Asleep in their wagons, the stove door ajar
The oil lamp tipped. And scores stamp
A last ghastly dawn patrol – their crook a rifle
Cigarettes for their bible.
The hills are not high. High enough
To exist outside us, our low troubles
At the school gates the children look up
And see with a shock of memory
That the earth gathers itself
Into another world
One closer to the sky
Once peopled by shepherds,
Who inherited the high roads from kings and saints
As they passed, withy ropes about their shoulders.
Who spoke little, and wore tall hats
Bawled gently at their dogs,
Who were themselves
Creatures apart
Times when the mist comes up
And rolls like weighted grey
Down the scarp, up there
The cars see their lamps reflected back
A metre ahead, and the back of her is silent
But never like a moor, never fierce like that
She’d carry you back to your own gate
On the palm of her hand – not bury you alive.
Her spine is a landshed, and a land of itself
A land of haunches and shoulders, and glistening fields
Impossible that they weren’t in love with her
The kindness of her miles, the smalls of her back,
The blazing white of her summers.
The Bible is her book: she wrote it for her shepherds
To train them in oblivion and seasons
And the time she knows, the slowest time on earth.
She wrote it in chalk, in rabbit droppings, and lady’s smock
She wrote it in sweet marjoram and she adorned it with bells
And it has no meaning for anyone, except the shepherds
Who are gone.
All Souls’
After Charles Causley
Summer is over. Autumn’s lovely cells
Are collapsing and the yellow pears are underfoot
Call it mellow call it rotten, until the frost comes
And stops the rot like a knife, and the wasps fall midflight
Masses of apples slowly becoming the soil. I am not afraid of the cold
But every year wheels round and its deafening crescendo cut short
When the temperature drops, plummeting like the weighted line
Into the black sea. November, black sea, more terrible than the last –
And only her busy fingers to weave charms, and her laugh
Tickling ribs on All Souls’, food and drink enough
For all the dead, when she sees the first frost edging the last leaves.
Oh she proves that life, short life, is the only prize
And don’t the dead know it, lifted from the oceans
The cold earth, they nudge the windows and whisper:
Never… ever… been… away…
Annunciation
i.m. Irena Sendler
Take my child, take it quickly now and have
Done by it, do by it as you would any child
And place it in your toolbox, gently
Amongst the pliers and the rags
Anoint it with linseed and make it a bed of copper.
From here in there are two worlds. One bought of this
Transaction, weighed and found wanting,
The other in which the womb is soldered shut daily
Death is your mother, slipping you mercury in her breast milk
Letting the gold from her finger drown in the toilet bowl
Wrenching you from her heart with an iron bar
Take my child, let me never see it again
Let me never feed it again, or run my finger down its spine
Or open its palm and press it against my lead-filled mouth
From here in there are two worlds. One drops like the cold rain
In the cold streets, as you hurry away with your weight of flesh
The other crumples and is gone
The Alphabet of Emigration
Aaron was the first letter of the alphabet
And how it seemed then, a sort of greed
Hugging a name which opened the alphabet not once
But twice, and going on to envelop anteater and antelope
And all manner of beasts, down to the zebra who cantered
To that town, because he had heard the fame of Aaron who took everyone.
Alef-bet, from a to zet, their last possession sold, their books, their gods
Their neighbours, the old kings, the hard winters, gone, gone, gone
And even the memories reduced and wrung out on balconies
Jettisoned like old clothes, shorn like the wolf’s fur, the leopard’s spots
Ot a do ya the new is much like the old, it has the same horrors
Similar joys, it is only new, Aaron, the first time you hear it
The old creatures brought their mocking tongues, Aby
They say to the bears, the cheetahs, their daughters,
If only your souls will be at home, for we look back at the waters
From the bows of a boat, paying out the past
Like a rope which will jam fast, in this, Aaron’s place,
Aaron’s bath where the carp dive, the eel flitters
Ghosts, says Aaron, like the horses drinking at inlets, the jetties
The cool water, the nightingales, the open river
Stacks inhabited by the lonely stork,
Tracks up to villages, walnut and willow
Empty windows where bills once yellowed
Odessa, Hamburg, Liverpool, Cork
From anywhere in Europe via Rotterdam
Sail on the Zaandijk, the Zyldijk, the Zaandam
Agora
Athens, 2010
All along the road their standing silhouettes
Behind the makeshift tables, the stretched sheets
Heaped high with sunglasses and brass-clasped leatherette –
And only disregard from the Sunday crowd, the slow mockery of feet.
