Part 25 (1/2)

IV.

Fear of affectation made her affect Inadequacy whenever it came to p.r.o.nouncing words 'beyond her'. Bertold Brek.

She'd manage something hampered and askew Every time, as if she might betray The hampered and inadequate by too Well-adjusted a vocabulary.

With more challenge than pride, she'd tell me, 'You Know all them things.' So I governed my tongue In front of her, a genuinely well- Adjusted adequate betrayal Of what I knew better. I'd naw and aye And decently relapse into the wrong Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

V.

The cool that came off sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack.

So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was X and she was O Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

VI.

In the first flush of the Easter holidays The ceremonies during Holy Week Were highpoints of our Sons and Lovers phase.

The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick.

Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next To each other up there near the front Of the packed church, we would follow the text And rubrics for the blessing of the font.

As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul ...

Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on.

The water mixed with chrism and with oil.

Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation And the psalmist's outcry taken up with pride: Day and night my tears have been my bread.

VII.

In the last minutes he said more to her Almost than in all their life together.

'You'll be in New Row on Monday night And I'll come up for you and you'll be glad When I walk in the door ... Isn't that right?'

His head was bent down to her propped-up head.

She could not hear but we were overjoyed.

He called her good and girl. Then she was dead, The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned And we all knew one thing by being there.

The s.p.a.ce we stood around had been emptied Into us to keep, it penetrated Clearances that suddenly stood open.

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

VIII.

I thought of walking round and round a s.p.a.ce Utterly empty, utterly a source Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place In our front hedge above the wallflowers.

The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.

I heard the hatchet's differentiated Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh And collapse of what luxuriated Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.

Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole, Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere, A soul ramifying and forever Silent, beyond silence listened for.

The Milk Factory

Scuts of froth swirled from the discharge pipe.

We halted on the other bank and watched A milky water run from the pierced side Of milk itself, the crock of its substance spilt Across white limbo floors where s.h.i.+ft-workers Waded round the clock, and the factory Kept its distance like a bright-decked star-s.h.i.+p.

There we go, soft-eyed calves of the dew, Astonished and a.s.sumed into fluorescence.

The Wis.h.i.+ng Tree

I thought of her as the wis.h.i.+ng tree that died

And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven, Trailing a shower of all that had been driven Need by need by need into its hale Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail Came streaming from it like a comet-tail New-minted and dissolved. I had a vision Of an airy branch-head rising through damp cloud, Of turned-up faces where the tree had stood.

Grotus and Coventina

Far from home Grotus dedicated an altar to Coventina

Who holds in her right hand a waterweed And in her left a pitcher spilling out a river.

Anywhere Grotus looked at running water he felt at home And when he remembered the stone where he cut his name Some dried-up course beneath his breastbone started Pouring and darkening more or less the way The thought of his stunted altar works on me.