Refuge (6 page)

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)

on the night of the year’s least light.

Prospero’s staff is broken. Aerial-free you flit

among cabinets, copiers, stationery.

of the year’s midnight, or is it a trance?

as you waver in your tiredness and take a chance

with taunts and hints of affectionate sport.

unquiet encounters this night will now eclipse.

that says in no uncertain terms and not to please,

being loved from head to toe’s your just desert.

where we are duty-bound to part

and night unlighted summons me away

while you tread a straight, neatly-lighted way

with measured shadows that leave an undivided heart.

a pace apart in the year’s longest night,

like a question posed: welcome or withstand

this tender outbreak of long-restrained delight?

under lamp-tinged brooms of ash that sweep beyond us,

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.