Mountain

Winter: Borders

1. LOOSE CHANGE

The year you came,

it was only the mountain which stayed the same;

at the end of autumn, even in mist,

it was there distinct and pinched for winter,

as air squeezed out its moisture:

and after rain, the water seeping from it

came to the earth at your door;

you read its moods like occasional letters from an old friend,

not questioned, not fully understood.

The year you came

it was only

mutability

that stayed the same.

The year you came few things remained – the neighbours’ vast

pack of children, one TV show after the last,

the thighs of a girl in a pub, summer’s heave and fall;

others grew, like shirtcollar stains, or the beercan wall,

or damp on ceilings, trees on the hill, hopes and lies,

the unmentioned mountainshape stapled to your eyes.

While your mountain roared

as metaphor for stasis;

you’d rant against chaos

in all other cases.

Later, when your tense and

present sense rearranged

your mood, you mused it was

change itself that had changed.

The year you came you had so much to lose –

the more you looked, the less it could become;

onwards like decimals, never to close,

between the grains, inside atomic sums,

they slipped beneath the table with the crumbs.

The repetition clamped around your mind;

as months escaped, activity succumbed:

life was balanced and carefully aligned,

and constant interference sent you blind.

The year you came

you’d nothing to give

but infective anger,

pain and grief.

yours and mine

the town squats on the rump of a carbon age,

the coal-stoking, pick-poking, town-choking days

when men became machines and lived their hopes

in warrens squalid with primeval pride.

now on the hill the streams fill with mine swill,

and dwarf holes open in the private earth

where once the spitted workers pitted wits

against the tinder darkness of their maze;

today the spoils are gone and soil forms on the spoil,

and down in the town stone factories abound

stuffed like mine-dung up bleak back passages,

and shunning the schemes that will ease them out

soon in suppository replanning.

yet anarchy withstands the clean ideas:

new roads splay out, consumables haul in

freewheeling, speed-dealing, space-stealing ways –

our high rise grand prize family-size daze.

and streets hold their guts through a car-borne age.

the order of the walls

Familiar news of government change

pours over you like a cooling summer storm.

This is what you’ve waited for.

Before returning to privacy

men with anglepoised shadows

and husked voices clear their throats

and belongings from their desks

in rooms off pale echoing corridors;

obediently our leaders,

who take their scotch with soda

but leave the office neat,

follow down the order of the walls;

outside in passageways

they wait for the last rasping lift

as noises tinkle from a painful distance:

no one comes, but thoughts

are tortured into corners

by a circuit of naked lights;

arriving and unmoved, the secretariat

looks down at the files,

cataloguing fingernails.

Frost slides from windows

and water recovers itself for the day;

a horse in the traffic jam below

breathes the vapour of morning,

its dung steams, the stench rising.

Effortlessly the night-damp pavements dry,

and the stiff revolving doors turn again

to emit the men whose brittle dreams

clatter like teacups in the new day’s

unrelenting streets.

Their power was an edifice,

empty, grey and stone,

their mandate was a flight of steps

worn down by a million passing feet.

All-night celebrations sprinkle from a nearby hotel.

Tomorrow maybe the men of the new administration

will feel their way down sober halls,

stand family photos on their desks

fill drawers with felt tip promises,

ready at last to change the order of the walls

perhaps to look at far off things.

secret I

the white people came with cameras

looking for the most beautiful woman in the village

and I couldn’t stop my father saying it was me;

they made a film of me standing in my best dress

by the tap the aid workers brought –

the tap which ran dry last month so that

we have to walk another mile to collect water now;

it has not rained for months, and the big man

takes the little water we have for his tobacco crop;

my baby is hungry now; and I don’t know

what we will do if the harvest fails again;

I haven’t heard from my husband in nearly a year;

he went to work in the mines and sometimes

brought me money in the early days;

now there is nothing to buy in the village

and I do not know if he is alive;

but my mother says he may have taken

another woman: why would he do that

if he cannot even support his own wife?

maybe we will go to the town and try

to get the kind of work they pay you for.

