when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect its make and number and, as one bends his face towards your window, you catch sight of more on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent down cradled guns that hold you under cover, and everything is pure interrogation until a rifle motions and you move with guarded unconcerned acceleration a little emptier, a little spent as always by that quiver in the self, subjugated, yes, and obedient.
So you drive on to the frontier of writing where it happens again. The guns on tripods; the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating data about you, waiting for the squawk of clearance; the marksman training down out of the sun upon you like a hawk.
And suddenly you"re through, arraigned yet freed, as if you"d pa.s.sed from behind a waterfall on the black current of a tarmac road past armour-plated vehicles, out between the posted soldiers flowing and receding like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.
The Haw Lantern
The wintry haw is burning out of season,
crab of the thorn, a small light for small people, wanting no more from them but that they keep the wick of self-respect from dying out, not having to blind them with illumination.
But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes with his lantern, seeking one just man; so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw he holds up at eye-level on its twig, and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone, its blood-p.r.i.c.k that you wish would test and clear you, its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.
From the Republic of Conscience
I.
When I landed in the republic of conscience it was so noiseless when the engines stopped I could hear a curlew high above the runway.
At immigration, the clerk was an old man who produced a wallet from his homespun coat and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.
The woman in customs asked me to declare the words of our traditional cures and charms to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.
No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.
II.
Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning spells universal good and parents hang swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.
Salt is their precious mineral. And seash.e.l.ls are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.
Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen, the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.
At their inauguration, public leaders must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office and to affirm their faith that all life sprang from salt in tears which the sky-G.o.d wept after he dreamt his solitude was endless.
III.
I came back from that frugal republic with my two arms the one length, the customs woman having insisted my allowance was myself.
The old man rose and gazed into my face and said that was official recognition that I was now a dual citizen.
He therefore desired me when I got home to consider myself a representative and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.
Their emba.s.sies, he said, were everywhere but operated independently and no amba.s.sador would ever be relieved.
Hailstones
I.
My cheek was. .h.i.t and hit: sudden hailstones pelted and bounced on the road.
When it cleared again something whipped and knowledgeable had withdrawn and left me there with my chances.
I made a small hard ball of burning water running from my hand just as I make this now out of the melt of the real thing smarting into its absence.
II.
To be reckoned with, all the same, those brats of showers.
The way they refused permission, rattling the cla.s.sroom window like a ruler across the knuckles, the way they were perfect first and then in no time dirty slush.
Thomas Traherne had his orient wheat for proof and wonder but for us, it was the sting of hailstones and the unstingable hands of Eddie Diamond foraging in the nettles.
III.
Nipple and hive, bite-lumps, small acorns of the almost pleasurable intimated and disallowed when the shower ended and everything said wait.
For what? For forty years to say there, there you had the truest foretaste of your aftermath in that dilation when the light opened in silence and a car with wipers going still laid perfect tracks in the slush.
The Stone Verdict
When he stands in the judgement place
With his stick in his hand and the broad hat Still on his head, maimed by self-doubt And an old disdain of sweet talk and excuses, It will be no justice if the sentence is blabbed out.
He will expect more than words in the ultimate court He relied on through a lifetime"s speechlessness.
Let it be like the judgement of Hermes, G.o.d of the stone heap, where the stones were verdicts Cast solidly at his feet, piling up around him Until he stood waist-deep in the cairn Of his absolution: maybe a gate-pillar Or a tumbled wallstead where hogweed earths the silence Somebody will break at last to say, "Here His spirit lingers," and will have said too much.
The Spoonbait
So a new similitude is given us
And we say: The soul may be compared Unto a spoonbait that a child discovers Beneath the sliding lid of a pencil case, Glimpsed once and imagined for a lifetime Risen and free and spooling out of nowhere A shooting star going back up the darkness.
It flees him and it burns him all at once Like the single drop that Dives implored Falling and falling into a great gulf.
Then exit, the polished helmet of a hero Laid out amidships above scudding water.
Exit, alternatively, a toy of light Reeled through him upstream, snagging on nothing.
Clearances in memoriam M.K.H., 19111984
She taught me what her uncle once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal block split If you got the grain and hammer angled right.
The sound of that relaxed alluring blow, Its co-opted and obliterated echo, Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen, Taught me between the hammer and the block To face the music. Teach me now to listen, To strike it rich behind the linear black.
I.
A cobble thrown a hundred years ago Keeps coming at me, the first stone Aimed at a great-grandmother"s turncoat brow.
The pony jerks and the riot"s on.
She"s crouched low in the trap Running the gauntlet that first Sunday Down the brae to Ma.s.s at a panicked gallop.
He whips on through the town to cries of "Lundy!"
Call her "The Convert". "The Exogamous Bride".
Anyhow, it is a genre piece Inherited on my mother"s side And mine to dispose with now she"s gone.
Instead of silver and Victorian lace, The exonerating, exonerated stone.
II.
Polished linoleum shone there. Bra.s.s taps shone.
The china cups were very white and big An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug.
The kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone Were present and correct. In case it run, The b.u.t.ter must be kept out of the sun.
And don"t be dropping crumbs. Don"t tilt your chair.
Don"t reach. Don"t point. Don"t make noise when you stir.
It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead, Where grandfather is rising from his place With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head To welcome a bewildered homing daughter Before she even knocks. "What"s this? What"s this?"
And they sit down in the shining room together.
III.
When all the others were away at Ma.s.s I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes From each other"s work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some crying I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives Never closer the whole rest of our lives.