A Kind of Bright Darkness

7/29/2019 A Kind of Bright Darkness

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A Kind of Bright Darkness

Poems and lyrics by Giles Watson

with music by Kathryn Wheeler

2013


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"He has a wonderful sensibility for the layered British landscape and for a kind ofbright darkness."

- Vahni Capildeo


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A Kind of Bright Darkness

There is a stile still standing in the ghost

of a hedge, and a broken gate beside it, openingon the pathless nowhere of a ploughed field.

I don't walk there; nor do I retrace my steps

down the route I did not take to get here.

Cuckoos are silent, so next time, I must be

gone. The nearer ground has lapsed to shadow;

the middle distance echoes with a kind of bright

darkness, as though the slow alchemy of sun

and soil has not made gold, but crumbling crusts

of verdigris. The sky is strewn, as at an augury,

with molten copper: to scry it is to go blind.

This aching transmutation of light into a sightless

knowing is all that I can give you: my hands and feet

have vanished. No one walks. The landscape is in flux.


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Downland Paths

Downland paths are arched to contours;

their flexed backs maned with broomrapesand orchids. I have felt them shudder

when I walked them, as though vexed

by flies. Nostrils flare: sullen holes

where beeches have blown over. There are

vast eyelids lashed with stubble; dewponds

are their glazed corneas. A walker risks

being flipped over by a fetlock, when

the wind hits gale-force. There are trackswhich end in hooves. Approach them

from the wrong angle, and they'll throw you

into a tangle of nettles and whin. You'll

wear them down, but they'll not be broken in.

The picture shows a portion of the back - and one of the

legs - of the Uffington White Horse.


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Downland Mists

Sometimes on the downs, day is postponed,

and at the end of the barley-field, mistmelts into a sea of glumes. The vale

is an etching in glass, a glimpsed mosaic

of pale illuminations; there is no horizon,

or there are many. Old swathes are green

trails leading nowhere. The whole scene

might be sedimentary: a slow settling

of silts and silica beneath the glaze.

Time and space condense, precipitate;

earth, crops and air make a smoked pane

of faded layers - whites, beiges, greys.

Spaces yawn. My soul is formed of chalks,

clays and the failing breath of dawn.


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Ramparts

How many miles of mist-shrouded ramparts

have I walked, soaked to the knees in dew,with the solitary crow ever sentinel

ahead of me on a bare branch, the vale below

invisible, or emerging in puddles of light

as though the clouds were melting ice -

and I have melted too - melded with chalk,

gone eye-high to grasses, become a thistle,

a path, a thorn, moulded myself to contours

blurred by stubble, learned the slow andglacial art of undulations, condensed

life, love and sense into an urchin test

as the crow has gazed, surveyed with his

wise black eye, evaporated into flight?

The picture shows the ramparts of Segsbury Castle,

an Iron Age hill-fort on the Ridgeway above the

Letcombes.


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The Hindleg of the White Horse

The curve of it is perfect: pure, hammered chalk,calcium-coloured, cutting out and then conforming

to the line and sweep of the ancient coombe. Sunlight

enlivens it: a whole landscape's equine embodiment.

Put your ear to the turf: hear the urgent thrum

of his warhorse-heart, white lime coursing through

his pale aorta, and the inrush of downland air

through a blanched trachaea, into loamy lungs.

The downs become an amphitheatre of respiration:

grass-roots get nutrients out of dead bivalves

thrown to ground out of some antediluvian

sea-bottom. Evening sweats out golden oxygen

until the horse's breath is set to spill, like

powdered dreams, out into space from the holy hill.


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The Spine of the Downs

The escarpment lay down to sleep, weary of flight.

Its closed eye became raised ground, flattenedat the summit; a long muzzle probed the Vale.

The furnace in those lungs burned down to a single,

buried cinder, too deep to warm the sward.

The tail, vaned as a stegosaur's, threshed about

a time or two, then subsided into the Manger.

Great, interlocking vertebrae arched themselves,

making Downs, calcified the whole heaving hill

into solid chalk. The breathing shallowed itselfto a whisper. About the hollow, dewy coombe,

dragon-legends echoed. Twayblades split the turf.

Some days, sunlight stimulates the circulation.

The long spine flexes. The creature almost wakens.


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The Moon Above the Downs

The moon gave half of herself over

for the chalking-in, surrenderingto the lapwing's deception. The skylark

eclipsed her, sang, then looped down

to the wind-flattened grass. Hares

caught sight of her, turned bulge-eyed

and bolted crazily, negotiating unseen

mazes. Primeval ways revealed themselves:

paths made by sheep and glaciers. Wind

continued her slow and whittling work,

bearing chalk-dust, spiderlings and seeds

into a stratosphere so immaculate that

the lapwings fluted starward psalms,

and moonglow etched out ancient forms.


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Downland Harvest

Whittled down to stubble, the cut straw reveals

the hills' taut musculature, as though the bladewere practised in the art of making-plain.

