Home of the Steam Highwayman
Do you remember
sitting on a sofa, rocking your computer with our feet,
to keep the DVD running,
so we could watch
the pilot
of Twin Peaks
wrapped in a blanket,
a shared blanket,
leaning on each other
drinking Chartreuse
in a 14th century attic?
My laptop today
developed the same palsied shakes
and I’ve had to tap it to watch my DVD.
But it’s not a programme I’ve ever shared with you
and I don’t have any Chartreuse
and I can’t feel your hair beneath my hand.
Every pattern that’s made by the water
Where tides sculpt the ripples of low-slung sand levels
Is hidden, invisible, but for its traces,
The skeleton ridges and quartz-dancing revels.
Across the cold strand the sea is like silver,
Its lobes licking tenderly flattened out swells.
The sand barely rises, except when the water
Displays a true level and every tongue tells.
But even those waters are ebbing and rushing
And never the beach or the sea’s edge is smooth,
But climbing, high-rising, then falling, revealing,
It softens the crystals like lullabies soothe.
Four months already stand these fields fallow
That thickly were sheaved,
That thickly were sheaved.
Cuts the share deeply and lie the stones shallow,
Turned up the treasures we meant time to hallow,
The trees all unleaved,
The trees all unleaved.
Coincident footsteps convinced us of meaning –
I saw and believed,
I saw and believed.
Your hand for my holding, my wounds for your cleaning,
Those words for our hopes and your shoulder for leaning
And what we achieved,
O what we achieved.
The ground is all spent and now little is growing
For I’ll not plant there,
No I’ll not plant there.
Why cover the ploughings with a new Year’s sowing
Where the bones of the land are still bare and showing
And I know I still care.
I know I still care.
Poignant to me – as it was after expressing this that I felt different: while I still felt affection and gratitude, I was no longer bound in love.
Go, turn behind the willows leaning down
And cross a broad, unmetalled, concrete bridge
Beside the throbbing relay station’s fence,
Behind the bold-brick houses, built, set, square
Upon the fertile valley’s bottom, where
A tiny talking brook provides the sea
For toddlers’ first wellie-splashes, and then
For boys from school to fall into and soak
And come home scolded, seek again to sneak
To tiny kingdoms of hedgeholes and mud,
And live in, in their dreaming, sleeping minds.
And if you find that stream, that bridge, those trees,
Begin to walk the track and to explore
A microcosm of all England’s lands
Expressed in half a mile, so few acres,
As shells express the whorl of hurricanes
Invisible in shape until an eye
Above the world can picture them all whole,
As rockpools mirror all the ocean’s depth
And as a garden mocks, with love, the wild
And wildernesses live behind a shed,
So know that this small span of well-loved land
Can teach entire the lessons of landscape –
Entire, at least, the principles on which
Every other sight, whether moor or mount
Or shore or fen or cliff or field or wood
Or lawn or park or scrub or shingle down
Or chalk-hill flank or tide-bared mud or sea –
The principles on which these worlds are seen
And loved, and held in balanced wonderment
With awe and joy each sharing parts of thought
That flicker from the buds of hawthorn hedge
To wave-tops, turning, crisping white, a-rush
To burst upon the land with such desire,
Enthusiasm to enact and give
And interact and change and be part of
The world that springs from those first wanderings, young
As a boy might be, so was I right there,
Turned from the street onto the brick-dust track,
The over-written history of space
And growing things that taught me how to grow –
Ah, go down beside the willows, then take
The slowly steeping walk up that hill,
Turn about, look around, see the world
That we have, this gift of childish heaven
That in it holds appreciation of
The living, growing land beyond the sky.
Wordsworth never finished the poem we call ‘The Prelude’, but it was meant to be his autobiography in verse, or, as he put it grandly, the story of the ‘creation of a poetic mind’. I actually think this is a fairly good subject for poetry – if only of interest to other poets – but possibly self-indulgent! Nonetheless, even without Wordsworth’s age or position, I found it really pleasurable to revisit my childhood places in verse like this. Does this mean I’ll expand it?
I used to think you had to understand,
To know your place in history’s line,
Your form, your pace, your isocline,
And hold your past and future in one hand,
The hand that holds the pen. No more.
The pattern of art’s providence
Is far more complex, fractal, tense,
Than any art can frame or store,
And when I’ve walked through quiet pines
I’ve heard the boughs that yawned and swayed
That beauty isn’t something made
But something found between straight lines.