maybe I could work for a rich family in the city,

like the ones we saw on the television

at the big man’s house;

but who would want a pregnant woman with a baby?

and they say that the rich people ran away

to the country to escape the war.

we know so much more since the television came:

the government is trying to help us, they say;

the women should stay in the country,

our men should go to the war, our children can learn,

we can avoid sickness in a hundred ways,

but there is so much more to understand.

why do they mix up what is real with what is play?

the white people are strangest of all

they behave like the gods in the stories

my grandmother told my sisters and me,

so rich and strong that they control the world,

but only destroying themselves;

the people in Dallas are so beautiful

my friends believe they only pretend

to be unhappy – I feel their sadness

but not how they can be dissatisfied.

the white people with the cameras said

my pictures would come on televisions

all over the world, and that white people

will learn what it is like to live in my village.

that is more televisions than anyone

can count, and my father says their weakness

is not telling the truth, even to themselves,

and they will suffer for such foolish lies.

2. STORAGE JARS

The years they came:

like a spider up a drainpipe

or silverfish to the hearth

the months and years slipped in.

The quiet storage jars no longer rant,

their bland containment has replaced dissent.

Do they hold experience or passion?

continuity or faded fashion?

or are they crammed with paraphernalia,

scraps and patches of success and failure?

The years have tamed

two people making points,

left to pass round blame,

peaceably, like joints

They seldom go there nowadays

why should they?

they know what it is, what it does,

its gravitational pull

like the black mass of matter in space.

And yes, they know the shared out cared-out

piddle-glass middle class guilt of their lives

which play Trivial Pursuit

with the astonishing beauty of the mountain

it’s a kind of passive smoking which poisons

everyone and everything they are near

a consumption which slowly exhausts

the lungs of the planet, and which

in time will turn its incredible

intricacy to a barren sandstone slab.

How dare they even set foot on its slopes

when they’ve dustbins full of black matter

and their radiators run on the heat death

of the universe.

Besides, it stopped its pestering

in time; so they skipped the sequel,

refused to yield to questioning,

claimed their real world was more equal,

withheld its rocky history,

its craters, cracks, its depths, its core –

thus they dismissed the chemistry

and enzymes in the mountain’s maw.

While life is like

a well-publicised hike

across an icecap

played out as ordeal,

you’re well advised,

if you want to survive,

to try to treat

the adventure as real:

there’s nothing to win

but the space between

the last hole you’re in

and your might-have-been.

Do not burn or place near excessive heat

alone, with every sound his own,

he shrinks away from the shout of the night,

grows still, grows threatened, grows small and contained,

just pressurised matter for aerosol cans;

evening fingers the clock, dead hands

numb and fumbling turn outwards,

tear silent screams from the air.

when the world ends, when he enters

the silence, when he is so amazed

to speak no more of brightness and burning,

of ashes and angels, then God and ape

will creep upon him unawares,

then, as he chokes to a hideous end

in guttering illiterate Latin,

he will wish to god he had never prayed.

he waits inside the deafening can

for these blunt receding edges to crush

him to vapour; the shrinking universe

grows overweight, and fearful poets

with words which once released the springs

of wonder, celebrate mass among

the dancing hands; so no one will hear

this thin pneumatic hiss as he jets

through the night in particles of spray.

spurge

The spurge is a plant between

spurn and purge,

and not even either of these.

It sneaks its frequency into our lives

like fruit flies, moss and myth,

seemingly sexless, flowers

like some other plant’s leaves,

weak green till it wrinkles

and shrinks to winter’s nil.

Its strength is insignificance:

next year its seeds will

heave aside the earth and shoot these

fragile fleshy surfaces from

every unfilled vegetative space.

and when we least expect, this weed

of disturbance, ubiquitous, defiant,

will come again and then again,

all spur and surge.