The thin skin of earth is stretched, tight

as drum-leather, over every flex and distension.

A bird in flight might pick out striations,

bunched tendons, and high on the escarpment,

ancient scars, soiled and grassed over: the only

angular things for miles. Hillsides are fusiform:

gigantic lines and curves, laid naked, draped

for life-class, one scored with an arching, bleached

tattoo. Cold water-courses source themselves

in groins; armpits bristle with wild oats.

Have patience - wait - and feel the respiration.


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Downland Thorns

They cling to places that can't be tilled -

ramparts, edges of escarpments, sullen slopes -and thrust out thorns with a wise misanthropy,

as if to say, "Axe me, and I'll spill blood."

Only the wind is obeyed: it sculpts them,

wakes them, withers them in the sere,

and when they die, uproots them, rolls

their gorgeous torsoes down the coombes.

Others have a gnarled agreement with gales,

thrust deeper roots, fleck the frozen air

with withered haws, their sagging arms

laden with the sodden wool of lambs.

They earn the permanence of stones,

stark as menhirs guarding ancient tombs.


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Swallows at West Kennet Long Barrow

There were dull susurrations in the clouds,

and a stirring in the ripened wheat,the burial mound sagging under its burden

of wildflowers. Those great sarsens

were dark sentinels, lichen-mottled

and looming at the threshold of the tomb.

As I probed, the swallows flecked out

like smuts stirred from a dormant furnace,

whirling into the atmosphere, the quick,

dissonant chit-chits of their distress

borne thinly on the wind, rising and

plunging whole fathoms, out of fear.

I withdrew. Rain fell. I turned to dust.

Like struck sparks, they swept into their nests.


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A Thistle at Avebury

Rampart, ditch and stone have been here

four or five thousand years; the butterflies,

bees and hoverflies were pupal soup

just days ago, resolving themselves into

miracles of wings and compound eyes.

Tourists are more ephemeral, clouding

like midges, dallying at the Cove, humming

around the Barber Stone, fleeing for pubs

and buses - but it's the thistle I've come for,

with its chalk-riddled roots, stem fibrous

as a hempen rope, and that serried armoury

of spines. I crouch, admire, shudder.

It's already higher than the smaller stones,

spiked for survival, determined not to die.


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Scabious

Let your eyes slip out of focus, and the blooms

are lilac interpunctions in a meadow almost gold.

In a wind, they turn to blurs, and bumblebees

must cling with all six claws, their eyes knocked

by pastel-coloured stamens. The unopened flowers

are a stippled green. Petals break out at their edges,

turn spatulate. At the centres, half-formed corollas

are crosshatched with stamens. Fat spiders crouch,

expecting hoverflies, and haired stems are astir

amongst the longer grasses. Walk through them: a spider

drops insensate; butterflies flit to more distant

flowers. The heat-haze wafts and sways.

Come closer. Stand beside me, with that quietness

of yours, in the gilded meadow all splashed with sky.


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Downland Poppies

The sepals fall. Petals flare, crumpled

as tissue-paper torn from a gift, and a thinfringe of anthers scatters pollen on the wings

of hoverflies. Landscapes recede: chalk

fresh dug for drainage, a blurring slope

of blue-stemmed wheat, a hedgerow marking

a road, recumbent breasts of downland hills

and wind-sculpted beech hangers, all slipping

out of focus. The petals flake away like

filo-pastry, scatter their wilting crimson

on the heated earth, and the haired stems

lengthen, catch themselves in wind, knock

against the sky. Seeds pour out like smoke,

or black ashes from an urn half-unsealed.


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The Meadow

The drier blades are brittle as grasshoppers' legs,

the swathe hissing in the heat. Yellowhammers' voices

punctuate the lazy hums of bumblebees, tweezering

the air with needled crescendos. Purpled knops,

yellow rattles, bright orchis-smudges, sky-echoing

scabious and cranesbills, bow under the weights

of insects: marbled whites, ringlets rich as chocolates,

tortoiseshells flashing open, and pairs of little

skippers, dropping their hindwings as they drink.

Lizards still themselves, heartbeats visible

beneath their skins. Snakes bask on tussocks.

A burnet-moth slips out of a chrysalis, half-way

up a grass-stem, as my soul begins to flit across

the meadow, lit up with memories, ephemeral as a skipper.

Picture by Buffarches.


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Autumn Comes to the Downs

The land becomes an etching, a criss-crossed

panorama of fine-scored lines, painstaking

in its details: chalk-graphs of ploughed

fields, the Ridgeway's own thin scouring,

the sudden swerve in the stubble before

a tower of straw, and the black sides

of the stacks, echoed by shadows obliquely

cast - firm notches filled with welling ink.

Then, it's the way rise leads on to rise -

glimpsed hills in ever thinner striations -

that brings Palmer, Griggs and Sutherland

out with their burins, angle-tints and

florentines: fix-faced men, ghost-engravers

surface-scratching for the spirit of place.


