for something
what have I done what am I
doing how have I spent
my day
although for the moment
here is my mother still here
and singing
the Ugly Duckling
where at the last
the very last minute
he turns
what is a miracle is it
the same as a mystery
miracle mystery
is it I cannot tell
what with the surface of water
the endless glittering surface of water
where I am floating
where I have fallen
where I am
under the water and cannot
is that
my mother still singing
where is there
wait.
Felling a Tree
It was a Saturday’s work in autumn
to fell one ash tree in the copse,
my father handling the buzz-saw
in his cap and boots and windcheater,
me dragging back the undergrowth
then standing clear.
If we were lucky
and he planned it right,
the tree collapsed in one cascading swoop,
and in the aftermath,
with birds in bushes roundabout
returning to their songs again,
we stripped the leaves and twigs away
to have the pale green trunk and branches bare,
reminding me a body can be bare,
before we cut them up as well,
and hauled
the long logs through the brambles to the shed.
*
Back from church next day,
we dusted off
that scarred contraption like a clothes horse
with two Vs on top at either end,
then laid the long logs there
and briskly shortened them
to fit and burn next winter on the fire indoors.
That done,
my father put aside his buzz-saw,
fetched the axe,
worked the whetstone either side until
the blade-edge glittered like a silent scream,
and set to work
with me supplying one log
then another to the gnarly chopping-block
as he swung down,
and he swung down again,
and every one split easily in two,
as though
a law in nature made it happen so.
Laying the Fire
I am downstairs early
looking for something to do
when I find my father on his knees
at the fireplace in the sitting-room
sweeping ash
from around and beneath the grate
with the soft brown hand-brush
he keeps especially for this.
Has he been here all night
waiting to catch me out?
So far as I can tell
I have done nothing wrong.
I think so again
when he calls my name
without turning round;
he must have seen me
with the eyes in the back of his head.
‘What’s the matter, old boy?
Couldn’t sleep?’
His voice is kinder than I expect,
as though he thinks
we have in common a sadness
I do not feel yet.
I skate towards him in my grey socks
over the boards of the sitting-room,
negotiating the rugs
He still does not turn round.
He is concentrating now
on arranging a stack of kindling
on crumpled newspaper in the fire-basket,
pressing small lumps of coal
carefully between the sticks
as though he is decorating a cake.
Then he spurts a match,
and chucks it on any old how,
before spreading a fresh sheet of newspaper
over the whole mouth of the fireplace
to make the flames take hold.
Why this fresh sheet
does not also catch alight
I cannot think.
The flames are very close.
I can see them
and hear them raging
through yesterday’s cartoon of President Kennedy
and President Khrushchev
racing towards each other in their motorcars
both shouting
I’m sure he’s going to stop first!
But there’s no need to worry.
Everything
is just as my father wants it to be,
and in due time,
when the fire is burning nicely,
he whisks the newspaper clear,
folds it under his arm,
and picks up the dustpan
with the debris of the night before.
Has he just spoken to me again?
I do not think so. I
do not know.
I was thinking how neat he is.
I was asking myself:
will I be like this? How will I manage?
After that he chooses a log
from the wicker wood-basket
to balance on the coals,
and admires his handiwork.
When the time comes to follow him,
glide, glide over the polished floor,
he leads the way to the dustbins.
A breath of fine white ash
pours continuously over his shoulder
from the pan he carries before him
like a man bearing a gift
in a picture of a man bearing a gift.
The Lych Gate
All Saints, Stisted, August 1900
Thousands of heavily seeded grass-heads
are waving through the lych gate
I have entered
countless times
to find the churchyard always trim.
This must be
because the mower and his scythe
cannot be spared at harvest time
besides which
the dead are not many.
Charles Morgan Forster is here
and the crafty builder who designed
the twisted chimneys in the main street
seems to be a recent arrival.
But the dozens of crosses and headstones
packed on the slope
down to the river
do not exist yet
and the empty ground by the flint wall
where my great-grandfather
and my great-grandmother
my grandfather
my mother
and my father
lie in their descending order
is just that
empty ground
where I have yet to stand and imagine
the bliss
of having never been born.
2 LAURELS AND DONKEYS
A Moment of Reflection
28 June 1914
Although one assassin has already tried
and failed to blow him to pieces,
Archduke Ferdinand has let it be known
he will very soon complete his journey
as planned along the quay in Sarajevo,
but for a moment will pause
at the window of a private room in the town hall.
He needs time to recover his composure
after finding the blood of his aide-de-camp
spattered over the manuscript of the speech
he delivered from a nearby balcony earlier this morning.
And indeed,
the prospect of an Austrian brewery in the distance
is reassuring,
likewise the handsome red bri
ck of the barracks
filled with several thousand soldiers of the fatherland.
This is how those who survive him today
will remember him:
a man thinking his thoughts
until his wife has finished her own duties –
the Countess Chotek
with her pinched yet puddingy features,
to whom he will shortly whisper
‘Sophie, live for our children’,
although she will not hear.
As for his own memories:
the Head of the local tourist bureau
has now arrived and taken it upon himself
to suggest the Archduke might be happy to recall the fact
that only last week
he bagged his three thousandth stag.
Was this, the Head dares to enquire,
with the double-barrelled Mannlicher
made for him especially –
the same weapon he used to dispatch
two thousand one hundred and fifty game birds
in a single day,
and sixty boars in a hunt led by the Kaiser?
