Itself, while the light still holds,
To a steady burning, a clarity
Bordering the blue, deep fold of shadow:
Cars, weaving the woodslope road,
Glitter like needles through the layered leaves.
The Door in the Wall
i.m. Jorge Guillén
Under the door in the wall
the slit of sun
pours out at the threshold
such an illumination,
one begins to picture
the garden in there,
making the wrinkled step
seem shadowy, bare;
but within the shadows
an underfoot world puts forth
in points of light
its facets of worth –
surfaces of such depth
you have only to eye them,
to find you are travelling
a constellation by them;
and the sun that whitens
every lightward plane
leaks up the stone jamb,
reappears again
where the flickering tangle
of thick leaves covers
the top of the wall and
ivy piles over.
So the garden in there
cannot mean merely
an ornamental perfection
when the gardener lets be
this climbing parasite
within whose folds
birds find a shelter
against rain and cold.
But let be the garden, too,
as you tread and travel
this broken pathway
where the sun does not dazzle
but claims company with
all these half-hidden things
and raising their gaze
does not ask of them wings –
fissures and grained dirt,
shucked shells and pebble,
a sprinkle of shatterings,
a grist of gravel
where the print and seal
the travelling foot has set
declares, Jorge Guillén,
the integrity of the planet.
Geese Going South
Planing in, on the autumn gusts,
Fleeing the inclement north, they sound
More like a hunting pack, hound
Answering hound, than fugitives from the cold:
Flocks, skeining the air-lanes
In stately buoyancy even seem
To dance, but one’s weightless dream
Of what they feel or are, must yield
The nearer they approach. I sense the weariness
Of wings that bring them circling down
Onto this cut corn-field
That offers small sustenance but rest
Among its husks and straw. Rest –
Yet they continue calling from extended throats
As they did in flight, expending still
Energies that they will not stint
Crying to one another – is it? – encouragement.
I break cover for a clearer sight, but they
Instantly perceive this senseless foray
No hunter would attempt: a thousand birds
At the snap and spread of a great fan,
A winnowing of wings, rise up
Yelping in unison, weariness turned to power,
And tower away to a further field
Where others are arriving. I leave them there
On the high ridge snow will soon possess.
A moon that was rising as the birds came down
Watches me through the trees. I too descend
Towards the firefly town lights of the valley.
What does a goose, I ask myself,
Dream of among its kind, or are they all
Of a single mind where moonlight shows
The flight-lanes they still strain towards
Even in sleep? … In sleep
The town beside these transient neighbours
Scarcely dreams of their nocturnal presence
Awaiting dawn, the serpentine stirrings
And restless moon-glossed wings,
Numb at arrival, aching to be gone.
Hamilton, USA
Picking Mushrooms by Moonlight
Strange how these tiny moons across the meadows,
Wax with the moon itself out of the shadows.
Harvest is over, yet this scattered crop,
Solidifying moonlight, drop by drop,
Answers to the urging of that O,
And so do we, exclaiming as we go,
With rounded lips translating shape to sound,
At finding so much treasure on the ground
Marked out by light. We stoop and gather there
These lunar fruits of the advancing year:
So late in time, yet timely at this date,
They show what forces linger and outwait
Each change of season, rhyme made visible
And felt on the fingertips at every pull.
Jubilation (1995)
Down from Colonnata
A mist keeps pushing between the peaks
Of the serrated mountains, like the dust
Off marble from the workings underneath:
Down from Colonnata you can hear
The quarrymen calling through the caves
Above the reverberation of their gear
Eating through limestone. We are moving
And so is the sun: at each angle
Of the descending road, the low light
Meeting our eyes, surprises them whenever
It reappears striking a more vivid white
From the crests behind us. Down
And on: the distance flashes up at us
The flowing mercury of the sea below
That we, passing Carrara, lose
Until it shows once more backing the plain.
But the sun has outdistanced us already,
And reaching the level water, dipped
Beneath it, leaving a spread sheen
Under the final height dividing us,
And across the liquid radiance there,
A palpitation of even, marble light.
