1. One of Pythagoras’ Notes.
This is beyond the turning of a year
Since you touched me so, sparing a dream-time’s length
The night you died, to bid me good-bye. The air now
Is heavy with forethinking, there
The silver tarnished yarrow, the rust-covered clover,
There the rowan full of fire, a deep unease
Lying on the ground, the wind twitching
Restlessly, grey in its belly, golden
Grass around its maw –
No time for taking hay, so I can think wryly
Among these spinning months and years, how timely
I was last summer, mowing when the grass
Was full of flower. And looking up, as I was gathering in
My dried harvest, hung in the air
In fine shining rain, between me and the sun
I saw you, indistinct and certain, a
Memory, your spectre, taller than the hilltops
Walking over the grassheads northwards down the glen.
And I thought – why come here, to this part
You stayed so shortly in, it was never your home
And more than mine? But perhaps you are, now,
Indistinct but certainly, in everyone and every place
That has a memory of you, and were
Only hoping for a last glimpse out over
The Firth, where all those years ago
We two watched the breakers leaping Buckie front, and
Then out north and eastwards to the open sea.
With all these years elapsing, between now
And when we were friends, wandering each
With his impatience, or in those far spacious rooms
With their spreading pianos, I
Making music maybe, but you soaring. Indistinct
Now. Music for me has
Grown the fluid element that must always
Become fixed in words, it is at the root
Of anything spoken, but like home
Left far behind. We would understand each other
Little now, if you had been alive. Conversed
Easily, but the two scions have grown too far apart.
But this will not come between us, now
You have forsworn the logic of time,
Frozen – pickled, dried, what we would call
An evergreen memory, like hay
You can soak in water to revive the hues
Of cutting-time. – But there’s the fearful thing
Where flowers are thrown up, in dust, at random,
Dancing in the killing air, loose from roots.
That is, a living being is made a thing
Handled and tossed and stowed tight away
In vaulted sheds, from
The raking winter, and the fields outside are empty.
Rest easy. Perhaps you are one of
Pythagoras’ notes, that like star-points through passing cloud
Pricks out and the is lost under the wide vault;
Perhaps the loss would have been less if
You had reached full fruition, or perhaps more;
And who knows whether more or less if you had followed
The path your brother went, wordless
All his few days – I hear your mother listening in
The silence, twice over. I hold you close
Drifting, so small, under the vaulted ribs, on
The wide waters in me. I call
You up, you at the back of my words
My immortal twin, I lull you back, whose voice
Piercing sweet, rent out of dried river reeds,
Could not be nearer the human voice, and yet
Is not human, is not language, is music, is music.
2. Drumming on the Door
At first, they were drumming on the door to be let in
He must be I there, they said
But I knew that silence; I have seen is, visibly
Arrayed around a thing that is dead.
But they went on drumming, back and forth
Their soft hands beating on the hard wood
And soon the drumming was random, their voices joined it
And soon the drumming was random, their voices joined it
Shouting their fatuous lines as hard as they could.
The silence underlay them. But when the music crept in
Their drumming became something else
They did not hear it becoming the counterpoint line
Underlying the quickening pipes and strings. I heard it, and hearing
The worm slid into my spine.
But they went on drumming: he must, he must be in there;
I saw it all; if they’d raised their voices and started singing
I’d hardly have turned a hair;
You’d think they’d nothing better to do
Than beat till fists were black and blue.
I thought of the papers all to arrange
The police and the doctors to bring
And the rope to cut down and those eyelids to close
And the blood to wipe off the end of that nose –
I left them to it, and went stumbling out into the sun.
I don’t think much of the suburbs;
They lie arrayed about these dead cities
Full of car-radios churches and concert-rooms;
I incline to the proletarian view
That culture gives rise to such tragedies;
I thought of the skylark song hanging
Like a jewel over the crystal moorland.
But the sun was warm. I returned to that moment without cease
When the serpent twines up to empty your ears.
A transfiguration. A jewel from the midden.
The rhythm of music snatched from the fatuous rhythm.
