Blood Motet
Time’s a thief, but careless… these
memories.
September reeds quaking, the high
weather
hushed, a coolness of mist settled,
and we,
old combers scuffed by beach shingle,
the years
of intentions and this resolve of
place.
Each day differently, as though
something,
something there, you, walking,
running ahead,
meaning this, an informality rubbed
the same colour as the sun, waves
dreaming.
Such things must be imagined first,
preface
to the world and its intimations,
here
the sky falling west, red and full of
stars.
Out on the sea’s edge, the sky’s edge
too, meets,
is met, between them the swift keel
only.
…
To forget about time, its rush and
pulse,
that these nebulae continue, that it
is sworn, expected, the pinched gas
haze spans
this deep breathlessness and we then,
then this.
Sediments prove old places, their
alarms,
each machine blankness the thinness
of it
and still this longing, these minutes
folding.
Here are the days, we say, here are
the lives.
Brooding mystification collected
this dew on the cill, pooled, steady
droplets,
in another life a river, a thing
moving, and we, discontent,
gathering,
the nick of time evasive, its milled
grain
borrowing the taken sweetness of it.
…
Language in leaves, the pitch to
river edge
sliding slow down muddy fall-away,
fell.
The river that was one, forks now,
pursues
each shadow, the shadows once
together.
Here at the edge time changes, and
the times,
the minutes making them, roil and
wash,
a seething soak filter feeders call
home.
The shadows slip dodging among wharf
posts,
clattering crab pots hauled to deck
singly,
sequential sets dusky or dawn-wise
culled
for festivals, seasons, their
certainty.
Rig this, righting, the sail’s trine
filled and west
hard as the sun goes, a cold sky
mirrors
nothing, nothing not known to you
before.
…
Remember this, in the first breath of
things,
their shapes, all this resource, the
stem cell spark
and the dead walking forth, all on
this day.
The house, the well, the trees
beyond, follow
the cellar’s footprint, well depth,
that which is
known in the sap’s pulse, the sky
bending down
in rain, in each season a new god’s
face.
They, on the lawn, in long flower, in
green
and May’s bud-burst pink and yellow,
all there,
known to each other, these
generations.
I, not born, not come to that
company,
in its caring, in those photographs
all
made to dimity pressed and pleated,
now centuries since those summer
poses.
…
My kinsman, sometime in that country,
west,
the ship and those hands clearing the
tidal creeks,
the land theirs with the working of
it, some
living on there, shipwrights,
lawyers, others
restless with royals, to wilder
acres.
A hundred years upcountry, soldiers
now,
England a long way from these savannahs,
the king’s tithe less seeming where
the soil cropped
and militia, few, then regiments, all
fl ag colours bled, Allegheny long
march.
That winter damp powder froze, the
farms ruined.
After Germantown, after Brandywine,
before redcoats broke, near American
oak his stone, remembered death date,
and why.
…
Early last century, Virginia
on the Carolina border, acres—
ours, and we down to the old farm
once, I
was a boy, great-grandma a hundred
lived on a while yet, by the picnic
yard
everybody and others called by name.
And was born just after Appomattox,
a woman here before the west was
staked
to the lower forty-eight, before
trains,
before the soft shell hardened, lives
rooted,
tobacco staves heavy leaved, hung to
cure.
Nothing much said, seeing her at the
last
in Roanoke, paper lungs, paper face,
and her speaking first, last
hummingbird breaths.
…
Mother past eighty now, the voice
softer,
distant and still Virginia farm drawl
by satellite over the Atlantic.
Hands too gnarled for letters,
scratchy cursive
hieroglyphics, leaving just these
voices
disembodied, memory ricochet
for news, some little confidence to
keep.
Only now stopped running, never
looked back,
no one there to, no one to explain
to.
I made these years from what was
left, each one
shaken down to minutes, and time
nervy,
never really there, hunters, hunted,
each
down the Indian road to the salt
lick,
the mineral need and its following.
…
On the beach, walking with you here,
Europe,
America, lives shunting idiot
calling where poems list seaward,
blind metres,
blind in this knowing, together
still, still.
The old ships, timber split for the
New World,
the old ships, first days and their
cold harbours,
chance saddled, riding hopeful to
rough ports,
taking land for service, knights,
that realm theirs,
all that finery those centuries made
traded for pine trails, fevers
without names.
I was thinking of Mary Doniphan,
the wilderness, 1770,
on the Ohio near Tarts Falls, dying
in childbirth, weak from wild skies,
the longing.
…
The easterly binds the gulls, the
balance
of grey flight just clearing surf
surging in,
pulling marble wash underfoot, and
glass
polished in sea sand’s tug or tuck,
glass green
with the sea’s own colour, its
autograph.
Land trailing back, before the sea
was here,
Europe a short walk, and then the
earth shrugged,
land slumping, letting in, letting in
cold green,
the strata silts eroded, making do,
this driftwood, this fathoming
incline down.
The village that was here was
drowned, its bells,
in this deep, towers, their iron
ghosts sounding,
the last one standing, the few of
this lost
tribe, one by one, and I the last of
these.
…
Nearby trace foundations, Roman
villa,
Viking tumulus, Saxon boundary stone:
the boathouse sinks into the mud flats,
ooze
stuck stilts, beyond starburst glass
breaks, same sky,
history sepia lust, its quango
gold hoard turned in ploughing,
sudden bright things,
pressed ore emperor of sugar beet fields.
This sweetness pearls and pulses, the
night made
succulent, these images, footloose
now,
unrepentant and for sinners this grit
stays and the quaking rummages, stirs
roots.
These maps, diaries, death plague
burnt notices,
and this wakefulness, prove severally
raw verdicts, memory, devouring.
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