To My Wife at Midnight
I
Are you to say goodnight
And turn away under
The blanket of your delight?
Are you to let me go
Alone to sleep beside you
Into the drifting snow?
Where we each reach,
Sleeping alone together,
Nobody can touch.
Is the cat’s window open?
Shall I turn into your back?
And what is to happen?
What is to happen to us
And what is to happen to each
Of us asleep in our places?
II
I mean us both going
Into sleep at our ages
To sleep and get our fairing.
They have all gone home.
Night beasts are coming out.
The black wood of Madron
Is just waking up.
I hear the rain outside
To help me to go to sleep.
Nessie, dont let my soul
Skip and miss a beat
And cause me to fall.
III
Are you asleep I say
Into the back of your neck
For you not to hear me.
Are you asleep? I hear
Your heart under the pillow
Saying my dear my dear
My dear for all it’s worth.
Where is the dun’s moor
Which began your breath?
IV
Ness, to tell you the truth
I am drifting away
Down to fish for the saithe.
Is the cat’s window open?
The weather is on my shoulder
And I am drifting down
Into O can you hear me
Among your Dunsmuir Clan?
Are you coming out to play?
V
Did I behave badly
On the field at Culloden?
I lie sore-wounded now
By all activities, and
The terrible acts of my time
Are only a distant sound.
With responsibility
I am drifting off
Breathing regularly
Into my younger days
To play the games of Greenock
Beside the sugar-house quays.
VI
Nessie Dunsmuir, I say
Wheesht wheesht to myself
To help me now to go
Under into somewhere
In the redcoat rain.
Buckle me for the war.
Are you to say goodnight
And kiss me and fasten
My drowsy armour tight?
My dear camp-follower,
Hap the blanket round me
And tuck in a flower.
Maybe from my sleep
In the stoure at Culloden
I’ll see you here asleep
In your lonely place.
W. S. GRAHAM
Greenock at Night I Find You
I
As for you loud Greenock long ropeworking
Hide and seeking rivetting town of my child
Hood, I know we think of us often mostly
At night. Have you ever desired me back
Into the set-in bed at the top of the land
In One Hope Street? I am myself lying
Half-asleep hearing the rivetting yards
And smelling the bone-works with no home
Work done for Cartsburn School in the morning.
At night. And here I am descending and
The welding lights in the shipyards flower blue
Under my hopeless eyelids as I lie
Sleeping conditioned to hide from happy.
II
So what did I do? I walked from Hope Street
Down Lyndoch Street between the night’s words
To Cartsburn Street and got to the Cartsburn Vaults
With half an hour to go. See, I am back.
III
See, I am back. My father turned and I saw
He had the stick he cut in Sheelhill Glen.
Brigit was there and Hugh and double-breasted
Sam and Malcolm Mooney and Alastair Graham.
They all were there in the Cartsburn Vaults shining
To meet me but I was only remembered.
W. S. GRAHAM
Loch Thom
I
Just for the sake of recovering
I walked backward from fifty-six
Quick years of age wanting to see,
And managed not to trip or stumble
To find Loch Thorn and turned round
To see the stretch of my childhood
Before me. Here is the loch. The same
Long-beaked cry curls across
T he heather-edges of the water held
Between the hills a boyhood’s walk
Up from Greenock. It is the morning.
And I am here with my mammy’s
Bramble jam scones in my pocket.
The Firth is miles and I have come
Back to find Loch Thom maybe
In this light does not recognise me.
This is a lonely freshwater loch.
No farms on the edge. Only
Heather grouse-moor stretching
Down to Greenock and One Hope
Street or stretching away across
Into the blue moors of Ayrshire.
II
And almost I am back again
Wading the heather down to the edge
To sit. The minnows go by in shoals
Like iron-filings in the shallows.
My mother is dead. My father is dead
And all the trout I used to know
Leaping from their sad rings are dead.
III
I drop my crumbs into the shallow
Weed for the minnows and pinheads.
You see that I will have to rise
And turn round and get back where
My running age will slow for a moment
To let me on. It is a colder
Stretch of water than I remember.
The curlew’s cry travelling still
Kills me fairly. In front of me
The grouse flurry and settle. GOBACK
GOBACK GOBACK FAREWELL LOCH THOM.
W. S. GRAHAM
Feeding Ducks
One duck stood on my toes.
The others made watery rushes after bread
Thrown by my momentary hand; instead,
She stood duck-still and got far more than those.
An invisible drone boomed by
With a beetle in it; the ne®ighbour’s yearning bull
Bugled across five fields. And an evening full
Of other evenings quietly began to die.
And my everlasting hand
Dropped on my hypocrite duck her grace of bread.
And I thought, ‘The first to be fattened, the first to be dead’,
Till my gestures enlarged, wide over the darkening land.
NORMAN MACCAIG
Toad
Stop looking like a purse. How could a purse
squeeze under the rickety door and sit,
full of satisfaction, in a man’s house?
You clamber towards me on your four corners –
right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.
I love you for being a toad,
for crawling like a Japanese wrestler,
and for not being frightened.
I put you in my purse hand, not shutting it,
and set you down outside directly under
every star.
A jewel in your head? Toad,
you’ve put one in mine,
a tiny radiance in a dark place.
NORMAN MACCAIG
Deceptions?
