Part 24 (1/2)

when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect its make and number and, as one bends his face towards your window, you catch sight of more on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent down cradled guns that hold you under cover, and everything is pure interrogation until a rifle motions and you move with guarded unconcerned acceleration a little emptier, a little spent as always by that quiver in the self, subjugated, yes, and obedient.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing where it happens again. The guns on tripods; the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating data about you, waiting for the squawk of clearance; the marksman training down out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed, as if you'd pa.s.sed from behind a waterfall on the black current of a tarmac road past armour-plated vehicles, out between the posted soldiers flowing and receding like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

The Haw Lantern

The wintry haw is burning out of season,

crab of the thorn, a small light for small people, wanting no more from them but that they keep the wick of self-respect from dying out, not having to blind them with illumination.

But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes with his lantern, seeking one just man; so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw he holds up at eye-level on its twig, and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone, its blood-p.r.i.c.k that you wish would test and clear you, its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.

From the Republic of Conscience

I.

When I landed in the republic of conscience it was so noiseless when the engines stopped I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

At immigration, the clerk was an old man who produced a wallet from his homespun coat and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

The woman in customs asked me to declare the words of our traditional cures and charms to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.

You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

II.

Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning spells universal good and parents hang swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.

Salt is their precious mineral. And seash.e.l.ls are held to the ear during births and funerals.

The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.

Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.

The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen, the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

At their inauguration, public leaders must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office and to affirm their faith that all life sprang from salt in tears which the sky-G.o.d wept after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

III.

I came back from that frugal republic with my two arms the one length, the customs woman having insisted my allowance was myself.

The old man rose and gazed into my face and said that was official recognition that I was now a dual citizen.

He therefore desired me when I got home to consider myself a representative and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

Their emba.s.sies, he said, were everywhere but operated independently and no amba.s.sador would ever be relieved.

Hailstones

I.

My cheek was. .h.i.t and hit: sudden hailstones pelted and bounced on the road.

When it cleared again something whipped and knowledgeable had withdrawn and left me there with my chances.

I made a small hard ball of burning water running from my hand just as I make this now out of the melt of the real thing smarting into its absence.

II.

To be reckoned with, all the same, those brats of showers.

The way they refused permission, rattling the cla.s.sroom window like a ruler across the knuckles, the way they were perfect first and then in no time dirty slush.

Thomas Traherne had his orient wheat for proof and wonder but for us, it was the sting of hailstones and the unstingable hands of Eddie Diamond foraging in the nettles.

III.

Nipple and hive, bite-lumps, small acorns of the almost pleasurable intimated and disallowed when the shower ended and everything said wait.

For what? For forty years to say there, there you had the truest foretaste of your aftermath in that dilation when the light opened in silence and a car with wipers going still laid perfect tracks in the slush.