A mess of offal, muddled as an afterbirth.
His each wingbeat – a convict’s release.
What he carries will be plenty.
He slips behind the world’s brow
As music escapes its skull, its clock and its skyline.
Under his sudden shadow, flames cry out among thickets.
When he soars, his shape
Is a cross, eaten by light,
On the Creator’s face.
He shifts world weirdly as sunspots
Emerge as earthquakes.
A burning unconsumed,
A whirling tree –
Where he alights
A skin sloughs from a leafless apocalypse.
On his lens
Each atom engraves with a diamond.
In the wind-fondled crucible of his splendour
The dirt becomes God.
But when will he land
On a man’s wrist.
And the Falcon came
The gunmetal feathers
Of would not be put aside, would not falter.
The wing-knuckles
Of dividing the mountain, of hurling the world away behind him.
With the bullet-brow
Of burying himself head-first and ahead
Of his delicate bones, into the target
Collision.
The talons
Of a first, last, single blow
Of grasping complete the crux of rays.
With the tooled bill
Of plucking out the ghost
And feeding it to his eye-flame
Of stripping down the loose, hot flutter of earth
To its component parts
For the reconstitution of Falcon.
With the eye
Of explosion of Falcon.
The Skylark came
With its effort hooked to the sun, a swinging ladder
With its song
A labour of its whole body
Thatching the sun with bird-joy
To keep off the rains of weariness
The snows of extinction
With its labour
Of a useless excess, lifting what can only fall
With its crest
Which it intends to put on the sun
Which it meanwhile wears itself
So earth can be crested
With its song
Erected between dark and dark
The lark that lives and dies
In the service of its crest.
The Wild Duck
got up with a cry
Shook off her Arctic swaddling
Pitched from the tower of the North Wind
And came spanking across water
The wild duck, fracturing egg-zero,
Left her mother the snow in her shawl of stars
Abandoned her father the black wind in his beard of stars
Got up out of the ooze before dawn
Now hangs her whispering arrival
Between earth-glitter and heaven-glitter
Calling softly to the fixed lakes
As earth gets up in the frosty dark, at the back of the Pole Star
And flies into dew
Through the precarious crack of light
Quacking Wake Wake
The Swift comes the swift
Casts aside the two-arm two-leg article –
The pain instrument
Flesh and soft entrails and nerves, and is off.
Hurls itself as if again beyond where it fell among roofs
Out through the lightning-split in the great oak of light
One wing below mineral limit
One wing above dream and number
Shears between life and death
Whiskery snarl-gape already gone ahead
The eyes in possession ahead
Screams guess its trajectory
Meteorite puncturing the veils of worlds
Whipcrack, the ear’s glimpse
Is the smudge it leaves
Hunting the winged mote of death into the sun’s retina
Picking the nymph of life
Off the mirror of the lake of atoms
Till the Swift
Who falls out of the blindness, swims up
From the molten, rejoins itself
Shadow to shadow – resumes proof, nests
Papery ashes
Of the uncontainable burning.
The Unknown Wren
World-proof Wren
In thunderlight, at wrestling daybreak. Wren unalterable
In the wind-buffed wood.
Wren is here, but nearly out of control –
A blur of throbbings –
Electrocution by the god of wrens –
A battle-frenzy, a transfiguration –
Wren is singing in the wet bush.
His song sings him, every feather is a tongue
He is a song-ball of tongues –
The head squatted back, the pin-beak stretching to swallow the sky
And the wings quiver-lifting, as in death-rapture
Every feather a wing beating,
Wren is singing Wren – Wren of Wrens!
While his feet knot to a twig.
Imminent death only makes the wren more Wren-like
As harder sunlight, and realler earth-light.
Wren reigns! Wren is in power!
Under his upstart tail.
And when Wren sleeps even the star-drape heavens are a dream
Earth is just a bowl of ideas.
But now the lifted sun and the drenched woods rejoice with trembling –
WREN OF WRENS!
And Owl
Floats, a masked soul listening for death.
Death listening for a soul.
Small mouths and their incriminations are suspended.
Only the centre moves.
Constellations stand in awe. And the trees very still, the fields very still
As the Owl becalms deeper
To stillness.
Two eyes, fixed in the heart of heaven.
Nothing is neglected, in the Owl’s stare.
