Part 30 (1/2)

I stood on the railway sleepers hearing larks, Gra.s.shoppers, cuckoos, dog-barks, trainer planes Cutting and modulating and drawing off.

Heat wavered on the immaculate line And s.h.i.+ne of the cogged rails. On either side, Dog daisies stood like vestals, the hot stones Were clover-meshed and streaked with engine oil.

Air spanned, pa.s.sage waited, the balance rode, Nothing prevailed, whatever was in store Witnessed itself already taking place In a time marked by a.s.sent and by hiatus.

xv And strike this scene in gold too, in relief, So that a greedy eye cannot exhaust it: Stable straw, Rembrandt-gleam and burnish Where my father bends to a tea-chest packed with salt, The hurricane lamp held up at eye-level In his bunched left fist, his right hand foraging For the unbleeding, vivid-fleshed bacon, Home-cured hocks pulled up into the light For pondering a while and putting back.

That night I owned the piled grain of Egypt.

I watched the sentry's torchlight on the h.o.a.rd.

I stood in the door, unseen and blazed upon.

xix Memory as a building or a city, Well lighted, well laid out, appointed with Tableaux vivants and costumed effigies Statues in purple cloaks, or painted red, Ones wearing crowns, ones smeared with mud or blood: So that the mind's eye could haunt itself With fixed a.s.sociations and learn to read Its own contents in meaningful order, Ancient textbooks recommended that Familiar places be linked deliberately With a code of images. You knew the portent In each setting, you blinked and concentrated.

xxii Where does spirit live? Inside or outside Things remembered, made things, things unmade?

What came first, the seabird's cry or the soul Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?

Where does it roost at last? On dungy sticks In a jackdaw's nest up in the old stone tower Or a marble bust commanding the parterre?

How habitable is perfected form?

And how inhabited the windy light?

What's the use of a held note or held line That cannot be a.s.sailed for rea.s.surance?

(Set questions for the ghost of W.B.) xxiv Deserted harbour stillness. Every stone Clarified and dormant under water, The harbour wall a masonry of silence.

Fullness. s.h.i.+mmer. Laden high Atlantic The moorings barely stirred in, very slight Clucking of the swell against boat boards.

Perfected vision: c.o.c.kle minarets Consigned down there with green-slicked bottle gla.s.s, Sh.e.l.l-debris and a reddened bud of sandstone.

Air and ocean known as antecedents Of each other. In apposition with Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.

Crossings

xxvii

Everything flows. Even a solid man, A pillar to himself and to his trade, All yellow boots and stick and soft felt hat, Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet As the G.o.d of fair days, stone posts, roads and crossroads, Guardian of travellers and psychopomp.

'Look for a man with an ashplant on the boat,'

My father told his sister setting out For London, 'and stay near him all night And you'll be safe.' Flow on, flow on The journey of the soul with its soul guide And the mysteries of dealing-men with sticks!

xxix Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch.

Its coldness to the thumb. Its see-saw lift And drop and innocent harshness.

Which is a music of binding and of loosing Unheard in this generation, but there to be Called up or called down at a touch renewed.

Once the latch p.r.o.nounces, roof Is original again, threshold fatal, The sanction powerful as the foreboding.

Your footstep is already known, so bow Just a little, raise your right hand, Make impulse one with wilfulness, and enter.

x.x.x On St Brigid's Day the new life could be entered By going through her girdle of straw rope: The proper way for men was right leg first, Then right arm and right shoulder, head, then left Shoulder, arm and leg. Women drew it down Over the body and stepped out of it.

The open they came into by these moves Stood opener, hoops came off the world, They could feel the February air Still soft above their heads and imagine The limp rope fray and flare like wind-borne gleanings Or an unhindered goldfinch over ploughland.

x.x.xii Running water never disappointed.

Crossing water always furthered something.

Stepping stones were stations of the soul.

A kesh could mean the track some called a causey Raised above the wetness of the bog, Or the causey where it bridged old drains and streams.

It steadies me to tell these things. Also I cannot mention keshes or the ford Without my father's shade appearing to me On a path towards sunset, eyeing spades and clothes That turf-cutters stowed perhaps or souls cast off Before they crossed the log that spans the burn.

x.x.xiii Be literal a moment. Recollect Walking out on what had been emptied out After he died, turning your back and leaving.

That morning tiles were harder, windows colder, The raindrops on the pane more scourged, the gra.s.s Barer to the sky, more wind-harrowed, Or so it seemed. The house that he had planned 'Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you know', A paradigm of rigour and correction, Rebuke to fanciness and shrine to limit, Stood firmer than ever for its own idea Like a printed X-ray for the X-rayed body.

x.x.xiv Yeats said, To those who see spirits, human skin For a long time afterwards appears most coa.r.s.e.

The face I see that all falls short of since Pa.s.ses down an aisle: I share the bus From San Francisco Airport into Berkeley With one other pa.s.senger, who's dropped At the Treasure Island military base Half-way across Bay Bridge. Vietnam-bound, He could have been one of the newly dead come back, Unsurprisable but still disappointed, Having to bear his farm-boy self again, His shaving cuts, his otherworldly brow.

x.x.xvi And yes, my friend, we too walked through a valley.

Once. In darkness. With all the streetlamps off.

As danger gathered and the march dispersed.

Scene from Dante, made more memorable By one of his head-clearing similes Fireflies, say, since the policemen's torches Cl.u.s.tered and flicked and tempted us to trust Their unpredictable, attractive light.

We were like herded shades who had to cross And did cross, in a panic, to the car Parked as we'd left it, that gave when we got in Like Charon's boat under the faring poets.

Squarings

x.x.xvii