Mountain

Spring: Possibilities

house 1 

house.

I watch rain through windows

in thought.

the house is neutral,

the house is nil, streaming down with rain:

there is no room in the house

no room for acting right or wrong,

only rooms where we go in necessity,

right and wrong.

house,

sharp brick, wall after wall,

contains feelings

excludes starlings

beyond windows of rain,

floors roof and ceiling –

levels of the eye,

windows like rain

and stares like a thought,

almost vacant now.

I must learn to distinguish a house

from a home.

     so it begins, the spring,

     with windows like rain,

     incessant, unremitting,

     a routine confirmation of change

water 

after rain, sometimes before ...

osmosis, capillarity and flow ...

among the grisly mountain grasses, black

in pools and edging for a common course,

squealing through the pebbles of streams:

gregarious, ubiquitous, the fall

of a body, the pulse of cells, running

pouring, parting the soil, permeating

the forest and sandstone skull of the hill;

fallforce, not one part in a thousand held,

out-channelling the reservoir and down its

concrete walls, beneath its crushed foundation,

and on to be deep in fast sloping fields

and lush in grasses tramped by mud-shod cows,

down to the swollen pocky faced canal

to the swill of puddles, the spitting overspill

of gutters and drains till, creeping secretly

in the chemistry of the cottage walls

and clamped as life in the boughs of trees

... osmosis, capillarity and flow ...

after rain, sometimes before,

water seeps endlessly to the heart of things.

routine confirmations

I see I believe

with windows of rain

the shudder of a swallow’s wing,

a flicker of shadow on rooftops,

bird black streak on the slate grey

hauling in a new skimp spring.

at a distance the shape of rising fields

softens with a hint of green,

but signs are sparse so early

and so high on life’s chain.

rain runs warming hands round the walls,

light dives for the dust

in winter corners of the room

and the air day by day

eases open windows and doors.

beyond the door, behind the wheel

all days are the same –

rolled up in commuter speed,

spray-grey on the tyre black tar,

while, steady and mindless

as a horse flicking summer flies,

the wipers sweep rain from my eyes.

it’s a five-day eight-hour oscillation

lost in confidence in paper words,

paper deeds, new friends,

wallpaper conversations.

I see, I believe,

through windows of rain:

incessant, unremitting,

runs a routine confirmation.

house 2

house

is the point,

the finest point to which all lines run.

I am surrounded by space

where the flood plain and the mountain meet.

they are recognisable externals,

passing through me,

through the house of lines,

the house in line, parting, departing:

the first uneasy steps of the fields,

the last heavy shove of the town.

stripes of rain run lines across our sleep

we doze and wake, strain our eyes

on fields and buildings poised outside,

desperate that we might miss the change

in the sky in the rain.

house, a point in space

where all lines cross

its windows on the rain,

windows painted by Victorian ladies,

drawn back in surprise,

drawn black in death;

inside outside

the length of the street

summer and winter, year by year,

measured one by one by those who died.

but when the stones pass through the pane,

who throws, and from whose side?

house

stands in a depression

by running water.

visit to friend

Spring is the time

that happens to the place you’re in,

alone or together, together and alone;

there are no easy alterations

in the ill-tempered breakfast of streets

where novelty slips like new love

to bland familiarity on the quest

for an old friend’s home.

    in the wood beside the canal

    dogs mercury scatters itself

    inconsequential, green;

    the male, the female

    seek a resolution.

    wild arum sheathed erect

    spikes through a hedgebank

    unready yet to enjoy its grandeur.

in among the traffic signs

disordered shoppers

set the childlike pavement free,

striking out to meet

the slide of the street,

the swing of the passing cars.

    stream bed laced with wood sorrel green:

    the smell of wet leaves

    the mud and the trees

    hang like a velvet coat.

feet pass securely on tarred camber,

on stone pavements, on iron stairways,

on concrete parks where stainless steel jets

toss sodium water on the night;

a fibreglass sculpture not yet understood

turns slowly white to grey,

while buses gyrate beyond,

bearing illusions of destinations.

    consider the quality of the celandine

    like but unlike any yellow headed daub

    on a green brown canvas:

    star fingered

    sheen wrapped for a while,

    striking first for the sky

    before woodland leaves,

    first with their own light,

    first of any buttercup to try,

    first alive and first to die:

    opportunist

    in self sacrifice.

turning his name inwards now,

James Davey – died 1905 –

on the island remnants of public gardens

studies the streaming traffic

that’s pulled like laden wagons

from the dark of a highrise adit;

earth movers judder offside

and clip new roads from his kingdom.

plastic bags and aluminium foil

perform derisory genuflections

in the bushes at his feet,

and inscriptions on the plinth

make concessions to a less certain order:

“United are magic” “United are shit”.

stiff and bronzed in indicator pulses,

James Davey perseveres a century on,

coal owner, benefactor,

man of revolution,

slowly absorbed by the panic of change.

    the white mountain track

    curls like farmyard smoke

    to a white house fleck on a green smudge slope.

    a gull swoops across a storm-wracked ocean

    of last year’s bracken whose brittle brown fronds

    snap at a touch –

    no hint of the rootlife

    soon to grab the hillside for its own.

in a spineless road

in an aching room

a friend claws for listening to go on,

smashes his brains on the beer

like the front of a bus.

loneliness clings in the coffee cup rings,

desperation peels from the walls.