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Downland Sunset

I love it when it all smashes into silhouette.

You'd think the beech branches had turned

to cracks in the enamel - fortuitous breakages -

and gradually the sun scorches its course

down the glass, obliterating smaller twigs

in a network of explosions. Sometimes

it is eclipsed behind some impossible knot,

thicker than a trunk, where the hanger-trees

have coalesced - or perhaps a whole channel

has been bashed out into blackness - great

ruptures in the pane, snaking like rivers

with inky oxbows, whirlpools and ominous blots

of beechwood. If you could walk through soil,

you'd see: questing roots do much the same to chalk.


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Raven

I look down on a raven

In flight above a sea

So still there is no reason

For fear in her or me.

The raven knows of nothing

This moment, but of flight

And air and wind and breathing

And joys of warmth and light,

And though I'm tired of loving

And my own light gutters out

And my heart is torn for leavingAnd my stomach churns with doubt,

She is rising, she is plunging

With no effort and no art

And there's nothing but the flying

In her breastbone, brains and heart.

Could I learn this of the raven

Who is one with wind and sea?

Have I wings, or only reason?

Am I fettered, am I free?


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The Swallow

The world has grown too big,

The firmament too wide:

I could lose you in a moment

Like a leaf borne on the tide,

Like a swallow on a cloudy day,

Like a feather in the storm,

Like a flame that's fading in the grate

Though I'm longing to be warm.

Leaf, come drifting back to meLike some miracle of fate;

Swallow, turn and fly my way -By autumn, it's too late;

Feather, blow against my face -

I'll feel your touch at night;

Flame, rekindle in my hearth -

There is no other light.


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The Swift

I held her in my hand

When she had no strength to fly;

In her dilated pupils

Were reflections of the sky.

Her claws were clenched and helpless;

Her wings were folded up.

She made no show of struggle,

Secure within my grip.

I held her in my hand;

She had rested overnight,And when my fingers opened

She turned towards the light.

She went off in an upward arc -

I knew she lived to fly -

And soon a flock of othersHad joined her in the sky.

I held you in my armsWhen you had no strength to fight;

In your dilated pupils

Were the echoes of the night.

Your hands were clenched and helpless

And tears etched your face;


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You showed no inclination

For leaving my embrace.

I held you in my arms.

When time was right, I let

My hold on you grow tender,

And I knew you would forget.

I only ask, my swift one,

Now you have shaken free:

With sky-winds in your pinions,

You'll fly once over me.


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Too Much Like a Burr

I know I'm too much like a burr,

Though you don't seem to mind -

I wonder, do you chafe sometimes,Or is your heart too kind?

I cling to you like velcro when

The path is spiked with seeds;

I'll be there in the winter when

The wind bends down the reeds.

Those little hooks that hold me fastAre loyalty unbroken,

And where my flower used to beAre cares that bloom unspoken.

I know I'm too much like a burr,

And now the going's rough,

I wonder why you've never paused

A while - to pluck me off.


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Hoverflies

I saw two hoverflies attend

A willowherb in bloom.

One perched to drink and would not shiftTo give the other room.

The other levelled in the air

Unable to alight,

But fixed his eyes and kept the flower

Steady in his sight.

Satisfied, the drinker droppedHalf-senseless by the way;

I cannot tell what happened nextBecause I did not stay,

But by my heart, I hope the other

Sought no deeper share,

But stared with longing all his life

And lingered in the air.

One was like a constant friend,

One like a passing lover:

One glad to drink and and fall away,And one content to hover.


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The Wild Pear

I lay beneath the wild pear

At the mowing of the meadow

And in a moment, must have been

Asleep beneath its shadow,

For it was but a sapling now -

The one spared by the scythe -

And lovers danced: a swarthy swain;

A maiden light and lithe.

They tasted of the wild pear;He spat, and she turned pale.

The little fruit he cast away

As bitter as betrayal.

She breathed the blight of cold distrust

And withered every shoot;

He took the axe of wayward love

And felled it at the root.

My dog it was who wakened me,

Nuzzling my face -

In time to find the wild pearWas gone without a trace.

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Crab Apples

She meets him in October; he loves her by November -

By the next September, it burns down to an ember.

Love is less than logic; he knows that it is wrong:

The flowers smell like sugar; the fruit will bite the tongue.

He saw her first in autumn; she loved him by the winter -

It was the chill that caught him, the snow that dragged her under.

She thought that love would ripen; he hoped a while too long.

The flowers smelt like sugar; the fruit soon bit the tongue.

"I met you by the wayside; I kissed you by the hedge,But the touch of tongue on lips was all an empty pledge.

The petals fell; it came to fruit; it seemed as sweet as song.

The flowers smelt like sugar; sour fruit bit my tongue."

"Love is a green apple; friendship is a flower -

But friendship lasts a lifetime, and love a little hour.

I was yearning to take root with you, but I did not belong.