To hear a dripping water tap in a house
That has no tap in it, in the dead of night.
And stop there forever. In bed in an empty room
To hear a voice on the pillow say Hello.
A wheatstalk dances lasciviously in the fire.
My hand drags its plough across this white field.
My head from a sort of radiance watches a chair
Continually completing its meaning. A picture
Tries to plunge from its nail to the centre of the earth.
Immense tides wash through everything. My knuckles
Are tiny whirlpools in it. I stream sideways.
The room’s roots are straining. Sounds of the fire
Unmuffle themselves from black coal, are a theatre.
My foot rocks because my heart says so.
How could things stop? And three plump cheers for distance …
To shake a hand and be left with it. To see
Sight cramming itself into an eye and wheat
A harrow of fire: and all a correspondence
Shielding the truth and giving birth to it.
NORMAN MACCAIG
The Bright Field
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
R. S. THOMAS
The Moon in Lleyn
The last quarter of the moon
of Jesus gives way
to the dark; the serpent
digests the egg. Here
on my knees in this stone
church, that is full only
of the silent congregation
of shadows and the sea’s
sound, it is easy to believe
Yeats was right. Just as though
choirs had not sung, shells
have swallowed them; the tide laps
at the Bible; the bell fetches
no people to the brittle miracle
of the bread. The sand is waiting
for the running back of the grains
in the wall into its blond
glass. Religion is over, and
what will emerge from the body
of the new moon, no one
can say.
But a voice sounds
in my ear: Why so fast,
mortal? These very seas
are baptised. The parish
has a saint’s name time cannot
unfrock. In cities that
have outgrown their promise people
are becoming pilgrims
again, if not to this place,
then to the recreation of it
in their own spirits. You must remain
kneeling. Even as this moon
making its way through the earth’s
cumbersome shadow, prayer, too,
has its phases.
R. S. THOMAS
Zero
What time is it?
Is it the hour when the servant
of Pharaoh’s daughter went down
and found the abandoned baby
in the bulrushes? The hour
when Dido woke and knew Aeneas
gone from her? When Caesar
looked at the entrails and took
their signal for the crossing
of the dividing river?
Is it
that time when Aneirin
fetched the poem out of his side
and laid it upon the year’s altar
for the appeasement of envious
gods?
It is no time
at all. The shadow falls
on the bright land and men
launder their minds in it, as
they have done century by
century to prepare themselves for the crass deed.
R. S. THOMAS
The Elm Decline
The crags crash to the tarn; slow–
motion corrosion of scree.
From scooped corries,
bare as slag,
black sykes ooze
through quarries of broken boulders.
The sump of the tarn
slumps into its mosses – bog
asphodel, sundew, sedges –
a perpetual
sour October
yellowing the moor.
Seven
thousand years ago
trees grew
high as this tarn. The pikes
were stacks and skerries
spiking the green,
the tidal surge
of oak, birch, elm,
ebbing to ochre
and the wrackwood of backend.
Then
round the year Three
Thousand BC,
the proportion of elm pollen
preserved in peat
declined from twenty
per cent to four.
Stone axes,
chipped clean from the crag-face,
ripped the hide off the fells.
Spade and plough
scriated the bared flesh,
skewered down to the bone.
The rake flaked into fragments
and kettlehole tarns
were shovelled chock-full
of a rubble of rotting rocks.
Today
electric landslips
crack the rock;
drills tunnel it;
valleys go under the tap.
Dynamited runnels
channel a poisoned rain,
and the fractured ledges
are scoured and emery’d
by wind-to-wind rubbings
of nuclear dust.
Soon
the pikes, the old
bottlestops of lava,
will stand scraped bare,
nothing but air round stone
and stone in air,
ground-down stumps
of a skeleton jaw –
Until
under the scree,
under the riddled rake,
beside the outflow of the reedless lake,
no human eye remains to see
a landscape man
helped nature make.
NORMAN NICHOLSON
Eden Rock
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.
CHARLES CAUSLEY
The Green Man’s Last Will and Testament
In a ragged spinney (sc
heduled
For prompt development as a bijou housing estate)
I saw the green daemon of England’s wood
As he wrote his testament. The grey goose
Had given him one of her quills for a pen;
The robin’s breast was a crimson seal;
The long yellow centipede held a candle.
He seemed like a hollow oak-trunk, smothered with ivy:
At his feet or roots clustered the witnesses,
Like hectic toadstools, or pallid as broom-rape:
Wood-elves – goodfellows, hobs and lobs,
Black Anis, the child-devouring hag,
From her cave in the Dane Hills, saucer-eyed
Phantom dogs, Black Shuck and Barghest, with the cruel nymphs
Of the northern streams, Peg Powler of the Tees
And Jenny Greenteeth of the Ribble,
Sisters of Bellisama, the very fair one.
‘I am sick, I must die,’ he said. ‘Poisoned like Lord Randal
From hedges and ditches. My ditches run with pollution,
My hedgerows are gone, and the hedgerow singers.
The rooks, disconsolate, have lost their rookery:
The elms are all dead of the Dutch pox.
No longer the nightjar churns in the twilit glade,
Nor the owl, like a white phantom, silent-feathered
Glides to the barn. The red-beaked chough,
The Map and the Clock Page 34