3. The Deadly Silhouette
I was taken to have a look at my mail-clad ancestors
One still faced the ceiling from the Norman days
Peace and resignation had been graven
Into the blind lineaments, as if he really
Had finished being himself, becoming
Mankind thereafter. I went out thinking
Appropriate thoughts. That image had my name
But my hands were warm, while his were folded stone
My elbows flexed, my feet walked, all the while
Those jutted out to the edges of a stone table.
I was taken by a friend, he was of military stamp
To see what he called a fly-past. It was not what
The two sparrows in my eaves call flying. A monstrous piece
Of jagged steel came, tearing the air apart
Treading it underneath, howling out at gravity
Leaving phantom winnowings in our ears, then
Rose vertical over the hill, the deadly silhouette
Sharply protuberant at waist and foot stamping
The air and vanishing. I shuddered, thinking
The gleaming dome in the nose housed flesh and blood.
I was taken – but that was long years before, in
The other world – to the circus, to see them doing
The “Human Cannon Ball”. I could not face
The sea of adult grins, as silver-clad and
Silver-helmeted, painted-faced, he was launched
Under the vaulted roof. Astounded
With pity and horror, I have his image, perhaps
Distorted by the years: hands clasped, elbows
Protuberant, feet splayed still braced against
The shock that sent him out before all eyes.
4. Phantoms over Davidston
I muse on the culture of Caroline architects.
The artistry that reflects
The dress of nature in this old house.
But out of the quiet the edge of thunder grows and
So beats on each cell of the air
And shakes the walls and flicks the roof like a razor.
Then quiet again. Hung blackly over
The fields, stamped in my head
Their image hangs. But the white walls blandly
Say what they’ve always said.
They intone the need of security
Against rough intrusion. They speak of discipline justice
Blood, dampening down
The fires. But those up there are planned meticulous
As razors. These grip the ground:
Each twist of plaster or harling lovingly
Reflects the inner stone, those
Architects had wind in their hair. But the same
Wind is massing white clouds where
Distant now, as ants, obscenity of black
The Phantoms crawl speck by speck.
Or no – they frisk in the upper strata
Ingenuously, mutedly:
Their dream may never be fulfilled
Or the hour come when they see
The panic in the dark when fires burn on
And architects’ wits have flown.
5. Under the Hunter’s Heel (the fatal crash of two Jaguar jets in Aberdeenshire hills)
They call the most primitive
Component of your craft
Yourselves. So it seems, when
You had all of God’s air
To roar about in, but chose
To bang into each other instead.
Now it is hard to sort
The more from the less primitive
When the whole lot is
Every piece broken, lying
In various parts of the heather.
The faces are grave.
They strut and fret, mouthing
I take in metaphorical sense the word
Tragedy.
I am already sick of the puppetry.
Why try to make meaning out of this tangle
Of wires, the pieces of shell and
Innards that with weighty analytical thought
Form the whole.
I watch, under the Hunter’s heel
Sirius rising in the black air, the jewel
Of all this night. I call that the point
Of those two young men’s exeunt.
I would like to hear
A fatherly officer full of concern
Briefing his charges
On what can be learned from this
Disaster. Then I would feel it has
Not all been in vain.
Apart from the purely human factor
There is the vast cost of
This particular artefact, which
Has to be considered.
6. Poem for Davie
On the dam, on the dam
I have sat here fifteen years
Picking a rough white pebble
My nails are worn to the quick
My fingers are chill and raw;
Perched up here on the dam
To begin, I searched and searched
For a flaw, for a flaw
At last I found the pebble
Embedded in concrete
I have sat here fifteen years
Picking it
Backwards, the hills go up
And the glen-floor goes on down
Davie and I sang on the summits
One dawn, one summer dawn
Davie and I danced on the river
In its broad dry shingle banks;
He praised my foolhardiness
And shook his head and laughed
One stone might fell the giant
One stone might fell the giant.
