THE APPROPRIATION OF BIRDSONG
Note. Till I was thirty-six I had not written any free verse, only formal poems (except a first-flood of teenage poems.) Then I started to get ideas for free verse poems, and all of them, initially, about birds.
THE APPROPRIATION OF BIRDSONG
Here come the people,
Straining their ears
In the absence of angels.
Oh I’ve come a long way, long way,
Nowhere to go.
Here on our spinning disc of days,
In the accelerating music.
Oh I’ve come a long way, long way,
Nowhere to go.
Picking up scraps here and there,
Fragments of a vast song.
Popping them into their handbags,
Next to the stick, the pills, the phone and the walkman,
Slipping them under their hats,
Next to the futures and the percentages,
Stuffing them under their belts,
Next to the grave and the marriage bed and breakfast and terrorist attacks
Patching their heads with scraps of birdsong.
They can’t help it, they don’t know they’re doing it,
Even the bird expert;
The lobbyist popping round the corner to the chemist, catches a waft from a rowan with its feet in concrete;
They are all doing it,
Feeding their brains with crumbs of birdsong,
Turning them around in their minds,
They are all spinning gold out of filthy straw, all of them,
Oh I’ve come a long way, long way
Suffered much, such a feathering
Journey, clean out of memory;
Caged in a shell,
Dark of dark, sleep of sleep,
No room to pace in that cell,
A viscous liquid, changed
Like egg scraped round a pan,
Filled up with wants,
In the smashed cup of that womb,
One of a small, mad gang,
Fighting for worms
In the dust that was us,
Till I perched
On the edge of a hope-connected tangle of things,
And flew
Into the blue
O blue
It is to you
My praise is due
To you and the dew
Of the dawn you own,
My song that’s come
Out of the long long long
Tunnel of nothing.
EXCLAMATION
What basketwork!
What early morning opera!
What amorous ballet!
What contests of troubadours!
What arial jousting!
What mobile sculpture!
What flock politics!
What outbursts of ostentation!
What great escapes!
What fragile beginnings!
What unconscious comedy!
What sea voyages!
What high diving!
What a cacophony!
What precision!
What tribes!
What beautiful uniforms!
What outdoor Parliaments!
What regular devotions!
What expressionism!
What night-songs!
What navigation!
What meteorology!
What prophecies of repetition!
What feathery empires!
What piercing glances!
What frost-forgetfulness!
What April renaissance!
What symphonies of instincts!
What perfect pitch
What natural balance!
What brainless beauty stately drifting!
What sweet eternities of idiot singing!
ROOKS
We vastly outnumber the humans in this valley.
We scatter from one to another hilltop crown.
This is the life of rooks, the high life,
The talkative life,
Complex as entrails.
The framework of the air is trees,
A living work that grows up,
Lifts up under the feet
With bending strength,
A sprung floor;
All through its webs the wind goes
Like ants rushing through tunnels
With eyes shut, guided
By bright invisible threads of scent.
Further down, under the dark,
The same web-work is reflected in the depths of the earth,
A fixing reflection,
That holds the tree as your form in water
Holds you to yourself.
All this rises through us in shrieks
At sunrise and sunset;
We might speak about lightning in shocked terms,
With burnt words,
Or about the sky like a furious cheated bride
Trying to tear itself loose from the earth,
But unable,
Always waking up with the same dirty old man.
About the breakers of air
Whose charred spray we are,
The gulf, the gulp of downfall,
Caught always like a sob turned croak.
The tall ghosts go in through the churchdoor.
Then rhythmical singing escapes
Out of the stained glass arches,
Songs about roofs, about stone walls, about regular baths.
But through us rises
Gossip of the veinwork of leaves,
And the twists of timber springing apart
And leaping together,
Hoarse and nonsense songs
About everything smashing itself to bits
And then flinging itself back together.
BIRDS.
An almost infinite endeavour
Weighed on me once – a gravestone sky.
Then by the sleep-talk of a stream
A wagtail flicked its yellow feathers
From rock to rock – a tick, a sign
Of courtesy and grace. Another time,
My eyes were dragged into the sea
As if I was a fish on land
Caught by an angler who had drowned
Then I saw stepping on the sand,
A tiny bird, but bigger than the sea.
With its strict manner it reproved the sea.
Now I can walk through thorns and fire
And they are always there – I see
The winter branches green with finches.
EATEN ALIVE BY SMALL BIRDS IN SOUTH DEVON
I am staked out for the birds to peck at,
My belly of lard,
My head of suet.
The wood-dove carries off my shyness
To her high nest.
The jackdaw
Pecks all the dead words out of my mouth.
Magpies
Steal my weak eyes.
Now my head floods with rain,
And I return with them
To their various roosts and their various songs.
LARKSONG
News from heaven.
Same again today.
Victory.
TWITCHER.
No more for me the vague wash of song,
And the blurred flurrying of the half-known
From oblivion into oblivion.
I have magnified them,
I have given them names,
I know the places of their mating
And of their dying,
I know the likes and dislikes of their nestlings.
They have made a sky of my mind.
Their masks adorn the halls of my imagination.
Yet God is more present to the atheist
Than I am to them,
As they dance in the dawn air,
Disbelieving.
THE END.
Now subtlety began to withdraw from the earth,
Rising from innumerable fires, a smoke-screen,
That had once been a dust of love, covering everything.