3. BATTLEZONES

in the analytic time they came

they would ask how and why could they permit

politicians to manage the state?

to get where they are they must have the brains

to see the job is beyond all their claims;

it must be our fault if we can’t admit

that too; so why would we choose to submit

to tyranny, except to pass the buck,

or because we dream we’d have more luck?

in the democratic time they came

post-modern critics give awards for fame,

philosophers unanimously think

they must retain their fellowships; solicitors

win cases at left luggage sales; soldiers

go blind and politicians do not blink.

in the nihilistic time they came

history resisted what the world called blame;

they heard it confirmed on the evening news

they saw it everywhere on pub rock posters;

truth took a ride on the roller coasters,

and promises returned as crossword clues.

in the altruistic time they came,

technology provokes everyone

to be witnesses to the smash and grab

on the premises it calls Planet Earth;

the evidence as usual is flawed

so press and state must tell us what we saw:

they know how evil drives a child to kill

they know why a woman tortures for thrills

(but please can we give them a few decades more

to discover what makes good people poor?)

Who needs to think, when crimes are so black

and beyond the imagination they lack?

in the time they came

like the last, like the next

the battlezones are drawn

and the world hangs on the edge:

history resists and the news excludes,

and  Newsnight leads with all the young dudes.

the vanquished

After we have vanquished the Communists,

Coke and Big Mac seize key street corners;

new states want aid – we airlift consultants,

the best our generosity can buy;

they need customers – we tame the means of their

production, factory by factory;

we want them to cherish independence –

which they do, five ethnic wars at a time.

And after the economic holocaust

drives the hard men from power, drugs trundle

up the Afghanistan road, and gangsters

give up government to take over the streets

with suits, Mercedes and liberated arms.

After we obliged the heirs of Stalin

to play their last grim hand of misere,

old men die of hunger in Moscow parks;

thousands disappear in Yugoslavia;

Albanian peasants start to feel poor.

So no one can doubt who has won the war.

After we have vanquished Communism,

Marxists slink from our universities,

abandon criticism and history.

Politicians ennoble ignorance

as righteousness, and unfold origami

policies on judges who use their own

judgement and priests who condemn the wrong sins.

Now equality is a calculation

which results from teaching children to add,

subtracting cash, and dividing the workforce.

Independent trade unions are suppressed

by their own free press; dissenters are barred

from political parties, and debate

breaks down in an empty hammering of shoes.

After the West breaks free at last from fear

of barbarous tyranny, it becomes

necessary to starve black refugees

or lock them up for years without trial;

Our state rediscovers the need to hold

dying prisoners in chains, and to wrench

babies from principled women using

insanity orders and surgeons’ blades.

Secret service agents switch assignments

from spying in East Berlin to lying

in West Belfast, as eager as ever

to discredit the peacemakers’ cause:

no one could doubt who’s winning their wars.

war machines

In the war of someone else’s independence

they chose computerscans of army HQ

and pressed the key marked “find”;

in the war to safeguard oil

they shot a beam on a bunker vent

and told the smart bomb “fetch”;

in the war to beat the solitary egomaniac

they hunted down two hundred thousand

with the finesse of a desert storm.

Your softspoken sister wrote the software code

which designed the guidance chips;

your brother-in-law helped the army load

the cargo planes with saline drips;

your neighbour threw a studio switch which showed

the world the bloodless newsreel clips;

and friends despatched supply trucks down the road

with biscuits, bombs and comic strips –

all for our cars to burn the oil that flowed

back home on peaceful merchant ships.

We all have sons, but they stayed in bed,

or they played guitar in a shopping arcade;

they spewed up their guts on Saturday night,

smoked dope with friends, shot up in a squat.

They’re the Disappeared; they’re gone.

They run the streets; they carry a gun.

The blame’s all theirs, it’s nothing we’ve done.

children on the edge of town

Children in a landscape danced in space

around a lone oak, improvising games

of cruelty and pre-pubescent lust,

boys-girls rolled together lost in magic.

Memories of that July jab into the bark

of their readable lives: the dying sun

ignites a single sense which is the scent

and warmth of bodies on chill earth and hay;

sometimes the bold ones enflamed by darkness

in nearby woods shared the secrets of each

other’s almost innocent naked parts.

Then a man who was thirty years older

strode the grass, high on stilts of ownership,

preparing to build a housing estate.

They tore down his notice, and he bulldozed the field.