Hear Mozart tumble with his tune –
He knows how long to tease and tweak,
But try and numerate that feat –
Retire, and learn to play bassoon.
I wrote three thousand words today
In just two hours, to do what’s due,
Delineate some skill’s debut
And teach a child to make work play.
But that was not enough, I missed
The target I had had me aim
And have drawn out this writing game
To be the whole week’s stretching list.
What better? Suffer? Write and sob
Or inject laughter, distract noise
Forget my children, leave the boys
The girls, the classroom, drop the job?
I am one man – I have one heart –
And when I test it, stretch it out,
The pain is like a desert’s drought,
The muscle rested pulls apart.
Then only through life’s constant work
Can I find rest from doubt or debt.
There’s no relaxing here, not yet,
So I’ll pick up the pen I shirk.
I went alone by old canals
And saw the gardens grown from waste
Coal-heap compost, newspaper paste
And smelt the raindrops’ funerals.
Around a reedy, autumn pond
A wary grasp of sycamores
And mortal ash trees marked with flaws
Where wire fences scarred their bond.
Upon the puddles ripples ring;
The sky begins to decorate
The garden with a water-weight
And smack the mud, and patterns bring.
It is a partial sanctuary;
Aided and abetted, rich,
Leafmould rotting in a ditch,
A very sullen place to be.
The lonely walk I’ve taken here
Has led past corners where we laughed
And where we drank a loving draught
And where we shared a pint of beer.
How could it not, when every street
Has been a place we’ve known and shared?
When every roadsign once declared
The city was our place to meet?
I cannot walk past cranes or trees,
Follow paths or railway lines
Without seeing speaking signs
Of what you sometime meant to me.
I had to go to somewhere new –
A place I never shared, and still
As up the tower I found my thrill
I wanted so to be with you.
The train fled through a concrete scar
Half across the garden fields,
Through the chalk your bone-land yields
Not long away – and yet too far.
I felt my trespass in a place
Reserved for our shared wanderings.
I cried to think of happy things –
Cold on the downs, your true embrace.
The beach is shingle and I read
That half the land is shingle too,
Five centuries worth of land born new
Where once the sea lay in its bed.
Each stone a flint plucked from the chalk
And rounded by the waves’ rough play
Until it found a place to stay
Where rustles are the stonefalls’ talk.
There is a castle on the marsh
Built by a famous, frantic King,
Now a ruin, crumbling
And eaten – rotten – broken – harsh.
Built there to stand upon the shore
But stranded by the passing tides
Each bringing stones, and wrack besides.
The sea is not there anymore.
Two miles inland – what a plain sign
For all those things we deem most firm.
The world will change, so ends the term
Of all possession – but chiefly mine.
I loved you till it creased my soul;
I changed my mind to want your shape
And feel the lack when you’d escape:
You did. I let the pebbles roll.
So starts an avalanche again –
The smallest stones move rocks.
The freest hearts are bound with locks
That rust like links in anchor-chain.
On the third wide floor of the museum
You can travel between treasures gathered
In centuries’ collection of the past –
A past of narrow stories intertwined –
That’s what the glass says, and the little signs
Ruled on white Perspex, all best guesses,
Estimations – archaeological –
Risky historical reputations.
But looking in the glass I can still see
Fingerprints in a stoneware pot, once hid,
Then found, no framed and famous, full of wealth.
The massed carnelian lozenges with birds
And simple beaten snake-head bracelets, rings,
The taciturn quartz, hard and sworn silent,
Collected silver profiles destined soon
To soften, stick, unpiece and glue, adhere,
The swallow in themselves the featured fair,
Becoming blank, upon which expression
Can be new-shaped a decorated face.
All interrupted by a sudden threat
That prompted careful choosing of this vase
And surely careful memory’s searchings
For a place in the crook of an ash tree
By a bed in a brook by the long field
Where a treasure can lie in secrecy.
To try to put a glass between ourselves –
Me and this distant woman or man –
Is no more possible than to part
Two melted coins, two rust-fused swords or rings,
And all the people making all these toys
Are like the massy links in one colossal
Tunic of chainmail, which the earth unites
By giving up its moisture, making rust
That freezes pliable metal and dust.
