Part 23 (2/2)

A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O.

II.

Declensions sang on air like a hosanna As, column after stratified column, Book One of Elementa Latina, Marbled and minatory, rose up in him.

For he was fostered next in a stricter school Named for the patron saint of the oak wood Where cla.s.ses switched to the pealing of a bell And he left the Latin forum for the shade Of new calligraphy that felt like home.

The letters of this alphabet were trees.

The capitals were orchards in full bloom, The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches.

Here in her snooded garment and bare feet, All ringleted in a.s.sonance and woodnotes, The poet's dream stole over him like sunlight And pa.s.sed into the tenebrous thickets.

He learns this other writing. He is the scribe Who drove a team of quills on his white field.

Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab.

Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold.

By rules that hardened the farther they reached north He bends to his desk and begins again.

Christ's sickle has been in the undergrowth.

The script grows bare and Merovingian.

III.

The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O.

He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves.

Time has bulldozed the school and school window.

Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves Make lambdas on the stubble once at harvest And the delta face of each potato pit Was patted straight and moulded against frost.

All gone, with the omega that kept Watch above each door, the good-luck horseshoe.

Yet shape-note language, absolute on air As Constantine's sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO Can still command him; or the necromancer Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house A figure of the world with colours in it So that the figure of the universe And 'not just single things' would meet his sight When he walked abroad. As from his small window The astronaut sees all that he has sprung from, The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O Like a magnified and buoyant ovum Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare All agog at the plasterer on his ladder Skimming our gable and writing our name there With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.

Terminus

I.

When I hoked there, I would find An acorn and a rusted bolt.

If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney And a dormant mountain.

If I listened, an engine shunting And a trotting horse.

Is it any wonder when I thought I would have second thoughts?

II.

When they spoke of the prudent squirrel's h.o.a.rd It shone like gifts at a nativity.

When they spoke of the mammon of iniquity The coins in my pockets reddened like stove-lids.

I was the march drain and the march drain's banks Suffering the limit of each claim.

III.

Two buckets were easier carried than one.

I grew up in between.

My left hand placed the standard iron weight.

My right tilted a last grain in the balance.

Baronies, parishes met where I was born.

When I stood on the central stepping stone I was the last earl on horseback in midstream Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.

From the Frontier of Writing

The tightness and the nilness round that s.p.a.ce

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