These are remarkable achievements
the Head continues,
on the same level as the improvement
the Archduke has suggested in the hunting of hare,
by which the beaters,
forming themselves into a wedge-shape,
squeeze those notoriously elusive creatures
towards a particular spot
where he can exceed the tally of every other gun.
In the silence that follows
it is not obvious whether the Archduke
has heard the question.
He has heard it.
He is more interested, however,
in the memories it brings to mind:
the almost infinite number of woodcock,
pigeon, quail, pheasant and partridge,
wild boars bristling flank to flank,
mallard and teal and geese
dangling from the antlers of stags,
layer after layer of rabbits
and other creatures that are mere vermin –
a haul that he expects will increase
once the business of today has been completed.
In the Stacks
1
These dry scraps are five olive leaves
Denis Browne pulled from the olive tree
growing over the grave he had just dug
on Skyros for Rupert Brooke in April 1915
and posted back home to Cathleen Nesbitt.
They lie here as brittle and glittering now
as the scales of a surprisingly large fish,
but I think they are what it says they are,
because strange as it might seem I myself
stood under this tree almost fifty years later,
aged seventeen and so beginning to discover
how existence is measured out and must end,
thanks in part to the procession of red ants
marching from a narrow crack in the coping
designed for the grave by Brooke’s mother
after Denis Browne had made his farewell
and boarded his ship the Grantully Castle,
sailing towards his own death at Gallipoli.
2
Resting in the trench now but this soldier
with his soft cap and kilt, his bare knees
and open wind-nipped face, will disappear
over the top in a moment and so leave behind
the terrier, the jaunty white terrier called Argos
who, if his master returns, will raise his head
because this man smells like the same man
that left all those minutes ago, although to see
the changes in him now no one would think so.
3
What flew in from another land
enraged the sky above the Strand –
an insect like a huge cigar
splashed about with tongues of fire,
with someone crouching at a door
despite our guns’ tremendous roar
to drop his clutch of shining bombs
across our dark and quiet homes.
Remember, I was still a child
and never thought I might be killed.
I liked the bombs, I liked the fire,
I liked the huge high-up cigar,
I liked especially how the lights
cut misted pathways through the night
and how my footsteps made no sound
when I walked there, not on the ground.
4
This report is a continuation of one numbered 303A
and contains extracts from letters from Indian soldiers
relating to the fortnight concluded on 13th inst.
Those cited here illustrate how almost impossible it is
for barriers to be effective in Oriental correspondence.
Among several examples showing courage and duty
Orientals excel in the art of conveying their information
without saying anything definite [words missing here].
When they have meaning to convey they are apt to use
a phrase such as ‘Think it over until you understand it’,
or some equivalent. It naturally follows that their news
is exceedingly vague and will give rise to wild rumours.
It has nevertheless been possible to draw some conclusions;
e.g.: the prospect of a return to the firing line appears to be
regarded with something approaching [words missing here],
as in: ‘My brother, this is no war. It is the final destruction
of the world. A whole world is being killed. If ever I return
I shall tell you very much. If I end here, what is there to tell.’
In the same way, extracts show that the man who has served
and been wounded feels he has amply [words missing here],
as in: ‘The guns are firing. The Kings are looking on. Like dust
the dead are lying before the trench. Thus are we all sacrificed.’
5
What tree was felled in what remote forest,
then dragged by what engine or elephant
through what jungle to what paper-mill
in what sea-port, then shipped to what dock
then sold how and cut how and brought how
for 2nd Lieutenant Owen on this particular day
in Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh
to single it out thinking, Now, here, with this
pen on this tabletop with this my right hand
I shall write down these words in this order
to catch what I am trying to say then pass it
along the corridor to him who just happens
to be recovering there from his own troubles,
and who, when not practising his golf swing,
will read them and recommend that one thing
becomes another, for example the word ‘dead’
which he thinks should be ‘doomed’, and also
that ‘silent minds’ be changed to ‘patient minds’?
6
At the very end of everything, the last man emerges
through a copse of trees without any leaves or branches
and comes to a halt on the greasy slope of a bomb-crater
where in a brown puddle he sees his own face looking up
to remind him of the need to wash himself. Laying aside
on the pitted bank his tin hat and satchel, his lousy jacket,
he slithers forward as close as he dare to the water’s edge
where mud immediately swallows his boots to the ankle,
spreads his legs while at the same time leaning forward
as if the air itself were solid enough to stop him toppling,
and scoops a dark handful from the pool. The impression,
a
s he uses his left hand to smear the water over his neck
and jaw, and his right to continue the process over his chin
and mouth, is of a man taking a firm grip of his own face
before twisting his head off the delicate screw of his neck
and rather than washing himself throwing away his skull
along with everything inside it that can never be forgotten
and so, at the very end of everything, become clean again.
The Camp
Near the dogleg turn of the lane down to the ponies’ field,
skulking in summer among cow parsley and meadowsweet,
in winter with their streaked black corrugated walls laid bare,
were the half-dozen Nissen huts my father refused to mention.
A prisoner of war camp for Italian soldiers my mother told me,
but also part of the silence my father had brought back with him
ten years before from Germany which now could not be ended
although the reason for that was one more thing he never gave.
Why spoil an early morning stroll bringing halters for the ponies
so we could lead them home to the stable yard then saddle up?
What else could there possibly be on earth for us to talk about
that was more interesting than a blackbird calling in the hedge,
or the swarming hawthorn flowers that smelled faintly of drains,
or the rain cloud that he always said was only a clearing shower?
A Pine Cone