How black they are. The night unpierced by stars
Absorbs less light than them, but they throw off passing stares
And make an emptiness of themselves, like the desperate anywhere.
Who on earth would want their desolate luxury?
The dark rows of sunglasses gazing at the sky
They stand listless guard over the daylight fakery
Without a word, a pleasantry – not even a welcome lie.
Come see, come touch. Instead they keep watch
Their genius is this: to haul away their catch
And be bodily transformed to nothing, whilst we see nothing much.
A police car, still far away, and the drivers in sunglasses
The very same as these, but wearing the authority of a brow,
Swims slowly downstream and makes several passes
Each time the men draw further into their own halo
Seeming trees, railings, dark ghosts with bundles and table-cases.
It passes. They are men again, and upon all their faces
Their feelings. One works his mouth in fear and dumbly paces
But another looks down the road in bold indifference
And unties his bundle so it flashes out like a cry
And hears his mother’s sharp voice: have some sense
A childish act like that – you’ll lose your living, boy
The police car begins again its fateful round
At last he bends to gather plastic from the ground
And bears it on his shoulder like a wound.
Now he slips into the crowd, for the crowd is sweet
Unfettered, desiring pleasure, bearing its own cheap goods
Constant, like the tide, it swells to fill the street
And those borne in it have no past and no roots:
They have forgotten the enterprise of migration
And believe again in the hibernation
Of swallows in the water’s deep.
Sweet Companions
After Marina Tsvetaeva
On the next day there was a funeral for the traveller boy.
All the travellers came and stopped for the day
And formed a procession, for he had been a golden one
Cut down in flight by a car without headlights on.
Two twin girls walked behind the coffin
Keening like lost hens, arm in arm and sobbing
They were peaches, thought the men, ripe for the picking.
Pick us, they urged silently, our mouths are old with sobbing
So place your hands on us and be our first intimation of
Death. And these men, whose core was empty as an oak
Pared from them by wasp and rot and the sight of him
Laid out like a splintered choir boy, needed no second
Asking. Telling that night the tall tales of bravery
About the fire, not on the steppe as the fiery sun
Is eaten by the earth, but alongside the dump
Where the vans are parked up, in a stink of green
And shit, and two signs say no pikeys we say no paying
For pikeys there is no humility nor yet cast asunder
Nor yet touched by death and I tell you like an evangelist
There are places where love is still possible tangled in lust
Like two bodies, and sons born of the earth’s dust
Which ate the sun as it dipped
Behind the municipal recycling and resource renewal plant
Which passes round here by the name of tip.
Laughter
When I awoke it had snowed
And it was the old geological snow
Snow upon snow, snow
Upon snow, and the sky was wet clay
As if the potter’s wheel had just ceased spinning
When I awoke, the farmer pushed back the steel door
Of the barn, and the cows were blinded.
Not a week before when the hose to the trough
Split out there on the down, the water sprinkled out
Like manna from heaven, and settled on every blade
A million glass thumbs all pointing upwards:
Spare him, that even with his wound
He made a ring of beauty.
We went over the fields
And the mist met the snow, which had found every berry
Wised itself to the holly curl,
The fox had gone, but he had danced a new time –
And into the woods bent down like wild beasts to veer
Fast over ditches and warm streams licking brown leaves
To themselves, fast like that, there was a sound coming from us
And it was laughter.
Wolstonbury
for my children
I leave to my children Wolstonbury Hill
An island in the morning, with the mist at its heel
Pressing like a tide at its silent green slopes –
Day at the top – yet the underworld sleeps.
