Refuge (5 page)

Chill January rain cuts us short.

He’ll face it, grabbing up the iron crust,

firm behind wayward wheel and belching pipe,

though the yearly survival of stock is on his mind.

PROCESSIONAL

The year’s moved house overnight

and left a dismantled vault.

Trees are inscrutable, etched into

basket-weave hedgerows.

A few sheep scattered over bald fields

have stripped every green blade,

and latch on to roots. This high up

birds of passage probe no loopholes

in a polar wind but dart from bush to bush.

Northward one chalky cloud swells

like chimney-stack smoke against a zinc sky.

Icy gusts make up-hill work

for a man and two youngsters

plodding across land knotted with sedge and tussocks.

In shiny, warm, sensible clothes,

they might be nomads from any history:

cloaked heroes claiming domains,

homeless fugitives in filched or borrowed dress.

The children startle a lone crow,

watch it driven downwind; explore a hollow,

pick up dead leaves. Their father

bends to listen and explain; but earth’s parings,

its stalk and bone, mean little.

They need to point and ask. He has to cast

the spell of theory: rationale

of wire fence, pylon, cratered field, property.

And they all hold hands

to make reassuring headway

against the wind’s senseless push and shove.

Sky’s armoured grey is battered by gulls

wheeling in cross-wind forays.

That one teeming cloud to the north has massed

and flattened into drifting skeins.

AGES

Power lines whip round poles,

road and pavement run in spate,

hedges sag and swell, feeble as cress.

Business as usual, we trust,

yet we’re primaevally old,

unfledged, shrink inside,

then into ourselves for shelter,

only to find fitful sparks

where a will once blazed.

Is our race about to lose

its feebly tightening hold ?

Look at those drenched kids

who dance and scream as if

to-day’s deluge needs no tomorrow.

WAIFS

‘What the devil can I do!’ Hipcroft groaned

(Thomas Hardy:
The Fiddler of the Reels
)

Festival of
Eighteen-Fifty-One
.

Enterprise and optimism glisten

in Hyde Park’s glass cathedral, while London

sucks in the lost and undone.

Under Waterloo’s iron awning,

jostled along a paved waste, mother

and child, unloaded from open, rattling

voyage like cattle, cling to each other.

Only a faceless surge of arrivals

and departures. Will
he
be there?

What with lean years corroding her

and this pinched offspring not his, he feels

their supplication too sodden to bear.

“How about something to stop the shivers?”

REFUGE

1.
MUNICIPAL PARK

Triangular park railed between

converging lanes of heavy traffic.

Endless families alight on green

benches and parched grass, munch

picnics with far-away looks, wrangle

over ice cream or where to go next,

sidle off in loose gaggles,

while old mum and dad sit and sip

from thermos tops, doze, puzzle

over dried-up flower beds,

wait to be collected.

Crisp leaves rattle in circles,

a long summer’s dust tangos

over gravel. Not so distant

cloud has whipped itself up

into a host of cobras.

Three women identically smart

dodge cars, vans, topless double-deckers

and take a break to show off the flimsy

contents of their logo bags.

Designer-clad covens and fully-padded

bikers glitter past, being seen together.

Sparrows have even more in common:

spasmodic chatter, pranks for ever

fizzling out to start again.

Then rain

hesitant and clumsy

after months of drought.

Which hardly matters to

some played-out busker

squatting on a playground log

or a frumpy pigeon that preens

and shuffles in a flattened sandpit.

2. IN THE GARDEN OF THE MUSÉE RODIN

A leaf spins down

and scrapes his shoulder.

Such soft percussion after

insistent crash of boulevards

wave upon wave...

then in Rodin’s sanctuary

footfalls and angry sighs jostling,

nudging him on through modest rooms

stuffed with writhing sculptures, tight-lipped

daguerreotype families hung in brass,

carefully labelled stumps and blocks

that chronicle a clouding vision...

He who became a lunatic with no asylum

now stands still

on a path that tilts and dips

under balding trees, breathes his fill

of clammy decay, begins to feel

he’ll measure up

to being mad again:

turned imbecile by hard facts and faces,

chased by volleys of wheels and lights

to take cover among falling leaves,

platinum ponds ruffled by smug ducks,

distant mothers behind prams, toddlers

in limbo, safely running circles...

Who can retrace such circles?

Will he always be heading straight

from A to B, or back,

only to check

his hell-bent intercity pace

in some unexpected garden

that hides from a wide confinement?

ALL

He had come to a meeting of roads we all

reach, if we travel long enough.

Not like the fork that Robert Frost recalled: two

paths diverging in a yellow wood.