I thought you'd taste like sugar, but you turned and bit my tongue."

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The Tip of the Briar

The root of the briar can weather the frost

And live through the drought, let the sun do its worst,

Rotted and knotted, dug up and regrown,Dark at the heartwood, harder than bone.

The stem of the briar can flex in the gale,

Grim and impervious, harsh as a flail.

You will not break through it; by tangle and thorn,

The briar will leave you bleeding and torn.

The flower of the briar is blown in a day;Bitter winds carry the petals away.

The hip of the briar is tender indeedUntil you bite into the fibres and seeds.

I'm harsh as the briar, for seasons have turned:

I have been harvested, frozen and burned -

These, my defences, lest love take its grip,

And leave me as tender, as green as the tip.

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Walking Barefoot

My instep curves to meet the flint

Protruding from the path;

The straw slips between my toes -The stubble of the swath -

A burr catches on my leg;

My trouser-cuff is torn

A thistle lies across the way;

I leap to miss the thorns.

I turn aside, where others walk,For nettles in the grass,

And patience finds a winding way;It opens, and I pass,

And climb down to the earth-cold spring

Gushing from the chalk,

And on the sarsens, leave a trail

That glistens as I walk.

So that is why the ancient hill

Thrills me to the heart,

And every pitted standing stoneBecomes a work of art,

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For though the bramble and the briar

Conspire to make me stall

I'd rather pluck a thorn or two

Than never feel at all.

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The Knotted Tendril

The hum of bees at bindweed flowers,

Tremulous as love,

Fills my heart with honey.The dragonflies above

Are hawking, darting, perching fast

Upon a bindweed stem:

And somehow they persist, and live -

Yet no one cares for them,

And where the bindweed seeks to choke

The nettle, out of spite,It fills the humming, shadowed glade

With flowers, ghostly-white,

And sends a tendril on a quest

For stems that are not there:

That is why it cannot helpCurling into air.

It cannot grip, it cannot hold,Though it is long and lithe:

It looks for something to enfold

And all it does is writhe,

Or lovingly, it chokes itself

On what it has not got

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By gyring on and grasping air

And ending in a knot.

Ending in a knot, I stop

With nowhere left to twist:I've strangled everything I am

And yet I still exist.

The dragonflies will perch on me

When the glade is lighter

But noontide has no remedy;

The knot grows ever tighter.

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A Feather

A titmouse dropped a feather

Upon the village green:

Be sure, there is no otherSign of where she's been;

For she has flown - another

Is growing in its place -

And of her swift departure

There is no further trace.

I look into the future,I hold it to my eye;

She's not inclined to bother -She only wants to fly.

I stoop each day to gather

Whatever quill may fall:

I only wonder whether

I'll ever find them all.

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The Elm-Man

This man's like the silver birch:

Papered all about;

He grows fastest in the gladeBut rots from inside out.

That man's like the downland beech:

Bronzed against the sky,

Stolid 'til the lightning strikes;

Then he'll split and die.

Yonder's like the darkling yew:He lives on, huge and hollow,

Yet no lovely thing survivesThe poison of his shadow.

But I am like a skeleton elm,

And here I raise my head:

I come up green from underground

Although you thought me dead,

And though I'll never make a tree

And always will be dying,

I live in hope you'll care for me,And never give up trying.

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The Preening Grebe

Pride spilt from the preening grebe

As sun spilt through his wake,

His haloed head an icon inThe surface of the lake.

He shook the water from his bill

Like pearls spilt from a string,

And all the dazzling ripples

Moved outward in a ring.

His lover trailed behind him,Drawn onward in a trance,

And in the lucent water

The grebes began to dance,

And all was spilt with radiance,

Their feathers edged with gilt,

The waves as bright as gladness,

The troughs as dark as silt,

For beauty spills unheeding

Like a splash that blinds the sight,

And love that lasts a momentSpills all the world with light.

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Thistledown

It's a wonder to watch the ants

Emerging from their mound

Wearing each four flimsy wings.They were confined to ground,

I thought, but, to my delight,

Those whose lives were made for earth

Express their loves in flight.

It's joyous to see the thistledown

Emulating clouds,

Or to watch the spiderlingsEmerging out of shrouds -

So small, a little gust can be

Enough to lift them off the world

And set their spirits free.

I am a globe of thistledown,

A little ant with wings:

An easy thing to crush, or drown,But something in me sings

Despite any loss or pain:

I hope one day to find the sky

And not touch down again.

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The Bee at the Balsam

The bee at the balsam pushed open the door,

Enclosed on three sides, with one way to withdraw,

In a nectaried bliss, his eyes veiled in pink;

The world disappeared as he started to drink,

Enwombed or entombed in a state of delight,

In a tissue of flesh suffused with soft light.

The buzz of his wings touched a climax of pitch;

Powdered and pollened, he started to itch,

And bliss turned to panic - so when will he learn?

Once you're inside, there is no room to turn.