In winter the dewpond slithers with ice
And the trough glances back with the swiftness of skies
The branches are empty that the moth-wren shook
Where we broke our path through the wreck of the dock.
I saw a crow and her damp children once
They squatted and watched the cows from a fence
The calves trailed bloody umbilical cords
I never thought crows to be tender before –
Wind-kicked, the hawthorn’s a stumbling boy –
But a blossoming hawthorn once witnessed joy
I have not breathed enough of the steep of the hill
But none of our kind ever quite had their fill.
In summer we climb the steps of thin root
And hear the grass squeal and wrench underfoot
And the blood in our ears and the scratch from the briar:
Are all the proof we need we’re alive.
Yarrow and ragwort, clover and thyme
The earth echoes hollow. It says: I am your home.
And you have lain down so often to touch
The bedstraw, the sheep’s bit, the violet, the vetch.
This is your hill and this is your home
I bequeath it to you, and here you will come
And here you shall be kings and walk tall –
And be crowned by the buzzard, like Wolstonbury Hill.
(I do not think there’s a luckier king
Than he that knows how the skylarks sing –
Like unravelling tangles of sky-blue wool
And that I learnt on Wolstonbury Hill.)
Wolstonbury Hill – a finger of sound
A knuckle, a kneecap, a grassed shoulder-round
Take care of my children, and let them be still
On the bright palm of Wolstonbury Hill.
Late winter, like the tide retreating,
Throws ever hollower frosts across the grass
A complicated battle has been won, a port taken
The ships of spring allowed to pass
Still under the dead of night, and crasser
Greasier, shrunk – inconceivable like frozen rope
And still for many days it is unclear:
Winter cycles jaunty out to see his lover
A rifle slung across his shoulder
And ambushed, cannot even muster fear.
How can fortunes change this fast?
Light is suddenly divided and increased
Like a flank action stemming in the south
Shivering with redwings in the hedge
Faltering with spring’s irresolute core.
Is this the meaning then of war?
A few hours when all hangs in the balance
And spring prepares to hang its head in shame
And who knows why winter then surrenders?
How every trembling victory is the same –
And history, happening like the seasons,
Spring is righteousness upon despair
And with a thousand pretty reasons
Trusses winter, beats it, shaves its hair.
Blessing
for Livvy and Jamie
That your love may be a walled garden
Newly tattered by rain, which comes suddenly
And stutters its few pearls on the lady’s mantle
And in this walled garden, which is your love
Lupins spread their fingers, honeysuckling
Moths bear the walls’ patterns, goldfinches tap –
Teasels tickle. This for you, who are no ordinary lovers
Who drink rain and mist and above all light
That dances and creeps and hopes
That your love may be wild and rampant
Multiplying like the mysterious foxgloves
Sweet and persistent as mallow
Fire-tipped like phlox
In its fierce dance of reconciliation
And meadowsweet and woodruff
Come to scent the cool halls of your
Marriage. Your love is a walled garden
May season follow season
Scent follow scent
The pattern of love flourish and root itself
Deeper and wider and lay its own seeds
Bluebell and harebell and comfrey and sage:
In the naming of love how sweet it grows
A hundred greening names to your young garden
In its ancient walls. Your love
Is a walled garden, and yet there will be
No name to contain it
About the Author
&nb
sp; SASHA DUGDALE was born in Sussex. Between 1995 and 2000 she worked for the British Council in Russia, where she set up the Russian New Writing Project with the Royal Court Theatre. She currently works as a translator and consultant for the Royal Court and other theatre companies. Many of her translations have been staged, one of which, Plasticine by Vassily Sigarev, won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. She has published two collections of translations of Russian poetry and, with Carcanet, two collections of her own poetry, Notebook (2003) and The Estate (2007). In 2003 she received an Eric Gregory Award.
Also by Sasha Dugdale from Carcanet / OxfordPoets
Notebook
The Estate
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2011
by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved
© Sasha Dugdale, 2011
The right of Sasha Dugdale to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
Epub ISBN 978–1–84777–943–4
Mobi ISBN 978–1–84777–944–1
The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England