Backwards, the hills go up
And the glen-floor goes on down
The wind goes in my hair
And lapwings go over my head
The lapwings go calling out over the dam
– do it do it do it do it –
My nails are worn to the quick
But I know I will do it yet
For all that
For all that
7. Children Going into School
Under the dirt held on
By whatever stickiness or
Slime they’ve been researching
They have skin like mine but softer
Under the skin flesh blood and
Bone like my own although
More loosely woven:
They thump each other and
Bounce back quicker than I would
But with perfect familiarity. I watch, and something
Hangs at the back of my mind.
But now the road outside the school is empty
The cab of a lorry crests the ridge out of the trees;
The trees shake, a few leaves flutter down.
Where? It’s the question
That’s given rise to all
Poetry, all art. Take poetry
Out of the hands of
The usurpers, the religions
And their latest stooges
The scientists, psychologists
And she returns to her purity;
She blinks round a moment at you
Seeing if you’re still there,
Waves cheerily at your approbation
And returns to her old searching.
But now the road outside the school is empty;
A pigeon breaks out under the trees’ heavy green;
The trees shake, a few leaves flutter down.
The seat of art is not
High in the spirit’s crag
As I learned from those vaunting
Sword-waving moralists
But hangs, now humbly
Once proudly, in a scrotal bag.
The seat of art (or artist)
Might wriggle when it gets itchy
Yet knows a secret road
Through mountains of the spine
To burst, like silence on orgasm
In the unbelieved flower of the brain.
But now the road outside the school is empty
Dry sunflower-heads nod in the schoolhouse garden;
The trees shake, a few leaves flutter down.
The children chant canonically
They quest, they quest onanically:
I bend on myself, I’m like the teenage girl
When the dizzy heights
Have sprung explicit in this other
Thing filled hard with blood.
She is steeped in rote
But opinions flash with the tenderness
Of intuition – she knows her soul
Is in the books, but also free
He dwindles ahead, shining
Her guide on the mountain way.
And the road outside the school is empty
In the field, barley falls under the combine’s lfails;
The trees shake, a few leaves flutter down.
I’ve sent them out
I’ve seen them in
Sometime at last they must begin
To seek a way of their own;
Although they’re learning fast
To neither shout nor whisper
Their natural dress
Is grubbiness
Their natural mode is mischief.
And now the road outside the school is empty;
The bird flies straight for the monstrous head
That rises beyond the field, on the hill. The road shakes.
Now it will not be long, it whispers, nor will it:
I’ll be left in a bright, unwanted clarity.
The trees shake, a few leaves flutter down.
8. Message to Mother and Son
We sit here sucking
Beard, pencil, thumb –
Any time-passing thing that’s lying
Around. But he has the paradigm.
We sit here nursing
Sore head, cramped back,
Any good enough thing for complaining
About. But you have the primeval ache.
We sit here watching
The sun, early to late,
Barred, slanting at windows, dappling
Under leaves. But he penetrates light.
We sit in a clutter
Of furniture, dust, books, toys, the fodder
On which the cranks of time are driven;
But you pass the time eternally,
Among rocks, by the sea, in stable, in heaven,
Mirrored back in history.
9. Surgeon to Pyromaniac
When you were the clay and I was the moulder
When I was the hourglass and you were the sand
When I was the gian and you were the pebble
Where was the man in you? Where was he?
When I held the corkscrew and you were the bottle
When I had the ignition key in my hand
When you were the half-cheese and I was the grocer
Where was the woman in me? Where was she?
10. Cock
He has us rumoured
Coming from weekends
Mowing the lawn and
Walking the dog.
This is slander. We have
Eyes, we are true poets
We are involved, our
Unanimity lends us weight.
We do not back out
We are deeply troubled
By the labyrinth of wires
The loss of foundation.
We stand, stoutly, to
Express inexpressibles, that
Lie there, at the gaps, in
Everyday silences. But he
Sees only empty spaces.
He asks why we cannot burn
He asks why our language
Has become ice.
He preaches vistas,
He spurns details
He prophesies outmoded dooms
He burns anthologies.
He crows alone,
He celebrates his midden,
He believes himself a monarch
And his empty hills a bridgehead.
He asks, is my country free or
Merely at its last stand?
At last we laugh, he will
Ask irrelevant questions.
-
Charles Ashton on
AnnaScott
charlesashton
Coldhome 