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Peacock Butterfly

You flashed your wings at me; I was frightened by your eyes.

I might have sought the shade in fear of your disguise,

But then you disappeared, and folded into bark,And while the eyes were closed, I came out from the dark,

And watched them snapping open, like leaves inside a book,

And blue and black and golden, you transfixed me with one look.

Peacock butterfly - like a dreamer, like a sigh,

Like a grace that whispers by: look upon me.

Peacock butterfly - like a love that flits away,

Like a hope that will not stay: far beyond me.

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Beech Pollard

What should I think? She bends her back

Like a dancer gone to leaf:

She might pirouette for joy;She may arch her back for grief.

I've come a hundred times to see her;

I love each blemish in her form,

Yet I cannot claim to read her:

Is she cold, or is she warm -

Is she too weighed down with green,Is she longing for the sere,

Does she wait, and wish me gone,Does she weep, and want me near?

I cannot know unless she tells me:

She's inscrutable and calm.

If she wishes to repel me,

Why is she opening her arms?

I've no idea if she forgives me,

Or what she thinks I may be worth.

Will she dance when she outlives me,Or mourn me when I've gone to earth?

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Boundaries

The rocks are different sizes;

There are some that we must break.

We'll build the wall togetherIf it's the only thing we make.

We'll keep the stone between us

Dale and hillside, mile on mile,

I know when I come back alone

I'll be searching for a stile.

You're busy with your billhook,

And the light gleams at its edgeAs I bend myself to plashing

On the dark side of the hedge.

The thorns we lay beween us

Put our constancy on trial;

When I come this way tomorrowI'll be searching for a stile.

You pound the fencepost into earth;I reach to twist the wire.

I wonder, is your heart unscathed

Or riven by desire?

The barbs we stretch between us,

The scars we gain the while -

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I hope they'll be forgotten

In your arms, beyond the stile.

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The Snow in the Stubble

The snow in the stubble,

The tracks of a hare,

The marks of a field-mouse,The crows path through air,

The rime on the oak branch,

The frost on a stone:

This is the way, though I walk it alone.


The path by the bridge,

The spraint of the foxAt the edge of the ridge,

The autumn-shed antler,

The pale, bleached bone:

This is the way, though I walk it alone.


The snow in the brake,

The snow that deceivesAnd covers a lake:

This way of bewilderment,

Heart overthrown This is the way, though I walk it alone.

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How Like a Cocoon

How like a cocoon is the spider's larder -

Death and rebirth out of order -

Cradled, swaddled, entombed completeWithin a loving winding sheet.

How like a spider is this pent desire

With its spinnerettes and its fangs of fire.

I die. I wake; the barb impales.

I rend the silk with my fingernails.

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Downland Sunset

The grass sways in my line of sight,

a stir against the sky:

its filaments are fringed with lightand still I wish to die -

die into the shadowed coombe

where once I dared to walk,

my bones as red as setting suns,

my flesh as white as chalk -

die before the sun can swerveinto the realm of glass,

surrender heart and brain and nerveand live into the grass,

until my love and thought and sense

are nothing but an essence,

desire a gush of chlorophyll,

and hope - an inflorescence.

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Downland Butterflies

In wide-eyed sleep, the butterflies

take sky into their wings,

leach colours from the blade of grassthat stirs and idly swings

upon the rampart of the fort

where no one cares to mow,

and where the work of wind and field

is like an ebb and flow -

where cares are only foolish thingslost in downland light,

where joys are instincts on the breeze,flitting into flight,

where mottled wings of butterflies

are treasures none can keep,

where sky and seeds and open downs

are dreams in wide-eyed sleep.

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The Ant on the Wild Thyme

The ant on the wild thyme

is a thing of wonder,

her eyes the size of pollen-grains,her touch precise and tender.

The wild thyme's a world to her

and though her waist is slender

she walks between the dew and rain

and does not heed the thunder.

Her feelers touch the trembling pink;she makes the anthers shudder

she's imperturbable. She scornsthe hawk and writhing adder,

and underground, a thousand more

are piling up the plunder:

the seeds, the pods, the pollen grains,

the time, the dew, the wonder.

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The Orchids are Going Over

The orchids are going over, scorched

by a sudden fortnight of relentless sun.

Today is cooler, but the damage is doneand the field is empty of everyone:

they turned away when the petals withered.

I could have brought you; said, "Look,

here." A little furrow of observation

would have touched your brow. I'd have gone

to any trouble, loved you for too long,

but summer turned and the petals withered.

The orchids are going over. Seeds

turn dry. Pods crack open in the sun.

There's a hint of thunder. It's all done:

I stand bereft. The colour turns in every one:each petal browned, each memory withered.

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P t If


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Pentre Ifan

Pentre Ifan defies sense;

is a stone sermon on dying.

You trust it, or are crushed.

The rock is held suspended

in gorse-yellow air,

buttressed by grass-roots

hooked invisibly to clouds.

