Part 4 (2/2)

split for rafters, a cobwebbed, black, long-seasoned rib under the first thatch.

I might tarry with the moustached dead, the creel-fillers, or eavesdrop on their hopeless wisdom as a blow-down of smoke struggles over the half-door and mizzling rain blurs the far end of the cart track.

The softening ruts lead back to no 'oak groves', no cutters of mistletoe in the green clearings.

Perhaps I just make out Edmund Spenser, dreaming sunlight, encroached upon by geniuses who creep 'out of every corner of the woodes and glennes'

towards watercress and carrion.

Anahorish

My 'place of clear water',

the first hill in the world where springs washed into the s.h.i.+ny gra.s.s and darkened cobbles in the bed of the lane.

Anahorish, soft gradient of consonant, vowel-meadow, after-image of lamps swung through the yards on winter evenings.

With pails and barrows those mound-dwellers go waist-deep in mist to break the light ice at wells and dunghills.

Servant Boy

He is wintering out

the back-end of a bad year, swinging a hurricane-lamp through some outhouse, a jobber among shadows.

Old work-wh.o.r.e, slave- blood, who stepped fair-hills under each bidder's eye and kept your patience and your counsel, how you draw me into your trail. Your trail broken from haggard to stable, a straggle of fodder stiffened on snow, comes first-footing the back doors of the little barons: resentful and impenitent, carrying the warm eggs.

Land

I.

I stepped it, perch by perch.

Unbraiding rushes and gra.s.s I opened my right-of-way through old bottoms and sowed-out ground and gathered stones off the ploughing to raise a small cairn.

Cleaned out the drains, faced the hedges, often got up at dawn to walk the outlying fields.

I composed habits for those acres so that my last look would be neither gluttonous nor starved.

I was ready to go anywhere.

II.

This is in place of what I would leave, plaited and branchy, on a long slope of stubble: a woman of old wet leaves, rush-bands and thatcher's scollops, stooked loosely, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s an open-work of new straw and harvest bows.

Gazing out past the s.h.i.+fting hares.

III.

I sense the pads unfurling under gra.s.s and clover: if I lie with my ear in this loop of silence long enough, thigh-bone and shoulder against the phantom ground, I expect to pick up a small drumming and must not be surprised in bursting air to find myself snared, swinging an ear-ring of sharp wire.

Gifts of Rain

I.

Cloudburst and steady downpour now for days.

Still mammal, straw-footed on the mud, he begins to sense weather by his skin.

A nimble snout of flood licks over stepping stones and goes uprooting.

He fords his life by sounding.

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