Poems 1960-2000 (13 page)

The power speaks only out of sleep and blackness

no use looking for the sun

what is not present cannot be illumined

Katherine’s lungs, remember, eaten by disease

but Mary’s fingers too

devoured and she goes on writing

The water speaks from the rocks, the cavern speaks,

where water halloos through it

this happens also in darkness

A steep bit here, up from the valley

to the terraces, the path eroded by water

Now listen for the voice

These things wane with the vital forces

he said, little having waned in him

except faith, and anger had replaced it

One force can be as good as another

we may not think so; but channelled

in ways it has eaten out; issuing

into neither a pool nor the sea

but a shapely lake afloat with wooded islands

a real water and multiplied on maps

which can be read in the sunlight; for the sun

will not be stopped from visiting

and the lake exists and the wind sings over it.

It is not only the eye that is astonished.

Predictable enough in rainbow weather,

the drenched air saturated with colours,

that over each valley should hang an arc

and over this long lake the longest.

Knowing how it happens is no defence.

They stop the car and are delighted.

But some centre of gravity is upset,

some internal gauge or indicator

fed once again with the routine question

‘This place, now: would it be possible

to live here?’ buzzes, rolls

and registers ‘Yes. Yes; perhaps.’

‘What are you looking at?’ ‘Looking.’

High screed sides; possibly a raven,

he thought. Bracken a fuzz of rust

on the iron slopes of the fell

(off the edge of their map, nameless)

and the sky clean after rain.

At last he put the binoculars down,

drove on further to the north.

It was a good day in the end:

the cold lake lapping against pines,

and the square-built northern town idle

in sunlight. It seemed they had crossed borders.

Driving south became a return

to nests of trees in ornamental colours.

Leaving, he left her the binoculars

to watch her wrens and robins until spring.

I am the dotted lines on the map:

footpaths exist only when they are walked on.

I am gravel tracks through woodland; I am

field paths, the muddy ledge by the stream,

the stepping-stones. I am the grassy lane

open between waist-high bracken where sheep

fidget. I am the track to the top

skirting and scaling rocks. I am the cairn.

Here on the brow of the world I stop,

set my stone face to the wind, and turn

to each wide quarter. I am that I am.

Finding I’ve walked halfway around Loughrigg

I wonder: do I still want to go on?

Normally, yes. But now, hardly recovered

from ’flu, and feeling slightly faint in the sun,

dazzled by early spring, I hesitate.

How far is it around this sprawling fell?

I’ve come perhaps three miles. Will it be four,

or less, the Grasmere way? It’s hard to tell.

The ups and downs undo one’s feel for distance;

the soaring views distract from what’s at hand.

But here’s the tarn, spangled with quick refractions

of sunlight, to remind me where I stand.

There’s no way on or back except by walking

and whichever route I choose involves a climb.

On, then, no question: if I find myself

lacking in energy, at least I’ve time.

It will be cooler when I’m facing north –

frost often lingers there – and I’ll take heart

from gazing down again on Rydal Water.

The point of no return was at the start.

Mist like evaporating stone

smudges the bracken. Not much further now.

Below on the other side of the village

Windermere tilts its pewter face

over towards me as I move downhill.

I’ve walked my boots clean in gravelly streams;

picking twigs of glittering holly

to take home I’ve lacerated my fingers

(it serves me right: holly belongs on trees).

Now as the early dusk descends behind me

dogs in the kennels above Nook Lane

are barking, growling, hysterical at something;

and from the housing estate below

a deep mad voice bellows ‘Wordsworth! Wordsworth!’

These coloured slopes ought to inspire,

as much as anything, discretion:

think of the egotisms laid bare,

the shy campaigns of self-projection

tricked out as visits to Dove Cottage

tellingly rendered. Every year

some poet comes on pilgrimage

along these valleys. Read his verses:

each bud of delicate perception

sprouts from a blossoming neurosis

too well watered by Grasmere –

in which he sees his own reflection.

He sits beside a tarn or ghyll

sensitively eating chocolate

and eyes Helm Crag or Rydal Fell

plotting some novel way to use it.

Most of the rocks are wreathed by now

with faded rags of fluttering soul.

But the body finds another function

for crags and fells, as Wordsworth knew

himself: they offer hands and feet

their own creative work to do.

‘I climb because I can’t write,’

one honest man said. Better so.

Those thorn trees in your poems, Alistair,

we have them here. Also the white cauldron,

the basin of your waterfall. I stare

at Stock Ghyll Force and can’t escape your words.

You’d love this place: it’s your Central Otago

in English dress – the bony land’s the same;

and if the Cromwell Gorge is doomed to go

under a lake, submerging its brave orchards

for cheap electric power, this is where

you’d find a subtly altered image of it,

its cousin in another hemisphere:

the rivers gentler, hills more widely splayed

but craggy enough. Well. Some year you’ll manage

to travel north, as I two years ago

went south. Meanwhile our sons are of an age

to do it for us: Andrew’s been with you

in Wellington. Now I’m about to welcome

our firstborn Gregory to England. Soon,

if Andrew will surrender him, he’ll come

from grimy fetid London – still my base,

I grant you, still my centre, but with air

that chokes me now each time I enter it –

to this pure valley where no haze but weather

obscures the peaks from time to time, clean rain

or tender mist (forgive my lyrical

effusiveness: Wordsworthian locutions

are carried on the winds in what I call

my this year’s home. You’ve had such fits yourself.)