Jubilación
a letter to Juan Malpartida
You ask me what I’m doing, now I’m free –
Books, music and our garden occupy me.
All these pursuits I share (with whom you know)
For Eden always was a place for two.
But nothing is more boring than to hear
Of someone’s paradise when you’re not there.
Let me assure you, robbers, rain and rot
Are of a trinity that haunt this spot
So far from town, so close to naked nature,
Both vegetable and the human creature.
Having said that, now let me give a sample
Of how we make short northern days more ample.
We rise at dawn, breakfast, then walk a mile,
Greeting the early poachers with a smile
(For what is poetry itself but poaching –
Lying in wait to see what game will spring?).
Once back, we turn to music and we play
The two-piano version of some ballet,
Sacre du Printemps or Debussy’s Faune,
On what we used to call the gramophone,
To keep the active blood still briskly moving
Until we go from dancing to improving
The muscles of the mind – ‘in different voices’
Reading a stretch of Proust, a tale of Joyce’s.
And so to verse. Today, the game lies low,
And Brenda, passing, pauses at the window,
Raps on the pane, beckons me outside. She
Thinks, though we can’t plant yet, we still can tidy,
Clear the detritus from the frosty ground
With freezing fingers, and construct a mound
Of weeds and wood, then coax
it to a red
And roaring blaze – potash for each bed,
As Virgil of The Georgics might have said.
I signal back my depth of inspiration,
The piece I’m finishing for Poetry Nation
(What nation, as a nation, ever cared
A bad peseta or a dry goose turd
For poetry?). Our Shelley’s right, of course,
You can’t spur on a spavined Pegasus
Or, as he puts it, ‘There’s no man can say
I must, I will, I shall write poetry.’ –
Or he can say it and no verse appear.
As you now see (or would if you were here)
The winter sunlight sends its invitation
To shelve these mysteries of inspiration
And breathe the air – daybreak at noon, it seems,
The swift de-misting of these British beams
(Our watercolour school was full of such
Transient effects – we took them from the Dutch).
Strange how this wooded valley, like a book
Open beneath the light, repays your look
With sentences, whole passages and pages
Where space, not words, ’s the medium that assuages
The thirsty eye, syntactically solid,
Unlike the smog-smudged acres of Madrid
Boiling in sun and oil. You must excuse
These loose effusions of the patriot muse.
Not everybody’s smitten with this spot –
When Chatwin lived here, he declared he was not,
His cool, blue eye alighting only on
Far distant vistas Patagonian,
Untrammelled in the ties of local life,
Lost to the county, to both friends and wife.
We’d walk together, talking distant parts –
He thought we all were nomads in our hearts.
Perhaps we are, but I prefer to go
And to return, a company of two.
Hence jubilation at my jubilación
That we, together, leave behind our nación
And visit yours – or, just look up, you’ll see
The vapour trails above us, westerly
The high direction of their subtle line,
Spun between Severn and Hudson, and a sign
That we shall soon be passing at that height
And, if the weather’s clear, catch our last sight
Of Gloucestershire beneath us as we go.
But I must use ‘la pelle et le râteau’
(Things that were images for Baudelaire),
And with the backache, spade and rake, prepare
The soil to plant our crops in on returning.
So I must pause from versing and start burning,
To anticipate the time we’re once more here
In the great cycle of the ceaseless year.
Jubilación: the Spanish for ‘retirement’.
The Shadow
The sun flung out at the foot of the tree
A perfect shadow on snow: we found that we
Were suddenly walking through this replica,
The arteries of this map of winter
Offering a hundred pathways up the hill
Too intricate to follow. We stood still
Among the complications of summit branches
Of a mid-field tree far from all other trees.
Or was it roots were opening through the white
An underworld thoroughfare towards daylight?
There stretched the silence of that dark frontier,
Ignoring the stir of the branches where
A wind was disturbing their quiet and
Rippled the floating shadow without sound
Like a current from beneath, as we strode through
And on into a world of untrodden snow,
The shadow all at once gone out as the sun withdrew.
