Part 33 (2/2)

Gems for the undeluded. Milt of earth.

Its plain, champing song against the shovel Soundtests and sandblasts words like 'honest worth'.

Beautiful in or out of the river, The kingdom of gravel was inside you too Deep down, far back, clear water running over Pebbles of caramel, hailstone, mackerel-blue.

But the actual washed stuff kept you slow and steady As you went stooping with your barrow full Into an absolution of the body, The shriven life tired bones and marrow feel.

So walk on air against your better judgement Establis.h.i.+ng yourself somewhere in between Those solid batches mixed with grey cement And a tune called 'The Gravel Walks' that conjures green.

Whitby-sur-Moyola

Caedmon too I was lucky to have known,

Back in situ there with his full bucket And armfuls of clean straw, the perfect yardman, Unabsorbed in what he had to do But doing it perfectly, and watching you.

He had worked his angel stint. He was hard as nails And all that time he'd been poeting with the harp His real gift was the big ignorant roar He could still let out of him, just bogging in As if the sacred subjects were a herd That had broken out and needed rounding up.

I never saw him once with his hands joined Unless it was a case of eyes to heaven And the quick sniff and test of fingertips After he'd pa.s.sed them through a sick beast's water.

Oh, Caedmon was the real thing all right.

'Poet's Chair'

for Carolyn Mulholland Leonardo said: the sun has never Seen a shadow. Now watch the sculptor move Full circle round her next work, like a lover In the sphere of s.h.i.+fting angles and fixed love.

I.

Angling shadows of itself are what Your 'Poet's Chair' stands to and rises out of In its sun-stalked inner-city courtyard.

On the qui vive all the time, its four legs land On their feet cat's-foot, goat-foot, big soft splay-foot too; Its straight back sprouts two bronze and leafy saplings.

Every flibbertigibbet in the town, Old birds and boozers, late-night p.i.s.sers, kissers, All have a go at sitting on it some time.

It's the way the air behind them's winged and full, The way a graft has seized their shoulder-blades That makes them happy. Once out of nature, They're going to come back in leaf and bloom And angel step. Or something like that. Leaves On a b.l.o.o.d.y chair! Would you believe it?

II.

Next thing I see the chair in a white prison With Socrates sitting on it, bald as a coot, Discoursing in bright sunlight with his friends.

His time is short. The day his trial began A verdant boat sailed for Apollo's shrine In Delos, for the annual rite Of commemoration. Until its wreathed And creepered rigging re-enters Athens Harbour, the city's life is holy.

No executions. No hemlock bowl. No tears And none now as the poison does its work And the expert jailer talks the company through The stages of the numbness. Socrates At the centre of the city and the day Has proved the soul immortal. The bronze leaves Cannot believe their ears, it is so silent.

Soon Crito will have to close his eyes and mouth, But for the moment everything's an ache Deferred, foreknown, imagined and most real.

III.

My father's ploughing one, two, three, four sides Of the lea ground where I sit all-seeing At centre field, my back to the thorn tree They never cut. The horses are all hoof And burnished flank, I am all foreknowledge.

Of the poem as a ploughshare that turns time Up and over. Of the chair in leaf The fairy thorn is entering for the future.

Of being here for good in every sense.

The Swing

Fingertips just tipping you would send you

Every bit as far once you got going As a big push in the back.

Sooner or later, We all learned one by one to go sky high, Backward and forward in the open shed, Toeing and rowing and jack-knifing through air.

Not Fragonard. Nor Brueghel. It was more Hans Memling's light of heaven off green gra.s.s, Light over fields and hedges, the shed-mouth Sunstruck and expectant, the bedding-straw Piled to one side, like a Nativity Foreground and background waiting for the figures.

And then, in the middle ground, the swing itself With an old lopsided sack in the loop of it, Perfectly still, hanging like pulley-slack, A lure let down to tempt the soul to rise.

Even so, we favoured the earthbound. She Sat there as majestic as an empress Steeping her swollen feet one at a time In the enamel basin, feeding it Every now and again with an opulent Steaming arc from a kettle on the floor Beside her. The plout of that was music To our ears, her smile a mitigation.

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