Visiting
When I first came on a visit
to your limewashed house
– a clean-kneed child from town –
your two great fists
impressed me, for they
were ponderous chunks
of granite, notched
carelessly for fingers
and which, at your own willed
creation, you had torn
from the heart of the land.
Yes, I knew then how
you had risen and, separate,
had kept on walking.
I was almost frightened
to be your friend, but still
am running so breathlessly
beside you, as you stride
onwards, the castle of yourself,
across rough fields
of thistle and clover.
And the dog is running
before us and laughter
creates a flawless sky.
Cows
From compartment windows
they were fake, too far away
to be real. Friesians, Shorthorns,
Angus: painted cows
in a book of fields –
while on the train I rampaged,
shuttling impatience
through pages and pages
of green. Unexpectedly,
we’d arrive and land in a world
where they moped.
The first day up, a drover,
I’d goad them on with a stick
then savour their warmth
at milking when packed
into pungent stalls,
where a white jet steamed
frothed up in a galvanized pail.
The fields outside
were full of their muck
in pats that were ringed
and perfect. Wherever
I ran, that muck
would cling to my shoes.
Conveyance
Making love in a house that now begins
to feel like ours, we ease a strangeness, move
towards possession of that warmth we know:
the kindness of sheets. Around us,
packed in boxes, lies the clutter of our lives.
In the morning and then for days
decisions will crowd the hours, as your plants,
my books, the records, are absorbed by empty
rooms. The stealth of days will astound us.
We will find ourselves at home.
Going to Mass
I shuffled at the back
for years and kept a truce
at home by looking
at others around me –
the prim communion
faces worn like a mask
on dutiful daughters;
or the old women
who lit the candles,
crooning responses
from missals as though
caged from doubt.
Through pious
circumstance each rite
had refined us
in faith, but now
when the host is raised,
a tiny weightless moon,
it drifts in orbit
beyond all touch of mine.
The Master Builders
They made a prayer out of balanced stone,
the improbable height of a spire –
as if by risking Babel’s curse
they’d glimpse the gates of a factual
heaven. The Truth was a presence,
palpable and massive, their skill
an arrogance made to serve it
with mathematical certainty.
In the shuffling parishes time
dragged, bogged down in the tick
of generations. Elsewhere
violence spragged the ordered fractions
of a working day, and trailed
behind it corpses, smoking fields
of discord getting nowhere.
Vanitas. Designs and frayed ambition
all that’s new beneath the sun.
Pride, thus, raised each edifice
above its echoing pit;
and took the measure of stone
and dressed it, hoisting it up
until it soared like logic
into the high, unanswering air.
Krupskaya
[editor’s note: Krupskaya was Lenin’s (Ulyanov‘s) wife]
When I answered the letters Ulyanov
wrote me, I had guessed already
what love might mean: my attentiveness
a discipline to make me as pure
as our shared white exile,
our sweet talk sinking
into the language of a big idea.
The exhilaration! Like a troika ride
through candied forest –
the abruptly shaken manes of horses
scattering their halo of sound
until we are distant,
disappearing, reduced at last
to a quietness wrapped in tinsel.
And such contentment, possessing
only what we needed: our books, ourselves,
a purpose.
Our time served, we visited
terraced slums, and then worked on
into a foreign night –
our homeless script like figures
tramping across the snow.