They ripped up the pegs which marked out his place

and he torched the jungle of their senses,

tarmaced over their imagination.

They smashed the windows too high to see through,

and he bricked up the dreams of childhood

in homes where they would live and a shopping mall.

Today, garden fences nudge the solitary oak.

There is no dancing here now.

TV chains the children like neglected dogs

in a sad back yards;

no one feels safe in these woods but junkies

and brave kids who fell trees to make dens

and light smoky fires in oakwood boughs,

while closed behind a thousand lonely doors

in rooms empty of anything but things

sit the displaced children of that older landscape.

We’re drugged with yearning for or earning more

than we can ever need, diminutives

whose kindergarten destinies are worn

around our necks as long as each one lives.

it takes us half a lifetime, if we’re strong,

to fit together what the fuck is wrong;

and when we do, each anguished, frightened, uptight

generation has stomach left for one more fight –

to keep it from the kids, how our wondrous species

has learned how not to learn, what a boon deceit is

for piling up the crap in which they’ll have to stand:

family by family through the reptile land,

we abandon our young in shoreline sand, as sure

as we barricade doors to make ourselves secure.

It’s the town which moves, not us.

Down the road two miles is another field,

and, after thirty years, another oak with children dancing,

learning the endless possibilities of their bodies.

Construction work is starting nearby,

and we look for something lost as the kids retaliate.

the trees in the park

First, when the crime figures rose in our town,

they dropped ropes from trees –

warnings mostly, more symbolic than real –

till one was caught in the act, some reprobate deed,

and strung up by the arms for two or three hours

“to teach him a lesson he won’t forget”.

The idea caught on, estate by estate;

it did no harm, our neighbours said, in fact

it spread community togetherness.

Then a joy rider who’d escaped the carnage

of his stolen car, died in tragic circumstance,

with his hands tied tight and wide and high,

splayed out in a tree against the sky, dead,

asphyxiated, like one crucified, they said.

Thus the public mood and appetite slued round:

when the next suspected rapist was guyed

on a parkland oak overlooking a children’s

football pitch, the rope was taut and round his neck.

Police kept the crowds at bay, fearing

public order offences (though there were none).

Journalists jostled for camera spots

and parking shots, though it was deemed unseemly

that they should intervene. Councillors

in live and televised debate implied

the issues could be seen from two sides,

but nine out of ten townswomen and men

who held a view assumed their duty was

to execute.

Early concern that public vengeance might

get out of hand dissolved in time, and Action

Groups were formed to regulate the task,

to seek, by  fair and democratic means,

nominations for the gallows, and fix

stringent limits on numbers dropped each day.

The Deputy Chief Constable relaxed

his formal reservations with offers

to contribute offenders’ names and crimes

(the courts and gaols thus freed from doubt and stress

could concentrate on honest prosecution).

Council park men welcomed well paid sunrise

work with trees, cutting bodies down at dawn,

but down among the Civic Centre weeds

piranha potentates snapped and seethed

at wages bills and crematoria fees,

and stripped the issue to its barest bones:

“It’s not our responsibility alone,”

they whined. “We need the Church to quantify

the worth of souls, the sanctity of life.

No matter how small or large the offence

we can’t provide justice at public expense.”

unrecognised bird in the dark

He went out Saturday night,

shoved a broken glass in his face,

his head into a wall,

and banged his hand in the door;

He forced himself to drink a urine-coloured

liquid till he passed out,

demanding to know, “who’s hard now?”

Next morning in the chilling rain

he dragged his body into town,

to a tall building, with a long corridor,

and doors off every few yards

which he slammed in his face.

There were lifts, but he forced himself

to take the stairs, saying it would

“do you good, if you get our drift”.

At the top was a dark room,

where he locked himself away

with loud pulsing music to beat him up

until he was prepared to confess.

Yes, but he still had his pride.

The walls were filled with giant

TV screens; every frame displayed

came from a different channel,

though somehow they were all the same.

He told himself repeatedly

he had to think fast to get out of this;

but that was all he could think about.

