Home of the Steam Highwayman
By Bedford sheets of water blanket grooves –
The sillion silvered, overcome and smoothed.
Hedgerows prove ancestral farmers’ plans
But water came and drank up all the land.
A waste – lost value – blank diminished ground –
Or know that soil too needs rest and sleep.
A string of salmon-coloured floodlights from
A light industrial estate, those sheds
Near Wellingborough, parade a fan of rays
Across the fresh full mere like liquid stars.
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 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.
The curtains and the curtain poles are down,
The grips that held them plaster over, pale
But just discernible. Another leave
Now taken from a room and sight I need –
The branches, budding, of the roadside trees.
I’m realising this is my default –
To choose a room, then place the bed to look
Direct into the branches of a tree.
First ash, in my childhood home, then holly
In an arch, then sycamore, now common lime
And weeping horse-chestnut, struggling to leaf.
And it is not coincidence – my taste?
That next I’ve found a place that looks onto
A stately park with planes that wobble up,
Those hesitant trees that ponder problems
Then peer down to find they’ve out-grown their place!
So tall – they can’t be native! Oddly-hued
By a passing decorator using up
His tins of remaindered household colours.
From Spain, half-bred Greek and American,
His disparate parents lend him several strengths,
But he hasn’t yet won my heart. Ah, let
The morning tell him to me as I rise
And every day see buds a-breaking out,
Little moleskin fruits achieve their sphere.
Still remain a novelty – I know you’ll
Begin where someone sets you, wary tree,
Too quickly noticed growing in a waste
All spindly-shooting with those palmy spreads.
I’m growing generous in spending love
Now all my natural children are bound close
And coppiced into useful poles, ideas
And metaphors that show me how we are,
So now come time to welcome even planes –
A tree I had no feelings for before.
It’s late December – day-long dusks and clouds
And lovely open structures of the dying trees,
And railside wastelands earn another grey,
The brambles purple, old-man’s beard delights
With feather baubles long uneven swathes
Of drear embankment. All the puddles full,
All the ditches dark, reflective, cold,
The lives of poplars stark, the pointed pales
Of fences cold as printed tractor marks
Now filled with scraps of sky and dainty crows.
We pass a field of horses, straw strewn out,
And dirty stable-coats upon their backs.
What entertainment can December bring
A horse? What festive cheer a hungry bird –
Related in a theoretic way
To robins on a watercolour card.
But can I say it? These are all my paint –
The pigments that I choose when I return
To dreams, to hopes, to quiet peaceful dreams.
The subtlety of every tree which owns
A unique pattern, never copied twice,
The varied textures of the water’s flat –
Despite the stillness of the air, the grey –
By reading printed painted books, a child,
By walking on the paths of lonely tracks,
I’ve won a little of the painter’s eye,
And with it surety of English truths.
So – I want you now to now my purposing –
The motivation I cannot express
As policy, or aim, or goal. I guess –
I love to try, to leap, to run the course –
Another soul desires to comprehend –
I only want to know.
When the tide, slow retreating from the beach north of Broadstairs,
Reveals all the liminal acres of shore,
A field of nobbly pinnacles rises
Slathered with purple, green-fingered, white-raw.
The chalk will feel greasy to fingertip gripping,
The seaweed is slippy beneath treading feet,
Yet the softest of stones is defeating the ocean
Absorbing the thunder where seas swell and meet.
The cliffs, yes they tumble, they fall and they shout,
Collapse in the surf of the tide’s furthest rush,
But ten days in twelve the water drains backward
And the roar of the ocean will turn into hush.
The power of water is soon dissipated,
Rollers and breakers split into rills
And the cliffs, slowly crumbling, must face the ocean
But twice a day water retreats and then stills.
To think of burying gold
When it hangs for free in the air
Just beyond the lover’s reach,
Just above her hair.
There beyond the snouts of dogs,
The winter-fingered trees
But bright and strong and in my eyes
The shining coin of spring’s surprise
It hangs to tempt and tease.
The crocus tips are up
And the night has returned to its hours
And all the city folk are glad
To tell seasons by the flowers.
Past the sour smell of square white bread
Put out to feed the birds
I route my return in time to pray
And gently finish the first spring day
With a gentler ring of words.
A litter of yellow apples lie by
An access trackway, unregarded and
Ignored, for all the hundred pounds yet spent
On fruit from other garden fields, these fall
And tumble, bruise, sleep rotten by a path
That once in several months a gang tramp down
To mend, rewire, or tense the straightening cords
That rig steel pylons down the western line.
If only I had time and way to climb that fence
Or scale that wall and gather them – or you
Could ever give that hopeful seedling, now
A giving, breathing creature in our world
Appreciation’s gratitude of use,
To taste the fruit just once before it falls!
See all along the callous iron line –
Permanent way – the rails have taken part,
Assumed autumnal motley, blood and brown,
And ballast beds a thousand dry-stemmed weeds,
But heaps of darling brambles, glowing brass
Gloss-tip bold hips are all by-passed.
The jungles of sloes, elder, buddleia,
Are thick and scrawny, generous and gay.
Each waiting on a season – while the train
Diesels past, cold or wet or damp or dry –
And never can we tap those running rivers,
Wine-fountains. Realm of black cat and magpie,
Occasionally trespassed by working gangs
Of hi-vis lads with flasks and sandwiches
And itineraries by which time those briars
Must be cut back – until next year again
They show their open palms in generous glee,
Unregarding the sudden slash and hack,
Intrusive but impermanent and weak.
The oak still juts out limbs, regardless, hard,
The rowans stretch and slip down th’ embankment.
The brambles claw and catch, proliferate,
And everywhere in autumn you saw hips
In spring is but a net of green thorned twigs
And early summer, clouds of fragrant scent
Unrivalled by the essences, in glass,
Sold in a full room by the door of a
Large department store. Clear out such memory!
Rather see those nebulous banquets
Ubiquitous and unique, that colour
Our paths and commutes when we least expect.