Authors: Michael Tolkien
with croaking chatter they slew off
course and swivel idly back.
And wouldn’t you love to join them!
If they were scissors, you say,
there’d be holes in the sky.
What’s it like to be a rook?
“An ugly crow with pale face and beak.
Some might call you farmer’s friend
but who’d want to live or work
near a woodful of yackers like you?”
Easier said than what it might be like:
caught at dusk without a perch,
to drill at teeming fallow, mine for maggots,
shriek into dawn quarrel, taste
dry tongue as frost tightens.
When
you’ve
flown elsewhere, I wonder,
will you notice knots of black wings
making for some distant comfort,
and think of homing rooks and home?
II.
Your age again, I’m all weathers
outside flint-rendered hotchpotch cottage
near woods of towering beech and ash
under rookery flight path, our bowed roof
streaked white from its restless traffic.
Look-outs cling to topmost twigs,
welcome back wandering droves
with all’s-well bark. The sound
of permanence that makes it seem
we’re planted deep in tree-lined shadows,
though I long for roar and swell
of thick-flocking autumnal spates
when cackling jackdaws and shrill crows
join the daily forage, return and squabble
over where to ride out the night.
*
Above us now tail-enders mutter
between wing beats, and I kneel
to help you scrape up our cuttings,
but I’m back among flattened bluebells,
knees black with leaf-mould, to rescue
fledglings flung from nests by gales
before their first, haphazard flight.
Never mind the blank stares and idiot squeals:
they’re slop-fed in boxes by the coke boiler.
Tossed into aerial trials they flounder,
catch the knack, and never look back.
MOUNTAIN SUNDOWN
Low, lingering Norwegian sun
throws a birch pattern
over wood-clad room.
Most ponder their roaming day,
share it with postcards,
scribbling well-used phrases
that insist on being said,
miss the moment’s fullness
when hard, clean light scrubs
crags and brittle crests of trees,
and its slow dwindling unveils
clefts, groins, fine-hatched crannies.
And beyond it all I’m seeing
one distant once-loved woman
sigh before her mirror,
expectant or listless about
an evening out, testing herself
against invasive light,
trying to shun the moment’s weight.
AFTER THE SINGING
She lodged above a freezer shop.
He stood below her on the first dark step
beyond strip lights illuminating bargain buys.
Their concert so long rehearsed
with indifferent voices, was over.
Where should they go next?
Communal zest softened a broken past,
weekly shelter, somewhere to rub shoulders.
She shook and cried. He longed for her
to turn to him, sensing but not seeing
her morbid inwardness and taut temples.
He needed to cherish a crumpled face.
“I’ve been badly hurt. It ruins trust”,
she said. “I’m the one who’s always hurt,”
he said, feeling but not believing it.
Months later caught in the snare
of getting by and tired by devotion
that hadn’t begun to heal her pain
she caught him unawares, hit him,
he felt, with what he’d said too easily,
before they stumbled up those dark stairs.
He traced the mean corners of her mouth,
flinched from a fretful soprano full of rancour,
and to hold his own, crassly declared:
“So...
Tempting fate
is more than just a cliché.”
She consulted her watch, looked away
and said: “at least I’ve let you down gently.”
THE ASSUMPTION
......this
both the yeares and the dayes deep midnight is.
( John Donne: Nocturnal on St Lucies Day)
I watch you
file drudgery away
on the night of the year’s least light.
And I’m happy
for your respite.
Prospero’s staff is broken. Aerial-free you flit
among cabinets, copiers, stationery.
Do I walk with you
in moon-clouded vault
of the year’s midnight, or is it a trance?
Every thought
sways to a dance
as you waver in your tiredness and take a chance
with taunts and hints of affectionate sport.
O we’ve talked,
making every commonplace a comfort,
unquiet encounters this night will now eclipse.
Words cannot distort
heartfelt release
that says in no uncertain terms and not to please,
being loved from head to toe’s your just desert.