When hope started to fade

he asked himself what he needed to live,

since, whatever it was he wanted,

he couldn’t have it; but in the end

he made himself forget who he was,

and that alone got him through.  

changing trains

The place was so full of nothing like space

itself, like Crewe Station at 3 am,

and some late night spotters from western lands

were exchanging sagas of the far north.

The ordinary grew rarefied here

with news of strange locomotive movements;

but unlike times when traveller poets

silenced drinking cups to make myths in such

great halls whose roofs were lost in the smoke night,

these men lay out negligible details

on neon-lit refreshment bar tables.

No one listened as they guessed destinations.

But another guy scribbled among

empty coffee cups, emptied ashtrays,

the only one here truly alive;

he smiled, but earnestly, as if honesty

was about to be withdrawn from service,

and we might never have copped it at all.

“I’m writing,” he’d say, if you’d only asked.

“It’s a book – about what passes, what we see,

about the empty eyes of those who

stay awake all night by act of will.

It’s a book about being, and being alone,

about a mountain, and living on the edge.

It’s taken thirty years so far,” he’d say.

“It’s really a book on anything you like,

and everything which, if you like, you don’t.”

You’d have cursed beneath your breath if he’d spoken,

you, the undead, staying awake all night

by act of will, passing through and on the edge,

returning to live beneath the mountain.

A goods train stumbled by

bound for South Wales from the North;

the trainspotters ritually wrote a number –

it could have been any number,

it could be nothing.

4. CONVERSATIONS ABOUT LOVE

The age they came came dark and slow and late;

the world, the bastard world, was full of hate:

what else was there to do but deprecate

its wrongs, and so confirm this dismal fate?

there was no consequence to saying no

to the brute jackboot of the status quo;

subjective good and bad still ebbs and flows,

so why not be right, and make the world know?

Certainty closes in with age, like death,

but understanding travels far, like love.

melting in her arms

Atlantic gales crashed inland wiping the birds

aside, sucking the air up growling chimneys

as garden conifers swirled about and cursed

like flapping curtains, and dustbins rolled and drummed;

rains first smeared the distant hunchback forest,

then scratched out detail from the window view:

there is only one way to feel what is warm,

and that is to embrace the chilling storm.

The journey out is a fine grey line like foam

behind a sailing ship: the track splutters

with glistering pools on wet bare ground

which tacks from side to side on its ascent;

then wind barges in behind with the shove

of a slob in a crowd, half flounder, half

blunder – and anything not part of the earth

or fixed by roots or gravity is gone.

Higher in the sizzling forest, the fired

and orgiastic air finds shelter where

the ground and downpour churn and gorge themselves

and pound and plunder rills for rivers, streams

for molten torrents, where paths and grasses

sprawl and spurt and blurt in squalling courses,

and every inch of mountain pours and swims

in clumsy tumbling swelling overspill.

Everything is motion – roofs and rootballs shift,

lift, levitate to brave the boiling air,

pushed upward by the horizontal rain,

pulled downward by the saturated earth;

tangled, rolled, the tangible world crosses

out of matter into antimatter,

and slackens, vacillates, then passes back:

the whole mad mountain raves, runs out of meaning.

Then like some wild allnight group excesses

the senses coalesce: touching nothing,

every sharp nerve leaps and dulls to one

vague and instantaneous sensation,

as indifferent, undifferentiated

as this crazed gale, and as soon insensible;

the wind has no taste or smell, it leaves one blind,

all we hear is physical, air only.

Love is some such humbling reckless force

which subsumes the landscape and compels acts

that defy gravity: love unlatches doors,

abstracts us with its barewire excitement,

threatens danger, tempts with possibilities

propels us to heights, defies entreaties,

squeezes out the capacity for thought,

leads us back beaten, leaves us for dead.

Love too is earth and air, fire and water

the balance of impossibles that look

for footholds on the slope of Earth’s rotation;

it’s the edge of things that tends to create

sense – though not necessarily to make it;

it’s the function and conjunction of two

wanting people, who hold on to be sure

they’re burned or drowned or blown away together.

