Part 18 (2/2)
We look up at her hunkered into her angle under the eaves.
She bears the whole stone burden on the small of her back and shoulders and pinioned elbows, the astute mouth, the gripping fingers saying push, push hard, push harder.
As the hips go high her big tadpole forehead is rounded out in sunlight.
And here beside her are two birds, a rabbit's head, a ram's, a mouth devouring heads.
II.
Her hands holding herself are like hands in an old barn holding a bag open.
I was outside looking in at its lapped and supple mouth running grain.
I looked up under the thatch at the dark mouth and eye of a bird's nest or a rat hole, smelling the rose on the wall, mildew, an earthen floor, the warm depth of the eaves.
And then one night in the yard I stood still under heavy rain wearing the bag like a caul.
III.
We look up to her, her ring-fort eyes, her little slippy shoulders, her nose incised and flat, and feel light-headed looking up.
She is twig-boned, saddle-s.e.xed, grown-up, grown ordinary, seeming to say, 'Yes, look at me to your heart's content but look at every other thing.'
And here is a leaper in a kilt, two figures kissing, a mouth with sprigs, a running hart, two fishes, a damaged beast with an instrument.
'Aye'
(from 'The Loaming')
Big voices in the womanless kitchen.
They never lit a lamp in the summertime but took the twilight as it came like solemn trees. They sat on in the dark with their pipes red in their mouths, the talk come down to Aye and Aye again and, when the dog s.h.i.+fted, a curt There boy!
I closed my eyes to make the light motes stream behind them and my head went airy, my chair rode high and low among branches and the wind stirred up a rookery in the next long Aye.
The King of the Ditchbacks for John Montague I.
As if a trespa.s.ser unbolted a forgotten gate and ripped the growth tangling its lower bars just beyond the hedge he has opened a dark morse along the bank, a crooked wounding of silent, cobwebbed gra.s.s. If I stop he stops like the moon.
He lives in his feet and ears, weather-eyed, all pad and listening, a denless mover.
Under the bridge his reflection s.h.i.+fts sideways to the current, mothy, alluring.
I am haunted by his stealthy rustling, the unexpected spoor, the pollen settling.
II.
I was sure I knew him. The time I'd spent obsessively in that upstairs room bringing myself close to him: each entranced hiatus as I chainsmoked and stared out the dormer into the gra.s.sy hillside I was laying myself open. He was depending on me as I hung out on the limb of a translated phrase like a youngster dared out on to an alder branch over the whirlpool. Small dreamself in the branches. Dream fears I inclined towards, interrogating: Are you the one I ran upstairs to find drowned under running water in the bath?
The one the mowing machine severed like a hare in the stiff frieze of harvest?
Whose little b.l.o.o.d.y clothes we buried in the garden?
The one who lay awake in darkness a wall's breadth from the troubled hoofs?
After I had dared these invocations, I went back towards the gate to follow him. And my stealth was second nature to me, as if I were coming into my own. I remembered I had been vested for this calling.
III.
When I was taken aside that day I had the sense of election: they dressed my head in a fishnet and plaited leafy twigs through meshes so my vision was a bird's at the heart of a thicket and I spoke as I moved like a voice from a shaking bush.
King of the ditchbacks, I went with them obediently to the edge of a pigeon wood deciduous canopy, screened wain of evening we lay beneath in silence.
No birds came, but I waited among briars and stones, or whispered or broke the watery gossamers if I moved a muscle.
'Come back to us,' they said, 'in harvest, when we hide in the stooked corn, when the gundogs can hardly retrieve what's brought down.' And I saw myself rising to move in that dissimulation, top-knotted, masked in sheaves, noting the fall of birds: a rich young man leaving everything he had for a migrant solitude.
Station Island
<script>