Part 21 (2/2)

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Sweeney Redivivus

I stirred wet sand and gathered myself

to climb the steep-flanked mound, my head like a ball of wet twine dense with soakage, but beginning to unwind.

Another smell was blowing off the river, bitter as night airs in a scutch mill.

The old trees were nowhere, the hedges thin as penwork and the whole enclosure lost under hard paths and sharp-ridged houses.

And there I was, incredible to myself, among people far too eager to believe me and my story, even if it happened to be true.

In the Beech

I was a lookout posted and forgotten.

On one side under me, the concrete road.

On the other, the bullocks' covert, the breath and plaster of a drinking place where the school-leaver discovered peace to touch himself in the reek of churned-up mud.

And the tree itself a strangeness and a comfort, as much a column as a bole. The very ivy puzzled its milk-tooth frills and tapers over the grain: was it bark or masonry?

I watched the red-brick chimney rear its stamen, course by course, and the steeplejacks up there at their antics like flies against the mountain.

I felt the tanks' advance beginning at the cynosure of the growth rings, then winced at their imperium refreshed in each powdered bolt-mark on the concrete.

And the pilot with his goggles back came in so low I could see the c.o.c.kpit rivets.

My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge.

My thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post.

The First Kingdom

The royal roads were cow paths.

The queen mother hunkered on a stool and played the harpstrings of milk into a wooden pail.

With seasoned sticks the n.o.bles lorded it over the hindquarters of cattle.

Units of measurement were pondered by the cartful, barrowful and bucketful.

Time was a backward rote of names and mishaps, bad harvests, fires, unfair settlements, deaths in floods, murders and miscarriages.

And if my rights to it all came only by their acclamation, what was it worth?

I blew hot and blew cold.

They were two-faced and accommodating.

And seed, breed and generation still they are holding on, every bit as pious and exacting and demeaned.

The First Flight

It was more sleepwalk than spasm

yet that was a time when the times were also in spasm the ties and the knots running through us split open down the lines of the grain.

As I drew close to pebbles and berries, the smell of wild garlic, relearning the acoustic of frost and the meaning of woodnote, my shadow over the field was only a spin-off, my empty place an excuse for s.h.i.+fts in the camp, old rehearsals of debts and betrayal.

Singly they came to the tree with a stone in each pocket to whistle and bill me back in and I would collide and cascade through leaves when they left, my point of repose knocked askew.

I was mired in attachment until they began to p.r.o.nounce me a feeder off battlefields so I mastered new rungs of the air to survey out of reach their bonfires on hills, their hosting and fasting, the levies from Scotland as always, and the people of art diverting their rhythmical chants to fend off the onslaught of winds I would welcome and climb at the top of my bent.

Drifting Off

The guttersnipe and the albatross

gliding for days without a single wingbeat were equally beyond me.

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