Their tent was empty.
After searching it for proof
of what they had meant to do,
I stepped back into the gale
and continued my search
for another three or four hours,
repeatedly shouting their names
as loudly as possible across the wilderness.
Eventually I went back to the tent again
and dragged outside their sleeping bags
to make an X in the snow.
*
After two more days
and no further evidence
I began my own descent,
clambering through treacherous iceberg scenery at first,
then discovering a good moraine track
that led me down into valleys filled with flowers
and so to our Base Camp.
In my final estimation
the mountain looked very beautiful,
and I decided my friends
must have been enchanted in the same way.
It was the beginning of their mystery
and no mystery at all.
I can think of no better way to explain
why they chose to stay.
The Concern: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth
One has tramped forty miles, but at the sight
below him vaults the gate into standing wheat
and, with the hard heads rasping against him,
bounds forward taking for once a straight line
rather than musing roundabout, while the other
stops digging the vegetable rows in his garden
to watch this face which will persist in vanishing
then rising in the sea of green becoming gold.
*
This face is the face of an angel already falling,
the mouth open, voluptuous, gross, eloquent;
the chin good-humoured and round; the nose,
the rudder, small, feeble, nothing. But dramatic.
The other is gaunt, internal, plain, solemn, lyrical,
not yet stony from effort of suffering, although
thrust beyond the pale of love already, his likings
running along new channels, the old ones dry.
*
Old things have passed away, and new violence –
the rage and dog-day heat – that has died out too.
One says at the fireside: I am no longer for public life;
I have snapped my squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition.
Meanwhile the other, woken by this strange tenderness,
breaks the silence in himself. He thinks it is possible
now to describe the attraction of a country in romance,
and reasonable to live like a green leaf on the blessed tree.
*
Briefly to all intents and purposes they are one man
joined to the other – they have become one another –
Mr Colesworth or Wordridge, the Concern, settling
here at the hard roadside in the guise of a vagrant,
or there unfolding into an albatross and skimming
over the shining masts and slavers of Bristol docks
as if they were both one sailor who fell overboard;
a lost soul labouring north towards the ice and sun.
*
Then they find and make their chosen resort a fold
where a stream falls down a sloping wall of rock
to form a waterfall considerable for this country,
and across the pool: an ash tree, with its branches
spindling up in search of light. For want of that
the shaking leaves have faded almost lily-white,
while downwards from the trunk hang ivy-trails
a-sway to prove the breathing of the waterfall.
*
This is a fine place to talk treason, if not a place
to forget there is any need for treason. And yet,
sequestered as it might be in wild Poesy, the mind
still becomes illegible to itself for no good reason.
And yet, external things will lose the sense of having
their external life, and men that cannot fly will grow
and stretch their wings in the abyss of their ideals,
and grieve that all they have is just the feel of flight.
*
One says nothing. The other says: two giants leagued
together, their names are called bread & cheese.
The other says nothing. One says: my past life seems
to me like a dream, a feverish dream! all one gloomy
huddle of strange actions and dim-coloured motives!
The other says nothing. One says: it is a painful idea
that our existence is of very little use; I have left
my friends, I have left plenty. The other says nothing.
Before the Court
at the Foundling Hospital
We fall
and everyone
we fall
what makes you
with your flowing plaster and
your swag your little
eyelet pictures and
the boys here in the hospital
the marbles and
we fall we fall and look
green rushes O green rushes
where the current brought him
where
no matter I
I am a woman of good character.
Two Late Portraits
1 Audrey Wills
I was a Brixham girl
and Dad’s boat was
the pride of the fleet
every day
when they came ashore
I had my pick of the mackerel
beautiful
shiny blue suits
then again
I was stationed on the flying boats
that was a lovely time
they came in very low over the water
or seemed to
ask yourself
what will you remember
in Llandudno on honeymoon
singing at night can you hear me
singing and
I painted my toenails red
I still do this
by myself
that’s me there
dancing round and round the house
without a single brown penny in my purse
you see what I am saying
I am living
every colour except grey
and you would not believe
I have
looked after everyone O
but I have
when I go to the doctor now
I find the door closed
do I knock what
do I do
I sing
come in I am Richard I landed
on Gold Beach I am Peter
I was married to Steve for fifty-seven years
I am Helen aged seventy-two
and I do tatting
I am Ali a widow I am Ron
and I enjoy boiled potatoes
and a drop of broth
I am not a lover of sweet things
as for me I am Audrey Audrey open
the window
and let me hear the seagulls
let me hear the seagulls flying across
as for me I love God and I want to die
what better thing is there to live for
2 Sheila Smith
Is there anybody there O
Nobby our Suffolk what
Suffolk Punch poor Nobby he
trod on a wasps’ nest
but it’s bone it’s only bone
we led him
to and fro in the harvest time
Michael and me
first field then barn
in harvest time my brother and me
and next what’s red bright red
the tractor yes poor Nobby
well
I saw Aunt Mary cut him up
she cut him up
she sliced him in her kitchen with the flags
and blood
blood ran over her elbows
all in the High Street Number 11
here it is now see Nobby
his painless foot my horse
champed in the silence champed
the forest’s ferny floor
no it’s my father O
here’s my father walking down the stairs
don’t fall
don’t miss your step you
don’t forget
the silence surging softly
Michael in his arms but limp
then out
and so
I step aside aged twelve I do
I stand aside and let them pass
I watch my brother carried to the car
I do
is anyone is anyone is there
the Traveller said
The Realms of Gold
In a quiet part of Leamington Spa
in the same flat
where he has lived all his life,
sixty-two-year-old Michael Standage
is close to completing his biography
of the poet D. J. Enright.
