New and Selected Poems (25 page)
In the Likeness of a Grasshopper
A trap
Waits on the field path.
A wicker contraption, with working parts,
Its spring tensed and set.
So flimsily made, out of grass
(Out of the stems, the joints, the raspy-dry flags).
Baited with a fur-soft caterpillar,
A belly of amorous life, pulsing signals.
Along comes a love-sick, perfume-footed
Music of the wild earth.
The trap, touched by a breath,
Jars into action, its parts blur –
And music cries out.
A sinewy violin
Has caught its violinist.
Cloud-fingered summer, the beautiful trapper,
Picks up the singing cage
And takes out the Song, adds it to the Songs
With which she robes herself, which are her wealth,
Sets her trap again, a yard further on.
from
WHAT IS THE TRUTH?
New Foal
Yesterday he was nowhere to be found
In the skies or under the skies.
Suddenly he’s here – a warm heap
Of ashes and embers, fondled by small draughts.
A star dived from outer space – flared
And burned out in the straw.
Now something is stirring in the smoulder.
We call it a foal.
Still stunned
He has no idea where he is.
His eyes, dew-dusky, explore gloom walls and a glare doorspace.
Is this the world?
It puzzles him. It is a great numbness.
He pulls himself together, getting used to the weight of things
And to that tall horse nudging him, and to this straw.
He rests
From the first blank shock of light, the empty daze
Of the questions –
What has happened? What am I?
His ears keep on asking, gingerly.
But his legs are impatient,
Recovering from so long being nothing
They are restless with ideas, they start to try a few out,
Angling this way and that,
Feeling for leverage, learning fast –
And suddenly he’s up
And stretching – a giant hand
Strokes him from nose to heel
Perfecting his outline, as he tightens
The knot of himself.
Now he comes teetering
Over the weird earth. His nose
Downy and magnetic, draws him, incredulous,
Towards his mother. And the world is warm
And careful and gentle. Touch by touch
Everything fits him together.
Soon he’ll be almost a horse.
He wants only to be Horse,
Pretending each day more and more Horse
Till he’s perfect Horse. Then unearthly Horse
Will surge through him, weightless, a spinning of flame
Under sudden gusts,
It will coil his eyeball and his heel
In a single terror – like the awe
Between lightning and thunderclap.
And curve his neck, like a sea-monster emerging
Among foam,
And fling the new moons through his stormy banner,
And the full moons and the dark moons.
The Hen
The Hen
Worships the dust. She finds God everywhere.
Everywhere she finds his jewels.
And she does not care
What the cabbage thinks.
She has forgotten flight
Because she has interpreted happily
Her recurrent dream
Of clashing cleavers, of hot ovens,
And of the little pen-knife blade
Splitting her palate.
She flaps her wings, like shallow egg-baskets,
To show her contempt
For those who live on escape
And a future of empty sky.
She rakes, with noble, tireless foot,
The treasury of the dirt,
And clucks with the mechanical alarm clock
She chose instead of song
When the Creator
Separated the Workers and the Singers.
With her eye on reward
She tilts her head religiously
At the most practical angle
Which reveals to her
That the fox is a country superstition,
That her eggs have made man her slave
And that the heavens, for all their threatening,
Have not yet fallen.
And she is stern. Her eye is fierce – blood
(That weakness) is punished instantly.
She is a hard bronze of uprightness.
And indulges herself in nothing
Except to swoon a little, a delicious slight swoon,
One eye closed, just before sleep,
Conjuring the odour of tarragon.
The Hare
I
That Elf
Riding his awkward pair of haunchy legs
That weird long-eared Elf
Wobbling down the highway
Don’t overtake him, don’t try to drive past him,
He’s scatty, he’s all over the road,
He can’t keep his steering, in his ramshackle go-cart,
His big loose wheels, buckled and rusty,
Nearly wobbling off
And all the screws in his head wobbling and loose
And his eyes wobbling
II
The Hare is a very fragile thing.
The life in the hare is a glassy goblet, and her yellow-fringed frost-flake belly says: Fragile.
The hare’s bones are light glass. And the hare’s face –
Who lifted her face to the Lord?
Her new-budded nostrils and lips,
For the daintiest pencillings, the last eyelash touches
Delicate as the down of a moth,
And the breath of awe
Which fixed the mad beauty-light
In her look
As if her retina
Were a moon perpetually at full.
Who is it, at midnight on the A30,
The Druid soul,
The night-streaker, the sudden lumpy goblin
That thumps your car under the belly
Then cries with human pain
And becomes a human baby on the road
That you dare hardly pick up?
Or leaps, like a long bat with little headlights,
Straight out of darkness
Into the driver’s nerves
With a jangle of cries
As if the car had crashed into a flying harp
So that the driver’s nerves flail and cry
Like a burst harp.
III
Uneasy she nears
As if she were being lured, but fearful,
Nearer.
Like a large egg toppling itself – mysterious!
Then she’ll stretch, tall, on her hind feet,
And lean on the air,
Taut – like a stilled yacht waiting on the air –
And what does the hunter see? A fairy woman?
A dream beast?
A kangaroo of the March corn?