So: Gregory will come to Ambleside

and see the lakes, the Rothay, all these waters.

Two years ago he sat with me beside

the Clutha, on those rocks where you and I

did our first timid courting. Symmetry

pleases me; correspondences and chimes

are not just ornament. And if I try

too hard to emphasise the visual echoes

between a place of mine and one of yours

it’s not only for art’s sake but for friendship:

five years of marriage, twenty of divorce

are our foundation. It occurred to me

in August, round about the twenty-third,

that we’d deprived ourselves of cake, champagne,

a silver tea-service, the family gathered –

I almost felt I ought to send a card.

Well, that can wait: it won’t be long before

you have my blessings on your twentieth year

with Meg; but let this, in the meantime, be for

our older link through places and your poems.

Snow on the tops: half the day I’ve sat at the window

     staring at fells made suddenly remote

by whiteness that disguises them as high mountains

     reared behind the bracken-covered slopes

of others whose colour yesterday was theirs.

     In the middle distance, half-stripped trees

have shed pink stains on the grass beneath them.

     That other pinkness over Windermere

is the setting sun through cloud. And in the foreground

     birds act out their various natures

around the food I’ve set on the terrace wall:

     the plump chaffinch eats on steadily

even in a hail-shower; tits return when it’s over

     to swing on their bacon-rind; a dunnock hops

picking stray seeds; and the territorial robin,

     brisk, beady-eyed, sees them all off.

I am not at all sure that this is the real world

     but I am looking at it very closely.

Is landscape serious? Are birds? But they are fading

     in dusk, in the crawling darkness. Enough.

Knowing no way to record what is famous

     precisely for being unrecordable,

I draw the curtains and settle to my book:

     Dr William Smith’s
First Greek Course
,

Exercise Fourteen: third declension nouns.

     My letters, awkward from years of non-use,

sprinkle over the page like birds’ footprints,

     quaint thorny symbols, pecked with accents:

as I turn the antique model sentences:

     The vines are praised by the husbandmen.

The citizens delight in strife and faction.

     The harbour has a difficult entrance.

Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face

catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes

with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well:

that was a metropolitan vanity,

wanting to look young for ever, to pass.

I was never a Pre-Raphaelite beauty,

nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy

men who need to be seen with passable women.

But now that I am in love with a place

which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,

happy is how I look, and that’s all.

My hair will turn grey in any case,

my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken,

and the years work all their usual changes.

If my face is to be weather-beaten as well

that’s little enough lost, a fair bargain

for a year among lakes and fells, when simply

to look out of my window at the high pass

makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what

my soul may wear over its new complexion.

He is lying on his back watching a kestrel,

his head on the turf, hands under his neck,

warm air washing over his face,

and the sky clear blue where the kestrel hovers. 

A person comes with a thermometer.

He watches a ceiling for three minutes.

The person leaves. He watches the kestrel again

his head pressed back among the harebells.

Today he will go over to Langdale.

He springs lightly in his seven-league boots

around the side of Loughrigg

bouncing from rock to rock in the water-courses

evading slithery clumps of weed, skipping

like a sheep among the rushes

coursing along the curved path upward

through bracken, over turf to a knoll

and across it, around and on again

higher and higher, glowing with exaltation

up to where it all opens out.

That was easy. And it was just the beginning.

They bring him tea or soup.

He does not notice it. He is busy

identifying fungi in Skelghyll Wood,

comparing them with the pictures in his mind:

Purple Blewit, Yellow Prickle Fungus,

Puffball, Russula, two kinds of Boletus –

the right weather for them.

And what are these little pearly knobs

pressing up among the leaf-mould?

He treads carefully over damp grass,

patches of brilliant moss, pine-needles,

hoping for a Fly Agaric.

Scarlet catches his eye. But it was only

reddening leaves on a bramble.

And here’s bracken, fully brown,

and acorns. It must be October.

What is this high wind coming,

leaves leaping from the trees to bite his face?

A storm. He should have noticed the signs.

But it doesn’t matter. Ah, turn into it,

let the rain bite on the warm skin too.

Cold. Suddenly cold. Or hot.

A pain under his breastbone;

and his feet are bare. This is curious.

Someone comes with an injection.

They have brought Kurt Schwitters to see him,

a clumsy-looking man in a beret

asking for bits of stuff to make a collage.

Here, take my stamp-collection

and the letters my children wrote from school

and this photograph of my wife. She’s dead now.

You are dead too, Kurt Schwitters.

This is a day for sailing, perhaps,

coming down from the fells to lake-level;

or for something gentler: for idling

with a fishing-line and listening to water;

or just for lying in a boat

on a summer evening in the lee of a shore

letting the wind steer, leaving the hull

to its own course, the waves to lap it along.

But where now suddenly? Dawn light,

peaks around him, shadowy and familiar,

tufts of mist over a tarn below.

Somehow he is higher than he intended;

and careless, giddy, running to the edge

and over it, straight down on splintery scree

leaning back on his boots, a ski-run

scattering chips of slate, a skid with no stopping

down through the brief mist and into the tarn.

Tomorrow perhaps he will think about Helvellyn…