They strain downwards in clots

of cumulonimbus to hold it;

kestrels fan it skyward with

incessant hoverings; lizards

put their backs into it.

The soil that held it up

eroded before Christ; dry-

stone walls were crumbled.

Chieftains, foetal

in repose, had their bones

nuzzled by lambs.

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Death of a Willow


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Death of a Willow

Down one side of the river, the great willows,

with their wet, white wood and submerged roots

are cheating death. Left unpollarded, top-heavy,they rend down their hollowed centres, then grow

horizontally, rooting from their trunks, fledging

lines of saplings: lithe and pliable as the necks

of swans. Others bulk themselves into fortresses,

rinded, wrinkled as elephants, or split themselves

and go on growing, leaning outwards on furrowed

elbows. One grew isolated, in a swamped field,

a vast turret of grimness, fissures and decay.Overnight, half of its head peeled away - lay

sagging on a strip of its own skin. Elders

colonised its crown; a thorn seedling spiked

its way through the ruptured wood-flesh, until

fire licked out the interior, and lapwings

fled the field, frighted by gaspings too deep

for us to hear. The splinters lie, bleached

as the jawbones of whales, bristling withshags of baleen. The lapwings plummet, cry;

the grass-swell echoes with an undulating sigh.

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Valley of the Ock


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Valley of the Ock

The Horse himself is a source:

chalky water spills from his eye,

cascades down the marks of glaciation,puddles itself under Dragon Hill,

and courses into the copse, gushing

with a cold profligacy. There is

a burgeoning of waterweed, and ditches

form a hundred confluences. Uffington

is fen reclaimed in the Bronze Age;

flint tools work their way from

alluvial soils; there are bits of potswhich predate Christ. That church,

with its lancet windows and octagonal

tower, is an innovation, and the barn,

built of breeze blocks, merely ephemeral:

its bare rooftree a temporary perch

for buzzards and rooks. And still

the dark-watered Ock digs a deeper

channel, chokes itself in silt, floods,is dug out again, and the hillsides

do obeisance. You can rip up hedgerows,

cover whole fields with acres of rape,

cut down the oak, neglect the dying ash,

and the Ock will wind on after you

have gone to ground, and all your cash

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is meaningless as it always was Be still


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is meaningless as it always was. Be still

and know: hubris cannot stop the flow.

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Above Bishopstone


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Above Bishopstone

There is a skylark above each hill, weaving

needled trills with notes of others, his bill

a little shuttle of joys. Swathes wendthrough the wheat: pathways for hares - bent,

ephemeral, dying into the gilding. The village

sleeps, groined in a coombe, still and glinting

with the gabble of the chalk-stream. Between

here and there, the landscape takes a plunge,

goes sub-glacial: gouged and fissured, the grass

whiskered as a fox's chin. Sheep regard me

with a chilled indifference, hunch their backsagainst the wind. The sky begins to glower.

Here I sat with two friends, looking out

over Oxfordshire, a year ago, eating bread -

where the landmarks have worn themselves in.

We perched above the lynchets - just here,

where I cannot sit again. Silence descends:

the larks muted. I am not quite here: I came

a wraith-pale fetch, breathless, formless, numb.

My ghost-eyes search the ground for crumbs.

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The Thinking-Path


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g

It begins like a deer-track, at a tangent

to the Ridgeway, where a stand of mugwort

greys the verge. The upward gradientof the trail is just enough to tense

the thighs and make me breathe a little

faster. That chalky wayside is the place

to dump awhile this wreckage of cares,

shrug it off like a knapsack full

of stones, where campions splash

the hedge with spindle-pink, the grass

abristle with cranesbills and burrs.There is a loving, breathless listing:

nettles, agrimony, burnet, weld,

wild strawberries and St. John's Wort;

then the path becomes a tunnel: hawthorn,

blackthorn, elder, dogwood, sycamore,

whitebeam, beech. Ivies, bryonies,

blackberries bind the whole in living

wicker. Self-heals, restharrows, docks,

thistles, ragworts, buttercups, silverweeds,

crossworts, milfoils, toadflax and rattle,

bent-necked scabious, plantains, melilot,

willowherb, toadflax, fool's gentians,

a rash of knapweed, hogweed, gangly ragwort

and the gone-over remains of orchids

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and cowslips blend with the flittings


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p g

of marbled whites, blues and speckled woods.

Now I have arrived - back at the spinning-

place, with half my self erased; the otherwhirling into brightness as the great

grassy wave of downland looks ready to break

across the vale, my light soul at its crest.

I lie looking up at the catstail-tufts

of grasses, and a yellowhammer sings.

That is when the rain comes. I could

descend, pause, take up the old swagof separation and blank-faced pain, or stay,

eyes blind with raindrops, soaked

to my too-thin stretch of skin, careless,

dreamless, thoughtless, formless,

endless, empty, melting into ground.