The loveliest face listening,
Her black-tipped ears hearing the bud of the blackthorn
Opening its lips,
Her black-tipped hairs hearing tomorrow’s weather
Combing the mare’s tails,
Her snow-fluff belly feeling for the first breath,
Her orange nape, foxy with its dreams of the fox –
Witch-maiden
Heavy with trembling blood – astounding
How much blood there is in her body!
She is a moony pond of quaking blood
Twitched with spells, her gold-ringed eye spellbound –
Carrying herself so gently, balancing
Herself with the gentlest touches
As if her eyes brimmed –
IV
I’ve seen her,
A lank, lean hare, with her long thin feet
And her long, hollow thighs,
And her ears like ribbons
Careering by moonlight
In her Flamenco, her heels flinging the dust
On the drum of the hill.
And I’ve seen him, hobbling stiffly
God of Leapers
Surprised by dawn, earth-bound, and stained
With drying mud,
Painfully rocking over the furrows
With his Leaping-Legs, his Power-Thighs
Much too powerful for ordinary walking,
So powerful
They seem almost a burden, almost a problem,
Nearly an aching difficulty for him
When he tries to loiter or pause,
Nearly a heaving pain to lift and move
Like turning a cold car-engine with a bent crank handle –
Till a shock, a terror, with a bang
Grabs at her ears. An oven door
Bangs open, both barrels, and a barking
Bursts out of onions –
and she leaps
And her heels
Hard as angle-iron kick salt and pepper
Into the lurcher’s eyes –
and kick and kick
The spinning, turnip world
Into the lurcher’s gullet –
as she slips
Between thin hawthorn and thinner bramble
Into tomorrow.
from
RIVER
The River
Fallen from heaven, lies across
The lap of his mother, broken by world.
But water will go on
Issuing from heaven
In dumbness uttering spirit brightness
Through its broken mouth.
Scattered in a million pieces and buried
Its dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,
At a rending of veils.
It will rise, in a time after times,
After swallowing death and the pit
It will return stainless
For the delivery of this world.
So the river is a god
Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,
Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam
It is a god, and inviolable.
Immortal. And will wash itself of all deaths.
Milesian Encounter on the Sligachanfor
Hilary
and
Simon
‘Up in the pools,’ they’d said, and ‘Two miles upstream.’
Something sinister about bogland rivers.
And a shock –
after the two miles of tumblequag, of Ice-Age hairiness, crusty, quaking cadaver and me lurching over it in elation like a daddy-long-legs –
after crooked little clatterbrook and again clatterbrook (a hurry of shallow grey light so distilled it looked like acid) –
and after the wobbly levels of a razor-edged, blood-smeared grass, the flood-sucked swabs of bog-cotton, the dusty calico rip-up of snipe –
under those petrified scapulae, vertebrae, horn-skulls the Cuillins (asylum of eagles) that were blue-silvered like wrinkled baking foil in the blue noon that day, and tremulous –
early August, in a hot lateness (only three hours before my boat), a glimpse of my watch and suddenly
up to my hip in a suck-hole then on again teetering over the broken-necked heath-bobs a good half-hour and me melting in my combined fuel of toil and clobber suddenly
The shock.
The sheer cavern of current piling silence
Under my feet.
So lonely-drowning deep, so drowned-hair silent
So clear
Cleansing the body cavity of the underbog.
Such a brilliant cut-glass interior
Sliding under me
And I felt a little bit giddy
Ghostly
As I fished the long pool-tail
Peering into that superabundance of spirit.
And now where were they, my fellow aliens from prehistory?
Those peculiar eyes
So like mine, but fixed at zero,
Pressing in from outer darkness
Eyes of aimed sperm and of egg on their errand,
Looking for immortality
In the lap of a broken volcano, in the furrow of a lost glacier,
Those shuttles of love-shadow?
Only humbler beings waved at me –
Weeds grazing the bottom, idling their tails.
Till the last pool –
A broad, coiling whorl, a deep ear
Of pondering amber,
Greenish and precious like a preservative,
With a ram’s skull sunk there – magnified, a Medusa,
Funereal, phosphorescent, a lamp
Ten feet under the whisky.
I heard this pool whisper a warning.
I tickled its leading edges with temptation.
I stroked its throat with a whisker.
I licked the moulded hollows
Of its collarbones
Where the depth, now underbank opposite,
Pulsed up from contained excitements –
Eerie how you know when it’s coming –
So I felt it now, my blood
Prickling and thickening, altering
With an ushering-in of chills, a weird onset
As if mountains were pushing mountains higher
Behind me, to crowd over my shoulder –
Then the pool lifted a travelling bulge
And grabbed the tip of my heart-nerve, and crashed,
Trying to wrench it from me, and again
Lifted a flash of arm for leverage
And it was a Gruagach of the Sligachan!
Some Boggart up from a crack in the granite!
A Glaistig out of the skull!
– what was it gave me
Such a supernatural, beautiful fright
And let go, and sank disembodied
Into the eye-pupil darkness?
Only a little salmon.
Salmo
salar
The loveliest, left-behind, most-longed-for ogress
Of the Palaeolithic
Watched me through her time-warped judas-hole
In the ruinous castle of Skye
As I faded from the light of reality.