament

Or frames a star within a star.

What should they do there but desire?

So many days beyond the rhododendrons

With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,

They have learnt patience and silence

Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood. 

They have been waiting for us in a foetor

Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,

Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure

Of the expropriated mycologist.

He never came back, and light since then

Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.

Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew

And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something –

A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue

Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking

Into the earth that nourished it;

And nightmares, born of these and the grim

Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.

Those nearest the door grow strong –

‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’

The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling

Utensils and broken pitchers, groaning

For their deliverance, have been so long

Expectant that there is left only the posture. 

A half century, without visitors, in the dark –

Poor preparation for the cracking lock

And creak of hinges; magi, moonmen,

Powdery prisoners of the old regime,

Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought

And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream

At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with

Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.

Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,

They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith. 

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,

To do something, to speak on their behalf

Or at least not to close the door again.

Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!

‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,

‘Let the god not abandon us

Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.

We too had our lives to live.

You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,

Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’