Part 17 (2/2)

Soft thumps on the ironing board.

Her dimpled angled elbow and intent stoop as she aimed the smoothing iron like a plane into linen, like the resentment of women.

To work, her dumb lunge says, is to move a certain ma.s.s through a certain distance, is to pull your weight and feel exact and equal to it.

Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

Stone from Delphi

To be carried back to the shrine some dawn

when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south and I make a morning offering again: that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood, govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the G.o.d until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth.

Making Strange

I stood between them,

the one with his travelled intelligence and tawny containment, his speech like the tw.a.n.g of a bowstring, and another, unshorn and bewildered in the tubs of his Wellingtons, smiling at me for help, faced with this stranger I'd brought him.

Then a cunning middle voice came out of the field across the road saying, 'Be adept and be dialect, tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut, call me sweetbriar after the rain or s...o...b..rries cooled in the fog.

But love the cut of this travelled one and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.

Go beyond what's reliable in all that keeps pleading and pleading, these eyes and puddles and stones, and recollect how bold you were when I visited you first with departures you cannot go back on.'

A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing I found myself driving the stranger through my own country, adept at dialect, reciting my pride in all that I knew, that began to make strange at that same recitation.

The Birthplace

I.

The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain, the single bed a dream of discipline.

And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants of thick light: the unperturbed, reliable ghost life he carried, with no need to invent.

And high trees round the house, breathed upon day and night by winds as slow as a cart coming late from market, or the stir a fiddle could make in his reluctant heart.

II.

That day, we were like one of his troubled couples, speechless until he spoke for them, haunters of silence at noon in a deep lane that was s.e.xual with ferns and b.u.t.terflies, scared at our hurt, throat-sick, heat-struck, driven into the damp-floored wood where we made an episode of ourselves, unforgettable, unmentionable, and broke out again like cattle through bushes, wet and raised, only yards from the house.

III.

Everywhere being nowhere, who can prove one place more than another?

We come back emptied, to nourish and resist the words of coming to rest: birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash, flagstone, hearth, like unstacked iron weights afloat among galaxies.

Still, was it thirty years ago I read until first light for the first time, to finish The Return of the Native?

The corncrake in the aftergra.s.s verified himself, and I heard roosters and dogs, the very same as if he had written them.

Changes

As you came with me in silence

to the pump in the long gra.s.s I heard much that you could not hear: the bite of the spade that sank it, the slithering and grumble as the mason mixed his mortar, and women coming with white buckets like flashes on their ruffled wings.

The cast-iron rims of the lid clinked as I uncovered it, something stirred in its mouth.

<script>