The womb opens and the cry comes
And the shadow of the creature
Circumscribes its fate. And the Owl
Screams, again ripping the bandages off
Because of the shape of its throat, as if it were a torture
Because of the shape of its face, as if it were a prison
Because of the shape of its talons, as if they were inescapable.
Heaven screams. Earth screams. Heaven eats. Earth is eaten.
And earth eats and heaven is eaten.
The Dove Came
Her breast big with rainbows
She was knocked down
The dove came, her wings clapped lightning
That scattered like twigs
She was knocked down
The dove came, her voice of thunder
A piling heaven of silver and violet
She was knocked down
She gave the flesh of her breast, and they ate her
She gave the milk of her blood, they drank her
The dove came again, a sun-blinding
And ear could no longer hear
Mouth was a disembowelled bird
Where the tongue tried to stir like a heart
And the dove alit
In the body of thorns.
Now deep in the dense body of thorns
A soft thunder
Nests her rainbows.
The Crow came to Adam
And lifted his eyelid
And whispered in his ear
Who has heard the Crow’s love-whisper?
Or the Crow’s news?
Adam woke.
And the Phoenix has come
Its voice
Is the blade of the desert, a fighting of light
Its voice dangles glittering
In the sof
t valley of dew
Its voice flies flaming and dripping flame
Slowly across the dusty sky
Its voice burns in a rich heap
Of mountains that seem to melt
Its feathers shake from the eye
Its ashes smoke from the breath
Flesh trembles
The altar of its death and its birth
Where it descends
Where it offers itself up
And naked the newborn
Laughs in the blaze
Curlews
I
They lift
Out of the maternal watery blue lines
Stripped of all but their cry
Some twists of near-inedible sinew
They slough off
The robes of bilberry blue
The cloud-stained bogland
They veer up and eddy away over
The stone horns
They trail a long, dangling, falling aim
Across water
Lancing their voices
Through the skin of this light
Drinking the nameless and naked
Through trembling bills.
II
Curlews in April
Hang their harps over the misty valleys
A wobbling water-call
A wet-footed god of the horizons
New moons sink into the heather
And full golden moons
Bulge over spent walls.
The Weasels We Smoked out of the Bank
Ran along the rowan branch, a whole family,
Furious with ill-contained lightning
Over the ferny falls of clattering coolant.
After the time-long Creation
Of this hill-sculpture, this prone, horizon-long
Limb-jumble of near-female
The wild gentle god of everywhereness
Worships her, in a lark-rapture silence.
But the demons who did all the labouring
Run in and out of her holes
Crackling with redundant energy.
The Canal’s Drowning Black
Bred wild leopards – among the pale depth fungus.
Loach. Torpid, ginger-bearded, secret
Prehistory of the canal’s masonry,
With little cupid mouths.
Five inches huge!
On the slime-brink, over bridge reflections,
I teetered. Then a ringing, skull-jolt stamp
And their beards flowered sudden anemones
All down the sunken cliff. A mad-house thrill –
The stonework’s tiny eyes, two feet, three feet,
Four feet down through my reflection
Watched for my next move.
Their schooldays were over.
Peeping man was no part of their knowledge.
So when a monkey god, a Martian
Tickled their underchins with his net rim
They snaked out and over the net rim easy
Back into the oligocene –
Only restrained by a mesh of kitchen curtain.
Then flopped out of their ocean-shifting aeons
Into a two pound jam-jar
On a windowsill
Blackened with acid rain fall-out
From Manchester’s rotten lung.
Next morning, Mount Zion’s
Cowled, Satanic majesty behind me
I lobbed – one by one – high through the air
The stiff, pouting, failed, paled new moons
Back into their Paradise and mine.
The Long Tunnel Ceiling
Of the main road canal bridge
Cradled black stalactite reflections.
That was the place for dark loach!
At the far end, the Moderna blanket factory
And the bushy mask of Hathershelf above it
Peered in through the cell-window.
Lorries from Bradford, baled with plump and towering
Wools and cotton met, above my head,
Lorries from Rochdale, and ground past each other
Making that cavern of air and water tremble –
Suddenly a crash!
The long gleam-ponderous watery echo shattered.
And at last it had begun!
That could only have been a brick from the ceiling!
The bridge was starting to collapse!
But the canal swallowed its scare,
The heavy mirror reglassed itself,
And the black arch gazed up at the black arch.
Till a brick
Rose through its eruption – hung massive
Then slammed back with a shock and a shattering.
An ingot!
Holy of holies! A treasure!