That coat of gentle, ginger suede,
Real warm, perhaps the sleeves too long,
No inside pockets, can’t belong
To this me, since such fabric’s frayed.
The leather’s bright as bought, except
A collar-line; the buttons tied,
All rethreaded, worn with pride;
I’ve thrown out others – this I’ve kept.
For weeks I’ve followed round my ghost
Counting when I wore that first,
When she gave that, bit lip, cursed,
To find her hand was still on most.
But this I purchased long ago
When I was first at leisure, rich,
And chose to rise to pleasure’s pitch
And wear the mirror’s happy glow.
I bought it yet before I knew
The name that now distends my fears.
I’m tied to something through the years
That has no will to say or do
Yet speaks, forgiving, soft and smooth,
The skin like skin I miss to touch.
Ask, ‘Do I miss her?’ ‘No, not much,
Except when breath my lungs would soothe.’
On every surface, every door,
Fingerprints and darkling hairs.
I find her when I walk upstairs,
She rests in blankets even more.
The pencil pot, the chopping board,
The tent, the grout for fixing tiles,
The dreams of treading sunny aisles,
And every single guitar chord.
I haven’t yet resolved this rage –
Am I to amputate my past
And lose the years I clung to, fast,
And blanken all my diary’s page?
Don’t give advice – don’t share your grief –
I know already that time heals,
That when a nerve is cut it feels
But later leaves its torture brief.
Can you imagine I want that?
A heart which soon will cease to care?
A place to hide? Oh, how unfair
To know distraction or combat.
So either suffer every jab
And let no-body lift a share
Or betray, regret, then forswear
The once-bright future, paint it drab.
That jacket though is still as fresh,
And I still like it as I did,
And while I hated, cried and hid,
I petrified. But now send flesh.
The air plays fair with floating flakes
Today, not landing, touching, cold
And sure to make all memories old
As they’re immediate, as now wakes.
The moment of our living life
Which we have called the present, well,
Impermanent as snow that fell,
As dreams of future home or wife.
To touch is just to melt, to slip
Into the water of my tears
And reaching back through eight long years
I catch a stalagmatic drip.
Each thought or act, designed to build
A structure, gently, life’s smooth plan,
Is now dissolved. What I began
The changing of the air has killed,
Wind from across the sea or land
From far-off cities, far-off fields
Each birthing wind, which in turn yields
The emptiness of empty hands.
But all of this is out of place –
To let the snow be first a sore
Is to ignore the beauty – more –
To see the mirror but ignore your face.
My hurt is not the only one,
I am no axis for the world.
Forget the anger that you hurled
And let the tears drip, then be gone.
Unsettled snow and bitter wind –
The metaphors of my unease.
The weathers, like the seasons, tease
And when I pitied me I sinned.
The ash still marks my forehead like a bruise,
So rare, this imposition of a state
Quite unlike everyday, preoccupied
By plans and hurried patchings of short time.
A foretaste of a heavenly banquet’s mine –
Indeed, for as I chewed the bread, sipped wine,
I had no other thoughts at all, just hope,
Pure gratitude and joy, joy still and cold
Like shining crystal in a dirty rock.
That is the flavour of the awaited feast –
The freedom from the guilt and daily fear
Of failing tomorrow’s contracted tasks,
Of wasting the chances to write and to keep…
I have no fear of death, he said, but, ah,
To fail! A thing I have not known, and fear.
I’ve loved to hear Charles Gordon saying that
For all so many years, since still a boy
I saw that desert city burnt, attacked,
Feluccas swarm across the Nile, close-packed
With jibbah-clad jihadists, Gordon stand
Calm and clear of conscience, ready to die
To prove his point. How dangerous a film!
But I cannot deny it feeds my heart
And so proves that ideas, when acted well,
And scored with mystic themes, pearl-satin skies,
The bittersweet melodies of wanting,
Yes, ideas can outlast the very stars,
For supernovas have exploded since
The pyramids, the Hadrian wall, some books,
Some towns, some very buildings, all of that!
And deserts have advanced across the plains
Since ancients wrote down recipes for thrush
In honey, piglet cooked in brine with herbs.
Much longer then will last self-sacrifice
When isolated in a parched, dry town.
The dust of all the desert, dust of sin,
Can’t choke the throat the spirit wants to loose
And when I sang in worship, welcoming
The news of Easter, still a long walk hence,
I sang despite the dust surrounding me.