And what of those we’ll never love because

we’ll never meet them? Our morality’s

another such riot of consent and wrong:

we declare our belief not in power but

power beyond us – till nothing is left,

and nothing’s as deep as sex except death –

like poets who make their meanings obscure

only because they’re afraid to be sure.

How strange that when we’re old or cold enough

to know, our conversations about love

are so spare, so bared by the storm, forced below

ground by pounding water; instead we stand

at windows, watch rain and speak of death,

and ignore what it is to be human,

observing when someone we love is dead

only how much we left our love unsaid.

edge

It’s the edge of things in time which begins

to make sense, like people in love or sin –

not the tyrannosaurus rex of words

that roars anachronistic fallacies

as if they were meanings, and not the words

misunderstood because they mean too much –

but the edge which she and he might sometimes touch.

It’s the edge of things that tends to madness:

sharing and preparing food is a strange

stir fry of eroticism and parental care –

love is as much the washing up as not;

and then it’s management for excitement,

finding space for what is unexpected

without either threat or expectation;

he pleads for the application of logic,

she for intuition: irrationally

they beat each other till both feel nothing.

It’s the edge of things which makes you what you are

and it’s the edge of things which tends to war:

ultimate identical twins, equal

and opposite, define the rest as fear;

perhaps a scent of bluebells that explodes

sudden remembrance of someone you loved.

or the fish which smoothes its fused flesh through lost

grey depths hearing with the ears of its body.

It’s the edge of things that leaves you where you are:

fields fidget with a small twist of bird calls

at this thin end of the year, just a gasp

of rooks, and a stittering of sparrows

sift through the dark December afternoon,

remembering a wift of mayflower blooms

when the air clicked with birdsong;

like sunbathers by a burnt hotel pool,

the pace of dying slows to a faint heartbeat.

Is the mountainside such a dreadful place

that no living creature dares show its face?

It’s the edge of things which makes them grow:

when they were young they stood up coins on edge

believing they possessed special powers,

they made tea-time dangerous as a window ledge

building salt-pepper-and-sauce-bottle towers;

they fearlessly laid halfpennies on the rails

for trains to enlarge to a half-crown scale.

now they see how funeral attendances

swell with youth and slim right down with age,

an indication not of what a corpse

is worth, but the worst fears of survivors.

It’s the edge of things which ties you down:

morality’s not a long game of Triv

or hopscotch on flagstones of evil and good,

but how we dance with the stumbling motives,

of everyone else who jumps or gets screwed.

It’s the edge of things which set you free:

Shakespeare of course was just a mixed up

crazy guy or girl, living on the edge

of action and hooked on drama therapy.

if you want to live with Shakespeare

spilling love and blood on stage

you’ll need Hitler and Atilla;

if you think respect is due to Newton

you’ll need his cradle and old age,

you’ll need Einstein and Charles Pooter.

(“I’ll change the motion of the universe –

and I’ll do it my way.”

the obsessed scientist would say;

so thought stood still three hundred years and, worse,

when Einstein came along

he proved the bastard Isaac wrong.)

It’s the end of things which sets you free:

you count the cost of winter kicking leaves;

friends, relatives and lovers come and go:

the severity of all your partings

depends at last on how you comb your hair.

The age they came everyone took living

to be forever. In the next, giving

will be compulsory, and “rich” is then

wholly synonymous with “citizen.

and in

the end

the evil that you perpetrate

is equal to the good you hate.

It’s the edge of things that tends to score.

5. THE FINAL ASSENT

When the time came

before they went

they gave it a name –

the final assent.

The light came in long and low from the east

like a space shuttle landing

filling the cold town with smiles,

leaving for the mountain.

relief

morning’s opaque brilliance hangs

at windows shuttering the view,

and the sun steels the south out of sight:

he slips through the sunlight somewhere, watches

the dead weight of a bridge slung

across a canal clinging tensely

like a web between blades of grass;

factories and trees are pinned

against crisp skies; an anchored

high-rise slab sharpens in fragile

translucence above the town;

tar-bright street crosshatchings

wheel steeply out of the shade,

grabbing cars and swinging them off

down the free distance of their beams;

tall loose clouds scud over rooftops

in December’s wind, and the day

shudders light and dark.