A trout
Nearly as long as my arm, solid
Molten pig of many a bronze loach!
There he lay – lazy – a free lord,
Ignoring me. Caressing, dismissing
The eastward easing traffic of drift,
Master of the Pennine Pass!
Found in some thin glitter among mean sandstone,
High under ferns, high up near sour heather,
Brought down on a midnight cloudburst
In a shake-up of heaven and the hills
When the streams burst with zig-zags and explosions
A seed
Of the wild god now flowering for me
Such a tigerish, dark, breathing lily
Between the tyres, under the tortured axles.
Cock-Crows
I stood on a dark summit, among dark summits –
Tidal dawn splitting heaven from earth,
The oyster
Opening to taste gold.
And I heard the cock-crows kindling in the valley
Under the mist –
They were sleepy,
Bubbling deep in the valley cauldron.
Then one or two tossed clear, like soft rockets
And sank back again dimming.
Then soaring harder, brighter, higher
Tearing the mist,
Bubble-glistenings flung up and bursting to light
Brightening the undercloud,
The fire-crests of the cocks – the sickle shouts,
Challenge against challenge, answer to answer,
Hooking higher,
Clambering up the sky as they melted,
Hanging smouldering from the night’s fringes.
Till the whole valley brimmed with cock-crows,
A magical soft mixture boiling over,
Spilling and sparkling into other valleys
Lobbed-up horse-shoes of glow-swollen metal
From sheds in back-gardens, hen-cotes, farms
Sinking back mistily
Till the last spark died, and embers paled
And the sun climbed into its wet sack
For the day’s work
While the dark rims hardened
Over the smoke of towns, from holes in earth.
Feeding out-wintering cattle at twilight
The wind is inside the hill.
The wood is a struggle – like a wood
Struggling through a wood. A panic
Only just holds off – every gust
Breaches the sky-walls and it seems, this time,
The whole sea of air will pour through,
The thunder will take deep hold, roots
Will have to come out, every loose thing
Will have to lift and go. And the cows, dark lumps of dusk
Stand waiting, like nails in a tin roof.
For the crucial moment, taking the strain
In their stirring stillness. As if their hooves
Held their field in place, held the hill
To its trembling shape. Night-thickness
Purples in the turmoil, making
Everything more alarming. Unidentifiable, tiny
Birds go past like elf-bolts.
Battling the hay-bales from me, the c
ows
Jostle and crush, like hulls blown from their moorings
And piling at the jetty. The wind
Has got inside their wintry buffalo skins,
Their wild woolly bulk-heads, their fierce, joyful breathings
And the reckless strength of their necks.
What do they care, their hooves
Are knee-deep in porridge of earth –
The hay blows luminous tatters from their chewings,
A fiery loss, frittering downwind,
Snatched away over the near edge
Where the world becomes water
Thundering like a flood-river at night.
They grunt happily, half-dissolved
On their steep, hurtling brink, as I flounder back
Towards headlights.
17 February 1974
Foxhunt
Two days after Xmas, near noon, as I listen
The hounds behind the hill
Are changing ground, a cloud of excitements,
Their voices like rusty, reluctant
Rolling stock being shunted. The hunt
Has tripped over a fox
At the threshold of the village. A crow in the fir
Is inspecting his nesting site, and he expostulates
At the indecent din. A blackbird
Starts up its cat-alarm. The grey-cloud mugginess
Of the year in its pit trying to muster
Enough energy to start opening again
Roars distantly. Everything sodden. The fox
Is flying, taking his first lesson
From the idiot pack-noise, the puppyish whine-yelps
Curling up like hounds’ tails, and the gruff military barkers:
A machine with only two products:
Dog-shit and dead foxes. Lorry engines
As usual modulating on the main street hill
Complicate the air, and the fox runs in a suburb
Of indifferent civilized noises. Now the yelpings
Enrich their brocade, thickening closer
In the maze of wind-currents. The orchards
And the hedges stand in coma. The pastures
Have got off so far lightly, are firm, cattle
Still nose hopefully, as if spring might be here
Missing out winter. Big lambs
Are organizing their gangs in gateways. The fox
Hangs his silver tongue in the world of noise
Over his spattering paws. Will he run
Till his muscles suddenly turn to iron,
Till blood froths his mouth as his lungs tatter,
Till his feet are raw blood-sticks and his tail
Trails thin as a rat’s? Or will he
Make a mistake, jump the wrong way, jump right