Part 18 (1/2)
I had a bird's eye view of a bird, finch-green, speckly white, nesting on dry leaves, flattened, still, suffering the light.
So I roofed the citadel as gently as I could, and told you and you gently unroofed it but where was the bird now?
There was a single egg, pebbly white, and in the rusted bend of the spout tail feathers splayed and sat tight.
So tender, I said, 'Remember this.
It will be good for you to retrace this path when you have grown away and stand at last at the very centre of the empty city.'
A Bat on the Road A batlike soul waking to consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.
You would hoist an old hat on the tines of a fork and trawl the mouth of the bridge for the slight bat-thump and flutter. Skinny downy webs, babynails clawing the sweatband ... But don't bring it down, don't break its flight again, don't deny it; this time let it go free.
Follow its bat-flap under the stone bridge, under the Midland and Scottish Railway and lose it there in the dark.
Next thing it shadows moonslicked laurels or skims the lapped net on a tennis court.
Next thing it's ahead of you in the road.
What are you after? You keep swerving off, flying blind over ashpits and netting wire; invited by the brush of a word like peignoir, rustles and glimpses, shot silk, the stealth of floods So close to me I could hear her breathing and there by the lighted window behind trees it hangs in creepers matting the brickwork and now it's a wet leaf blowing in the drive, now soft-deckled, shadow-convolvulus by the White Gates. Who would have thought it? At the White Gates She let them do whatever they liked. Cling there as long as you want. There is nothing to hide.
A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann
The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon
just out of the water is gone just like that, but your stick is kept salmon-silver.
Seasoned and bendy, it convinces the hand that what you have you hold to play with and pose with and lay about with.
But then too it points back to cattle and spatter and beating the bars of a gate the very stick we might cut from your family tree.
The living cobalt of an afternoon dragonfly drew my eye to it first and the evening I trimmed it for you you saw your first glow-worm all of us stood round in silence, even you gigantic enough to darken the sky for a glow-worm.
And when I poked open the gra.s.s a tiny brightening den lit the eye in the blunt pared end of your stick.
A Kite for Michael and Christopher
All through that Sunday afternoon
a kite flew above Sunday, a tightened drumhead, a flitter of blown chaff.
I'd seen it grey and slippy in the making, I'd tapped it when it dried out white and stiff, I'd tied the bows of newspaper along its six-foot tail.
But now it was far up like a small black lark and now it dragged as if the bellied string were a wet rope hauled upon to lift a shoal.
My friend says that the human soul is about the weight of a snipe, yet the soul at anchor there, the string that sags and ascends, weighs like a furrow a.s.sumed into the heavens.
Before the kite plunges down into the wood and this line goes useless take in your two hands, boys, and feel the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me and take the strain.
The Railway Children
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.
Like lovely freehand they curved for miles East and miles west beyond us, sagging Under their burden of swallows.
We were small and thought we knew nothing Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires In the s.h.i.+ny pouches of raindrops, Each one seeded full with the light Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves So infinitesimally scaled We could stream through the eye of a needle.
Widgeon for Paul Muldoon
It had been badly shot.
While he was plucking it he found, he says, the voice box like a flute stop in the broken windpipe and blew upon it unexpectedly his own small widgeon cries.
Sheelagh na Gig at Kilpeck
I.