Not a crossing of embroidered autumn lanes

where the fingerpost made Edward Thomas

quell a mocking voice with stoical resolve.

No: here you can’t hazard a guess

like the young with all before them, take any turn

because there’s always another, swept towards

a mirage of endless chance, stacking the stakes

high, spinning the roulette dizzy.

Here merge all routes he hoped to follow

all at once, cheating the odds, tireless.

Like railroad junctions darting in beside a headlong

train, all fold into one way ahead,

a beaten track more or less clear, its end known

if not grasped, every choice he once made

a looping round, often far round.

Blind bends and dead ground

all doubts and queries put to rest.

LOST AMONG PINES

Knuckled pine, miles of unbreaking waves,

spiked persistence, under it and underfoot

buried cones sprouting from quilted yellow needles.

Stand beside this ancient ribbed sea

that quenches its own thirst and try to

bear our frail girth and rootless passage.

Two well-hidden finches, shrill and upbeat,

making sure of each other across dry hectares

pierce the baked air. Are they near or far?

One day’s niche in their dangerous trek,

a thousand miles of awkward looping flight

to seek out old haunts and new supplies.

They leave behind an arctic, green sighing

that sharpens the spirit as it wanders

on muffled footfalls, aware of loss, waste

what’s owed to itself and never paid.

Will it stumble on some vista to measure

all this living, dying drought and juice?

Study muddled prints on a sandy track,

trying to trace some left by one loved beyond

bounds and time, her hand, voice and breath

too palpably absent. So why should solace

spring from one erect, sappy pine bud

pushing itself, like all of us, light-wards?

BETWEEN LIVES

‘One is always nearer by not keeping still.’

Thom Gunn:
On the Move

Moor without peak or fold,

untinged by low, steely sun,

sole way north a track

beaten into heather, then shivered

rock climbing to crumbled pillars,

entrance to rough-hewn bow bridge

pitched over gorge, its deep-delved

torrent a distant hissing ribbon.

Eyes fixed ahead, scramble

to its crown, and plunge down,

loose stonework hurtling away

to silent freefall. Pass broken arch

and feel upland turf underfoot.

Steep-raked birch woods simmer,

their olive-lit under-carpet

seethes with hue and cry of living.

Loose-clothed in shifting shadows

a rotund figure who might be

hunter, butcher, cook or wrestler,

cuts up a carcass, sculpting out

joints and chops with delicate art,

at one with his task and himself.

Nearby in sheltered, green dell

long, low thatched hut, walled

in wood and wattle. Its doorway

profiles a busy, slender woman

coarse-gowned, raven hair tied aside,

shimmering like breeze-blown foliage.

What account would they take

of some dusty, wandering drudge

who combs a wilderness for days,

chances a ruin to exchange

his nowhere for somewhere else?

FLIGHT

1.

A 747 oddly low for here.

each looking for more than is there.

2.

In forest dusk two Muntjak bolt with crackling thuds

as the watcher cranes to sift hide from bark.

3.

overfed fowl panicked by beaters into air, their last resort.

RESORT

I bus back to azure days of rock and sand

when dark seas pummelled walled bays,

children holidayed to bathe and dig,

feasted on sandwiches, hadn’t learnt

to spend or felt the fear of missing out.

Alone up front on top I spot

a purple smudge beyond rising hills

that edge the sea in concave cliffs.

A black tor’s wind turbine scythes

my landscape with maddening blades.

Tree-smacked the double-decker drops

into sheer-sided valley as if I drive

with abandon, lean into blind bends,

thread bottlenecks towards a stone town

that glints through thinning woods.

As we buck and brake at lights or road-works

I look up past fat-frying bars and gift shops

at faded Victorian hotels with their portals,

bay windows displaying well-spaced tables,

tall bedrooms behind nets and draped curtains.

I alight where strollers zig-zag up and down

shorn slopes that end in fenced-off crags

colonised by grunting, stiff-winged fulmar.

Far below a paddle steamer waits

to wallow out round long-deserted islands.

Not much footage unwinds from this patchwork

but here’s a sandy inlet of barnacled rock

where we sat braced against wind and spray.

Reading
Bel Ami
, I laughed at something flagrant.

What’s up
,
Daddy
? (Don’t Fathers know better?)

BELONGING

(
For Cathy
)

I.

We’re trimming stalks and husks

in a strip-light sunset, earth

sodden, moss-filmed, passive.

Your fifth autumn. You sift

my debris as if it’s treasure,

neatly load the old barrow,

ask if mosquitoes dance

up and down spiders’ webs.

A question I needn’t spoil thanks to

rooks lolloping west to roost

miles beyond our hedged horizon,

in twos or threes, some silent,

intent on return, some so gorged