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Convolvulus


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The vale is wakening, but up here

the fringe of the downs skulks

under clouds. Butterflies sleep,their vacant eyes jewelled with dew;

dark, uneven spots, deep beneath

the froth of compound lenses,

are strangely magnified. Grass

seems to breathe; stamens quake

on long, wet inflorescences,

and the bindweed, seeing its chance,

twines an extra inch. I am suckedinto its vortex, held between

the lips of sweating petals, licked

into a dreaming white oblivion,

and the complex, fleshy pistil

thrusts and divides in a hazed,

silk-veined interior so pure

it fades to green. From here

I go down into the xylem, phloem,

urgent stem and plunging root -

into the chalk that bore them -

into the eyes and groins and

pert nipples of urchin-fossils,

into the corals that flexed

sensitive tentacles with stinging

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cells when the downland was


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a reef, and the vale was sunk

and drowned.

And out of the thinbrown smattering of topsoil, I

marvel how orchids are made, how

the sainfoin masters strange

alchemies, and the restharrow

distils the earth to pinkness -

until the bindweed drags it down.

The clouds divide. I look up

from out of the flower's soft

orifice, half-choked, spluttering,

blinded by the sun.

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The Red-Flowered Thorn


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For too long, I ignored you, when you were gaunt

and leafless, and the blackbird stropped his bill

where the groins of bark were worn. I wrote songsto the yew, praised the maplike forms of lichens,

scrawled eulogies in grass among the gravestones.

I tried to catch the tones of church-bells, found

words for shadows, wore paths across the lawn,

drew down the church-tower's grave octagonal form,

but the truth of you eluded me. It's only now,

with my heart half-set awry and my back part-turned

to go, that this strange way of noticing comes

over me, and your blossoms, warm as spilt blood,

spray about the churchyard wall. I've been bitten,

thorn. I cannot stop to staunch you any more.

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Bliss


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You can forget about civilization: I've got

this. Orchids in the inebriate light

of evening send a bright splatter of pulsesthrough my extremities. It is as though

Pollock has hit the marsh-edges with his

paints, his swing, and a half-swigged bottle

of whisky. Inflorescences lean and bend

like slashes of acrylic, plastered against

the grasses. Lips drip with pigments; flowers

twist to turn themselves upright; pollinia

quest at the nubs of their own silent yelloworgasms, pulsing against the pastel colours.

The orchids come in spurts and purple tints.

The sun goes nearly down. The horizon tilts.

Inspired by orchids of the genus Dactylorhiza at Dry Sanford Pit, Oxfordshire, and by Katherine Mansfield's

gorgeous short story, 'Bliss': "... you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss! - as though

you had suddenly swallowed a piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a

shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe... Oh, is there no way you can express it

without being 'drunk and disorderly'? How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it

shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?"

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Buttercups


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Even the attendant insects take on their glamour,

shimmering and burnished, and the five-petalled,

five-sepalled flowers have an enamelled gleam,attractive to compound eyes. There are five

nectaries each for probing tongues; the field

hums with metallic wings. But it's the way the sun

glances off them, in that rare appearance between

clouds, that sets off the perfect radiance.

Every step, I am wading through this elaborate,

trembling, butter-coloured smear of loveliness,

and the crows fleck the sky like smuts, jackdaws

clacking down the chimney-pots above the house

where the ghost-rhymer sits, and the ancient gate

swings and claps, counting the petals of buttercups.

The right hand house in the picture is Garrard's

Farmhouse, Uffington: once the home of John Betjeman.

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Bluebells and Hazel Coppice


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It did not happen entirely naturally:

there was a quiet consipiracy of deer

and human beings. The sapling treeswere grazed to ground, letting the sky in

to spill itself. Hazels were sawn off,

level with the earth, the wattle hauled away.

That was when everything spun itself into

a blue and green epiphany: ferns crimping

upwards like scrolls of violins, yellow

archangels opening wings and singing,

stitchworts trimming the edges like psalms

of lacework. Then the hazels sent out

their electricity, and the bluebells opened

themselves: a firmament thrown to earth.

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Stitchworts


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My grandmother could make embroideries

bloom from her needle, a quiet detachment

erasing her emotion, her bifocals angleddownwards. The thread would loop and tug

to the rhythm of her breathing; bluebells

or peacocks' feathers would form themselves,

like ringlets of sweet-scented smoke

from my grandfather's pipe. They never said

a word. The rocking chairs went back and forth

like shuttles. The clock kept time. Coals

settled in the grate. Now, only summer

can satin-stitch like her, and I cannot find her

in letters or photographs: only in the way

stitchworts thread themselves among ferns.

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Robins in Spring


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Last summer's umbels are broken now,

interwoven with newer growth. Robins

twine bird-claws with stems and barbs.

They flit unscathed through snagging

weaves of brambles, disappear behind

lime-white lichened stones, re-emerge

among gorse-spines and stiles: whin

flowers gilding winds with fragrance,

breathing haloes of midges. Every thorn

wears a nimbus, through which sun-stung

robins burst in flurries of wings and

pinions, piercing insects with bills

stropped by ice and hunger. The wasp

sting quivers. Spring is on the cusp.