                                 the year

has turned on itself, wire and taut,

and snapped the soft sun thread that held

the summer: today the sun remakes the world.

the bridge to another kingdom

down in the town

everyone has signed a pledge

to cultivate a nice square hedge.

but after the amber of autumn

a pool of brown leafslush

freezes beneath every tree;

then the track is shod with mud

and sludge run off from streams;

the factory is a throbbing drone below

like a far off goods train that passes forever

overlaid by a pulse of whines and screeches

and clutter and mouthings of heavy things dropped.

... osmosis, capillarity and flow ...

after rain, sometimes before,

water seeps endlessly to the heart of things.

Stumbling high in the woods an hour or so

they found a bridge to another kingdom:

above the boulder-bramble scrambling floor

two fallen trees sprawl – one a hulk of oak

clean wrenched root first, like an oafish tooth torn

from the forest’s gum, one a brittle beech

snapped in the clicking fingers of a storm;

trunk on trunk span the cavity of green

-yellow clay, crash across a dry stone wall

hauled here before the mantle grew, and fixed

firm all the years by interlocking rocks

like field borders or boundaries of worlds.

Thorns and holly tangle the underwood

and bar all routes, even back; so the tall

and precarious slithering tree bridge

leads them away to freedom against the grade.

Over the border of science and order

they become the archaeologists of stars

who navigate by buried walls and paths;

dead vegetation rots back into life

molecule mashed and newly assembled

like the half-life of silence they have heaved

against the grain up this desolate hill:

it means nil, it means all, that they cross

as they cross, and cross back and then cross –

till those left behind record them as lost.

fort

A slant afternoon light flushes the summit

then fades again in sudden flailing snow;

cars like attendants of Beatrice were drawn

by the sun, their steel wings stealing its glory,

seven are parked among sheep, clamped by cold.

the world here at the top loses its point,

the breast of the hill flattens as she splays

back on the skyline, even her nipple,

erect at a distance, levels in profile

to unaroused undulating desert,

an horizon of featureless gravel.

the boundary of earth and air recedes,

it sinks, lifts, then cracks into a crater,

the desecrated grave of an ancient fort

in stones pecked clean by ice and rain;

rings of ditches ring out with the wind

and gather round a crumbling footworn mound,

a place where summer prints have stamped

a symmetry on a faint embattled shape,

where cameras came to print its dust on film,

and people came to film their feet in dust.

a plaque says it was wood, post holes were found,

the time Fourth Century BC; and that

is all the archaeologists can know.

but this is no castle, manor, tomb or church,

just one determined island of retreat,

no last and least defence when all was lost,

a summit, not a consummation,

charges in the ebb and flow of kingdoms,

a margin or a measured cost which might fall

or rise with no risk to the capital.

here’s a trace, not a place of history,

a punctuation mark, but not a stop.

this brief eroded tale is incomplete –

who came? who stayed, who slayed? what name, what day?

no one remembers, no one imagines,

and no one has authority to speak;

so no one now commands this gaunt flat peak,

the sun dies, settling snow takes the landscape’s

shape quietly; chilled cars weave back down the lanes;

the table top remains without remains.

exposure

Winter has slapped its hand on the shoulder

of the hill, above the warmth of hunched up homes.

Pylons stamp across the ridge stiff with cold

and promised power for another valley;

they turn, bent back against the numbing air

and vanish with intent. Dark and snow fall

faster, and exposed horses muzzle in

the rain-grazed grass, monumental, as if

sculpted from the coal of long abandoned spoil,

while sheep and sedge and trees and moss scrape

scant life from the frozen soil. Higher still

a cottage, ancient, indistinct, snugs

to the bowl of a shallow quarry; a wood

finds shelter on its niggardly patch, neglected

since planting, and green even at its lowest ebb.

The sheep there shrivel in their fleece against

the scouring wind, and shift at an approach;

a half-horned ram hangs back then lunges off.

Above, a crowfoot stream claws drifting snow

with frozen fingers at a sheer beginning.