Nobody reads Enright now
apart from a few surviving friends
and a handful of fans
who insist he is under-rated.
Standage does not speak to them.
He is nervous of an interpretation
that differs from his own,
and they are jealous of him;
it’s not as though his book
is authorised or anything;
he just got there first
and found that archive in Japan.
All the same Standage
is confident of a clear run home.
He works late each night
and only pauses
to watch a black wind
stirring the trees that line his side street
but stop
where it meets the main road.
*
Meanwhile the poems of D. J. Enright
gather dust in second-hand bookshops
or fly into a skip
along with other unwanted things
that go when a life ends.
A long history of adventure and homecoming.
A fastidious editor yet free
to travel in the realms of gold.
A highly original mind
with Proust among others
virtually off by heart.
And speaking of the heart …
But to date only Standage can do that
with any confidence.
The rest of us, the few
of us,
open the dark green Collected and think:
this was a life as good as any;
who am I to let it vanish completely
without returning an echo.
When I read him and I listen
to the silence following,
I know
exactly what he means.
*
Standage makes an exception to his rule
and accepts my invitation to meet.
We decide on Brighton,
which is neutral ground,
and walk for an hour on the shingle.
Following publication
can we look forward
to a revival of Enright’s fortunes?
We both sincerely hope so
and, while the dry grey stones
grind under our shoes,
extol the virtues for which we feel
a common admiration,
especially as they appear
in Paradise Illustrated
and The Terrible Shears.
Once we have reached our climax
we stand still
and stare out to sea.
Small waves beat towards us,
fold over neatly, and turn into foam.
Very soon more follow and
the same thing happens.
Three Witnesses
1 The Wilderness
What does a man see
in the wilderness
if not a reed
shaken by the wind.
Since I arrived here
I have admired thousands
for the music they produce
astringent in summer
in winter fuller
and more nearly sweet
thanks to the green moisture in the leaf.
As for human visitors
there has only been
this stranger
who
if he spoke at all
argued with his shadow.
So far as I can tell
nothing changed when he went.
I still bathe in the streams
poured out by the desert lark.
I still read the news I need
in the footprints of lizards
and the looping hieroglyphics
snakes leave with their skin.
2 Lazarus
I slipped over the border.
I fell down
in the pure dark
with no dreaming.
Then I came home again.
Wherever I go now
to market in the village
or working the fields at harvest
I prefer to imagine
I leave footprints of swirling light.
In truth
there is nothing so obvious
to show I am unlike
the man I was before.
And yet
to speak in confidence
I am almost worn through
by the terms of my existence.
They require me
to raise my voice
every single day
and declare that I am happy.
3 The Upper Room
My task is to clear the room
when the guests go home at night.
To straighten the benches
to sweep up the breadcrumbs
fish skeletons
and pepper stalks
to separate the olives from the olive stones
and
to wipe away the stain
if any wine has spilt
between the pitcher
and the cups.
A Fight in Poland
Beyond the outskirts of Gdańsk
where the docklands and factories expire
in a shimmering wasteland
of foul-smelling marshes and black creeks,
and the Baltic Sea chews over its sorrows
never attempting to resolve them,
I came to a hotel as big as a palace.
The lobby
was like the interior of a gun-case,
darkened with red velvet that a clever workman
had pressed over mouldings and cornices;
my room
when I reached it along freezing corridors
where the timber groaned beneath me,
was simple as a hermit’s cell,
with a view across sand dunes
to the dark brown Baltic shoreline.
I was saturated.
I had no change of clothes.
But the shower worked after a fashion,
and an hour later I presented myself in the restaurant
where waiters slid very smoothly between the empty tables,
but still managed to rattle the cutlery,
and shake a faint musical accompaniment
from the throats of wine glasses.
I had eel.
Six inches of shining green eel
and a bottle of white rioja.
Enough to send me upstairs in due course
thinking I had drunk the electric Baltic,
which I saw from the window on the stairway
was still fizzing under a fierce barrage of rain.
After an hour’s sleep or strong hallucination
I was woken by the sound of two men
fighting in the adjacent room.
Heavy, muscular men
pounding each other with their fists,
and afterwards heaving together on a bed
before finishing with that
and throwing down on the bare floor
a wardrobe,
a mirror,
several books,
then one glass followed by another glass.
I grew used to the disturbance.
So completely used to it, in fact,
I did not even turn a hair
when the door from their room into mine
bulged on its golden hinges,
and debated whether to break open.
For this reason I said nothing next morning
as I took my place in the dining room
now flooded with cold white light
streaming in off the Baltic.
And nothing again
as the waiter poured out my coffee
and the hotel slipped her moorings.
We set forth over waves
heading due North,
and I still remained seated at my table;
I expected my neighbours from the night before
would appear at any minute