separately we search for bearings,

not for places to go;

but the sound of the question

is the answer we need,

and shoved up the arse of a tenement block

in this bedsitter gut

we care little for distinctions.

    hillcrest pineforest

    spring is mute,

    the rain pretends

    not to descend,

    hangs in the sky

    like a kite.

in the flat below

a neighbour feeds rabbit,

tinned and jellied, to his cat,

plants horse shit in his window box.

    a horse is a slab on the moor,

    rabbit a crash of gorse

I’ve measured it from side to side,

he says with his hand on the window glass,

it’s ten miles long and two miles wide.

    imperceptibly the mountain diminishes

    beneath remorseless running water.

    suddenly a crevice fills with primrose proof of spring.

house 3

house,

a town of intersected parallels

wall by wall dividing.

wet streets strike out

choice by choice to arterial exteriors.

town, house,

loosely bound by the ends of alternatives,

a circle at the rim where the line is joined:

the inevitable choice.

a dog runs sideways down the road,

its tail clenched hard between its teeth.

house,

the starting point of journeys,

meeting point of friends

and journeys out to meet

the friends whose meetings journey in.

beyond the town the hedges tracks and streams

- divisions stacked against escaping –

shapes of containment,

town by town, field by field,

shapes that close and open

like the jaws of a tired lion:

the nation also yawns,

growing effortlessly green, compact

within its cubicle of change and spring.

house.

the people at the crossroads

bent by umbrellas

question a decision;

families passing through the house,

its streets paved with deathly mythologies;

people crossing, lying like slabs,

irregular, uneven, some broken,

reciting their lines –

word by word, choice by choice,

deciding a question.

connections

Time is a telephone –

it rings all day when I’m not at home,

then I call you up to put things right,

and still it’s the same unobtainable tone.

Death is a microphone –

takes the voices of folks I’ve known

and silently, unamplified,

it feeds me messages of stone.

Birth is a megaphone –

look how fast my son has grown,

his first cry was a miracle

that’s caught up by the wind and blown.

Love is a gramophone –

diamond on a plastic throne;

I seem to give you nothing but

the words “I love you” spinning to a drone.

house 4

house

eyes mouth town fields

open and closed

the conditioned blink of necessity.

the hand on the window,

or hand on the eyes,

hand on the want,

the hand hand in hand.

there is no mistaking the sense of what I see,

outside the trains and buses shuffle by,

roads spray, skies change,

light and dark, wet and dry:

the mountain slips from brown to green.

there is no mistaking sense,

my head beaten to a pulp of wine,

the constituents of change –

the earth too rolls over and over in pain.

We must become transparent like water,

colourless flesh that hears

with the ears of its body

against the fathomless sway –

free as water –

sea to its cellar, river to its bed,

house standing nearby.

We are mistaken, there is no mistaking

the two ways, knowing and feeling,

the one, the many,

the sense in the acid of music and love,

the sense in the easy argued night with friends,

the steps from protein to cell.

bodies, greater or lesser:

I draw the house in outline on the page.

I blink and step deliberately inside.

rush

“I’m in no rush,”

boasted the smug swamp water;

it paused in pools glazed

by glancing early sun,

and soothed away the solid root-clamped soil

to a soft enclosing velvet ooze.

Still and cool, the water

reckoned without osmotic pressure,

entertained no notion of root hair power

and its own dendritic destiny.

So in time came the xylem slide

upward to the sheathlike Juncus leaves.

When it hit the surface, sunlight blasted

its molecules to another state

of being, where, airborne and freefalling through

three dimensions, all semblance of control

evaporated, or so it transpired.

house 5

house.

universal possibility,

it winds round every point of the circle,

round all the circles

and wraps them as spheres;

clear and clear, sense and sense,

house and house.

but I did not choose all this choice –

town and street, field, tree and rain –

I’m lost in a country whose language is growth,

in the city whose syntax is change,

lost here in the space of binary spirals

and the moment that follows.

touched or untouched, it follows the same,

instant, consecutive, again and again.

one by one

every line, yours and mine,

every point,

every phrase, every sign

a beginning an end,

one to one, one to nil,

the baffling significants of endless choice.

every move, every moment

a circle that turns to itself

secure in exclusion.

with the house, and or without,

within the walls, without them,

house or no house,

house and no house at all:

at the edge of the cosmos

lurk the alternative digits;

the highest that we can aspire

is perhaps to be ready. 

breakthrough

The trees prevail, while

woodland plants survive as dark ideas of themselves

beneath the beech and holly and oaks,

beneath the leaf mould soaked in surface run off

and beneath the soil.

They bide their time.

Woodland is defined by a dominant autocracy,

but who could deny that some day, some year

the canopy might fail,

that soft silk-coated petals, white and yellow,

might master the forest floor with their brilliance?

On a given sign each spring the ground erupts

with the singleminded madness of their chemistry;

a brief flash flood of colour

washes out the greys and browns –

wood sorrel, celandine, anemone –

till the fresh olive green of  tree top leaves

poisons the petals with their darkness.

But, what if,

when the flowers break from cover, trees have

the sun in their eyes, not knowing who is for and against?

and, when they push in blindness to the surface,

they have already planned the campaign?

what if they arrive with unity of purpose

and not in competition?

Could they then supersede the trees?

Spring flowers preserve their possibility unfailingly;

and each year dogs mercury comes and goes

in green obscurity,

ignominious, prepared. 

Summer: The Great War »