The summit slides backwards in immensity

to limits of knowing and endurance.

the woodgatherer

the woods have filled with solid things;

the leaf mould is rock, the air is powder,

late afternoon is a grey frost glaze on every stick and stem.

inhaling is tangible in this cold-

clamped wilderness, where

any breath of life would be detected.

thus a man at work, bent and ancient,

becomes evident, collecting wood.

like an outcrop which emerged from the earth

before the beech and oak, he shifts along

the rocks and black bog ponds, stiff among stumps

and long abandoned sawyers pits.

he snaps the brittle branches with fingers

like exposed bones; the bark skin of his hands

cracks and wrinkles; his knuckles are raw

and red as carrion, his cheeks hoar

and frozen, and weathered to pain and ice.

leafless is also lifeless here.

if anything survives it is the pines

rising and resolved in skyward spires.

vast trunks below split open, the bark curls round

leaving merely the shells of trees.

a sheep’s carcass, white teeth, white fleece, white bone

bleaches slowly to the texture of stone;

footfalls resound on the board forest floor;

dead matter lies intact; iced needles like

a needless snow delay decay, while whole

branches live on recognisably, hollow

memories of the years of falling.

the tall summer stalks – foxgloves, campions,

and willowherbs – grow crisp, brittle, black;

ragged broken trunks collapse underfoot,

and shrink in the presence of death,

empty except for dust.

this soil could still be food for living trees

if woodlands only died for next year’s leaves.

the woodgatherer, all hessian and hunch,

half hauls, half drags his log-filled sack away

to his spluttering, dancing cottage grate

salvaging more debris than a tree

shrugs off in a lifetime – “you’ve got to be warm

in winter,” he smiles, “when you’re old and free.”

the distant town spews vapour, fire and fume;

here all is earth, a crypt of ice and gloom.

the last tree on the hill

the last tree on the hill

is a still slant spill;

the last tree, still,

until ...?

it will last

if they will.

Two people stand on a promontory

of affluence and hope,

overlooking the valleys below,

a white house fading behind them.

The evening light dulls colours,

and sharpens shapes:

trains come and go in the darkness

with unseen blunt purposes that shift

foreign goods across the nation;

the bushes harden to monoliths;

on the skyline, against the dusk,

stands the outline of a perfect tree.

The sky’s not black but a hundred shades of blue

in the white open wilderness of the mountain plateau,

and a people stand on a promontory

taking the view from the end of the millennium:

a woman in a far off village

is coping with change and preparing to move home.

secret II – leaving for the mountain

This is the time when even the air cries out

for rain; we have little else on our minds

day and night, except the rains, wondering

whether they will fall or fail like last year –

any week, any day now we will know.

though, if they come they will still be too late

for my little girl: she grew stick thin and died;

I have a new son, he is two months old

and he cries with hunger because my breasts

are dry and hard like the air and like the soil.

My dear mother is dying here with me;

my brother who left us last year is dead –

the news came that government soldiers

found a rebel hideout in the mountains –

he was shot with guns like ones on TV.

and now the soldiers are coming this way

we hear stories from distant villages

as people come and go looking for food;

the end of the war’s far off, they say.

so we don’t know what to do for the best:

we could stay here and hide till the danger passes

or go to the Food Camp which is seven days’ walk,

but the radio tells us to stay away from the camps

because people there are dying of disease

as well as hunger; we could run to the hills

to be safe but the rebels have no food.

My mother says she will come with us,

wherever we go; but she is only

thinking of helping me to leave,

she will die by the road if we take her

or waste away here if she stays.

The aid workers have gone to the camps,

with the generator and the TV; I’m glad

I won’t see the pictures they made of me.

the Big Man went with them,

and no one has stayed to advise us:

so the choice is entirely our own.

I don’t know whether my husband is alive

and he can’t know that he has a son –

some say he has joined the rebels and lives

in a house high in the mountains

nowhere is safe, but my job’s to support

my family and find them food and water;

the dry heat weighs us down more than my pack,

or my son, or my hunger; the last sight

I have of home is earl y morning light

pouring on the deserted village tap

and splashing off the white walls of my house.