But here’s the lamp
where we are duty-bound to part
and night unlighted summons me away
to play another part
wearing hours away,
while you tread a straight, neatly-lighted way
with measured shadows that leave an undivided heart.
O the lamp inquires
and headlights probe as we stand
a pace apart in the year’s longest night,
and there’s your hand
limp and moon-white
like a question posed: welcome or withstand
this tender outbreak of long-restrained delight?
We’re watchers
at the year’s grave, benighted
under lamp-tinged brooms of ash that sweep beyond us,
your face uplifted,
traffic-lit, curious,
then snatched back, refusing to be sifted,
your breath charged and held, unutterably serious.
THE KISS
Recalling Vienna’s Upper Belvedere
I recap from Michelin and smile
at how you’d prepared me for Klimt’s
Kiss,
dashing back up the hotel’s four floors
for a postcard just to show me
how tenderly the man’s hands rested.
Yet when we’d thawed out
from the Prince of Savoy’s walks,
and stood before the original,
my eye ran down each pattern of a coverlet
that draped her, till I saw feet pointed
limply at her lover as if to match
her look of comfort and assent.
‘Yes: we neglect our feet,’ you said
in a voice that told me this was
your moment, and I wondered who
would rub yours to ease away their chill.
But the way those fingers touched without
taking, and the restraint of his bearded lips
made me turn aside with something about
reflexology and Chinese concubines.
LIVING SON
O zu ihr zuerst. Wie waren sie da
aussprechlich in Heilung
...(Rilke: Das Marienleben)
No mirage shuddering in sunlit dust:
it was her son pale as unearthed root,
slow, strong pace so like his measured words,
wide gaze that stirred love and hate.
Fine-sculpted man broken and nailed
till he lost himself in a wild cry
and she left him embalmed and deftly bound.
The old rebuke came back:
His Father’s business
and didn’t she realise?
Yet light in foot and heart
she took his outstretched hand while his other eased
her shoulders of their tight-held grief. No words
for what had passed. So they begin again,
two trees that stir and sway to windless currents,
his work and hers now for ever one.
NOTE
Epigraph:
‘ O to her he first (came). Then and there how inexpressibly they were healed...’
PSALM
Forgive me, Lord, for not rejoicing
in her regard,
for waking to curse a wakefulness
that wracks me with distrust.
I have not asked for grace
to fulfil your promise,
I have not asked you to bless
the moments and makings
of our regard.
I have not freed my heart
to soar at your summons.
I have stopped my ears against
the songs she makes me sing.
*
You have made me a place of rest to draw
on her regard.
And I have not delighted
in your loving kindness.
You have come brightening from the south
over a drenched land as we walked
in our regard.
And I have not taken
your sign to heart.
You have planted a seed and I have turned away
and left its tender shoots to wither
without regard.
A LIGHTER TOUCH
1. ASCENT
We tread higher into forest,
the path roughly terraced
by root and rock. Me first.
I turn and see you lit-up
in a glimmering gap,
your delight at each slow step
as if there’s no other place
where earth’s entire grace
could so enliven your face.
2
. EMBROIDERY
I look out at midsummer borders
while tenderly a Purcell Almand’s plucked
from harpsichord’s fine-tuned wires,
elusive, fluid syncopations
that tint all you’ve nurtured and planted.
It’s the rhythm of your fingers coaxing
into colour from green-winged fragments
wayward petunias, stocks, marigolds,
dahlias with pert looks and tuberous toes.
Is it you, Purcell, or the player
who brushes in layer by layer
this quavering melange,
pink-white, puce-yellow, mauve-orange?
3.
ILLUMINATION
Does grubbing up weeds in August mist
purge me or do I fight some dogged force
that has to be admired and cursed?
What matter when your greeting
pitches gently into the damp air
and your smile, part question part blessing
strokes my face like a shaft of warm light?
It’s the Feast of the Virgin’s Assumption
and I face Mass to be beside you.
The sermon asks if we find Mary’s joy
shining through the fogs of dogma,
for me no more or less your radiance
scouring a waste of potholes and minefields
I expect to fill and still for all eternity.