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Skippers


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Little, aimless, fluttering flecks above the sward

might once have been elm-seeds on an eddy - but they're

skippers, flitting from scabious to knapweed totufted vetch, their stub-bodies stuffed with life.

Club-antennaed, like butterflies, they settle

splay-winged as moths, the one raised vein

in each forewing standing clear above the scales.

I wish I was walking with you now, in an English

meadow, with the grasshoppers hissing, and everythingelse going impressionistic - except for lips, and eyes

and skippers.

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Green Aeshna


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Green Aeshna on the wrong side of my window,

blue-gazed as a sunspilt lake, how you zazz

and batter in resisting your escape.

Green Aeshna, your wings of honeycombed cellophane

bash out their little windowpanes. Your eyesquashed

brain rings loud with glazed concussions.

Green Aeshna, like an alien god, grappling

with my curtain-rod, sit still. I approach you

with saucepan and magazine. My intent's benign.

Green Aeshna, scooped up flash and angry -

with glance and frazz as fierce as a bite:

your freedom is my desperate design.

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Nettles

In Memoriam: Dylan Thomas and Edward Thomas


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y

They're a sea of chlorophyll and histamines

between you and the praise-fields; a symphony

of stinging hairs. You could wade through

them, your skin stippled with a constellation

of welts - undergo a thorough smelting. There's

something tender in their viciousness: a merest

brush is enough to set them off in a thousand

tiny paroxysms of impalement, a whole rash

of miniature smitings. A slight breath of steam

would wilt them, subvert their primed hydraulics

so that each spike fell flaccid, but as it is

you might as well traverse a vale of needles,

each one a prick of conscience, as the white-

socked, heedless horses go flashing into light.

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The Altons


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And whether Alton, not Manningford, it was

My memory could not decide, because

There was both Alton Barnes and Alton Priors.

All had their churches, graveyards, farms, and byres,

Lurking to one side up the paths and lanes-Edward Thomas, Lob (1915)

The living folk I met had too few words:

Five beaters waving flags to scare the birds,

A girl who barely spoke, her mother

Laughing, but not really saying. The other

Waskeyholder to the church. Under that

Trapdoor, theres a fallen stone, lying flat

And dusty. New Age sorts leave behind

Crystals heres one we dont exactly mind,

But its strange. And they hang ribbons

From the yew, for obscure reasons.

Edward Thomas? No, I didnt know.

Was he from hereabouts? Did I showYou this Last Judgement, done in brass?

Outside, it is raining. The sodden grass

Squelches underfoot, and the brook

Is swollen. I sloshed through it. Rooks

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Called, and a woodpecker chipped away,

The wooden turnstiles slimed with rain.


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There are two churches: Alton Priors

And Alton Barnes. A hedge of briars

And hazels divides the ground. A cobbled

Path joins them. Ghost-men have ambled

Down it, paused to see the Horse, looked

Up at Adams Grave, lit pipes, linkedArms with ghost-women, and disappeared.

I walked there, weary, my eyes bleared

With wet. The landscape seemed to quiver.

When the old mans speech was over

I went outside, and stood before the yew.It was bigger than the church, needles strewn

On bare soil, and split in two right down

The trunk. Gaping holes had grown

In its bulwark. I glimpsed the window

Through the cleft, and from a shadow

He stepped out. It passed my ear,

The shell. I fell, and woke up here,

Cold as a buried sarsen. These rootsSeemed to burrow through my boots.

At night, the owl, a silhouetted shape,

Calls me. There was no escape

After all. The barns, graveyards, byres,

Curving downs, barrows, nestled spires

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Were churned up in a wide morass

Of mud, guns, decaying bones. Pass


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Me some tobacco. You are kind. Life

Was mourning in itself. I didnt loveMy wife; there were others. At times

I preferred the lapwings cry to the arms

Of any lover. I walked out alone,

Watched, waited as you have done.

I looked up where the whiff of smoke

Coiled among the branches. I spoke

Calmly to the wind, but he was gone.

The ground oozed. The rain pattered on.

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Forget-Me-Not

" " h h d


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"Forget me not," I thought you said,

and your gaze was straight and true.

I wondered, by your garden's edge,

could I disremember you?

The light refracted at your heart:

a warmth that radiated through.

"No, I dare not let them fade:

those powdered hues of pink and blue."

"Forget me not," I hoped you said

as the summer bleached to white:

it was the hope that startled me,

like a swallow, into flight.

"Forget me not": I know it's true,

little flower of grace and light.

The time must come, whate'er I do

when I remember in the night.

"Forget me not," I know you said,

and I was aching with the needto cry that I could not forget -

so deeply planted was the seed

that it would germinate in drought

or in soil too choked by weeds

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for any other plant. "Forget

me not," you said - and I agreed.


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Documents

A Kind of Bright Darkness