Walks
The walks of our age
are like the walks of our youth:
we turned then page on page
of a legible half-truth
where what was written
was trees, contours, pathways –
and what arose as we read them
half conversation, half praise –
and the canals, walls, fields
outside of the town
extended geographies
that were and were not our own
to the foot of the rocks
whose naked strata threw
their stone gaze down at us –
a look that we could not look through.
That gaze is on us now:
a more relenting scene
returns our words to us,
tells us that what we mean
cannot contain
half the dazzle and height
surrounding us here:
words put to flight,
the silence outweighs them
yet still leans to this page
to overhear what we talk of
in the walks of our age.
The Vineyard above the Sea (1999)
The Vineyard Above the Sea
This frontal hill falls sheer to water,
Rugged forehead whose rhythmic folds
Are of stone, not flesh – walls
That hold up the soil and the vines between,
Whose final fruit, essence and asperity,
Is wine like daylight, tasting of the sea.
I lift a glass of it towards the sun
Catching, within, the forms essentialized
Of these cliff-edge vine-rows –
Cables hoisting a harvest to the summit –
And beyond the ripple of rock-shoulders
Bearing the load of grapes and stone,
The town itself – almost a woman’s name –
Corniglia, as tight-gripped to its headland
As to their heights these walls, floating
Along the contours like the recollection
Of a subsided ocean that has left behind
The print of waves. Windows, doors
In the heaped façades cast a maternal glance
Over a geology festooned, transformed,
Where through the centuries it hunched a way
Towards these cube-crystals of the houses,
This saline precipice, this glass of light.
Drawing Down the Moon
I place on the sill a saucer
that I fill with water:
it rocks with a tidal motion,
as if that porcelain round
contained a small sea:
this threshold ocean
throws into confusion
the image that it seizes
out of the sky – the moon
just risen, and now in pieces
beneath the window: the glass
takes in the image at its source,
a clear shard of newness,
and lets it into the house
from pane to pane
riding slowly past:
when I look again
towards the sill, its dish
of moonlight is recomposing:
it lies still, from side to side
of the ceramic circle
curving across the water,
a sleeping bride:
for the moon’s sake
do not wake her,
do not shake the saucer.
The First Death
in memoriam Bruce Chatwin
The hand that reached out from a painted sleeve
When you sensed that you were dying, gathered you
Into the picture: clothes, furs, pearls,
Bronze of a vessel, silver of a dish
From which the grapes were overflowing. Tangible
The minute whiteness of those pearls, the galaxies
They strung; the velvets, sleeves, the welcome
Among convivial company; the offered hand,
All those glistening appearances tha
t now
Were to declare the secret of their surfaces –
Surfaces deep as roots. You told
How you were led at that first death
Through the Venetian plenitude of a room
Across which a glance confirmed the presence there
Of windows spilling light on this festivity,
And running beyond them, a silhouette –
The columns of a balustrade – then sky.
You were let into the anteroom of your heaven
By the eye, moving and attending, finding good
Those textures it had grazed on like a food.
The second time you died without remission,
Leaving no report on the lie of the land
Beyond that parapet’s stone sill, beyond the gloss
On all surfaces, rich and indecipherable.
In Memoriam Ángel Crespo (1926–1995)
All things engender shadow –
the rose, the rose-arch and the meadow
sombre among surrounding trees
newly in leaf: shadow
is a continual flow
in the soliloquy we weave
within ourselves, and this
makes the diamond of the day
unreal when it insists
on permanence: but then it takes
a slow and spreading shade
from the contrasting undertone that makes
each facet seem
to both gleam and darken,
changing like the surface of a stream
whose points of light
advancing, dance
on the ripple
pulling them forward
over sunless depth. Listen
and you can hear
at the root of notes
a darker music giving form
to a music already there
filling the innocent ear
with only half its story.
By Night
Lights from the hillside farm by night
Open three doors of fire
Across the swollen stream. It is travelling
Freighted with the weight a season’s rain
Unburdens down all the waterways
Swimming Chenango Lake Page 12