So the flocks of crested gods,
The feathered visions,
Began the ascent, as gibbons
In jungles blazing,
To their ancient stations,
And the simplified earth
Now articulated
With a language of gaps
A sequence of final solutions.
WINTER
Turkey oak in full jackdaw
Apple tree with ripe stockdoves
Sycamore shedding its greenfinches
Silver birch coming into bluetit
MORE ROOKS
The rooks gather in court
To defend themselves.
They are not, they declare, omens
Either of grace or of doom;
They are not weather forecasters,
Accurate or innaccurate,
They are not singers of raucous songs;
They cannot, in fact, speak.
The rooks croak,
Emptying their emptiness.
But there is no end to it,
Tiny zero bubbles of nothingness
Rising out of a nought,
Not the least bit diminishing it.
How bright are the eyes
Lit by interior darkness,
What piercing glances dart
Out of the fog of unconsciousness.
How hard it is to stand on any kind of eminence
And not take on some kind of significance.
LINNET?
What are you smooth small bird a hint of green following the shape of the apple tree, to right, to left, and you flutter in the shapes between the branches, you are improvising on the theme of the tree, left and right, light as leaves, as leaves flutter down so you flutter up, to the very end the very thinnest lightest, now up first left then right to the
topmost
vertical
waving
flag
you don’t touch it you fly up it, you imitate it compliment it and then vanish
WINTER AGAIN
Rooks – for a shrieking minute
Black leaves thick
In the ash tree
BUZZARD
For a long time, buzzard,
You have been stretching my eyebeams,
Gyring and plaiting them
Like the ropes of a maypole,
Pulling me up but not to heaven.
You have usurped the station
Of the angels, but not their clothing,
Mad tramp gripping the pulpit, shrieking
Into the upturned faces of the fields and woods and pools
That now pull you down.
You are perching,
But still I carousel,
Trailing my long tether
Over the rough ground.
EGG
Bird crying in the tree all day,
Young buzzard grizzling a week of rain,
Complaining – after that curve so tight
Straining the blue lights through the yellow light,
And the twig-boat tossed and the fight
For the dangled scraps,
And then the valley crossed in a breath,
Swelling in and shrinking out its river-light,
How can I peck this wet light,
Me, hunched wet-feathered lump,
Till the stars and the tinier stars
And the tiniest stars, are cracks –
AN EXPLANATION OF THE SCENERY
After the drowning of the flightless angels
Who had panicked all over the land,
Crying out
In a language now lost -
As the dark shape of Noah’s boat slid overhead,
Silence spread out on the earth,
That had already swallowed
The falsetto chatter of the dinosaurs
And transformed the roaring
Of the whales into delicate stretched strands of radio noise,
And struck dumb the talkative flowers.
After all this had happened,
And the waters, yet again, receded,
The drowned angels
Stood scattered all over the earth,
Absolutely no sound coming out of them.
Then, after some months, no sound
But a multitude of elongating points pushed out of them,
Opening a canopy of fans
The precise colour of silence.
All over the earth silence deepened by some hundreds of fathoms.
And was suddenly broken
By a bluetit
BLUETIT
This song like scissors in the morning
Cut my anger into ribbons
SWANS
SWANS
Question marks on the lake are asking,
Am I myself or my reflection?
SWAN
With gracious bending of the head
Acknowledging the offerings
Of the adoring pilgrim stream
And saying without use of sound
You see I can’t accept a thing
I have no hands.
SWANSONG
Swan head down in the
Stereo both ears clamped
In the rush of a
Popular song, head up
To the disintegrating
Rhythms, people dogs, head down
Again to the
Old tune
SEAGULL
A single obstreperous mood has spread through the whole race
Stamping every man woman and child with the merciless mutinous face
Of a rude girl in a rage against everything struggling in vain to escape from her own
grace
AND AGAIN
wingtip-writing on the sky invisibly,
cup of a y maybe one field wide,
tail a deep dive, or downglide,
and recover. Then rub it all out,
then self also erased: gone
then there again between houses,
writer without ambition,
always erasing
and gone again
and reappears plural,
but still nothing –
again carefully
over and over again writing and rubbing out nothing,
gone again leaving nothing
but blots and traceless drifting unrealised notions
AND AGAIN
Forms of despair unfolding
White, from the wet and the clay sky.
Blank sheets, wishing the wind to write on them,
Open and open.
Following the doodled line
From nowhere to the sea and back again.
Unwrapping bundles of nothing,
White whitens and whitens.
Turns into stars that drown
And dawn as despair again.
AND AGAIN
Quick gull starving for river
over the identical mountains,
shrugging and shrugging through
the grey wool above London.
What superior beings
are we who sustain
lives above roof height
with our empty baked bean tins?
DEATH OF THE RIVER.
Down by the river
I saw a kingfisher
Smack full tilt into a low bridge.
Two swans were swapping punches
And black eyes,
Sprawling around in the mud.
The ducks were just sat in a line
On the bridge-rail, staring,
Sunk in a green gloom,
Nothing to do.
A drift of grubby seagulls was mocking and mobbing
A single immaculate eider
Making for the sea.
With extreme difficulty
Maintaining her dignity
For the duration of that terrible river.
KINGFISHERS.
The moon is a riot of footprints.
Mars is orange with streetlights.
Amazing flying machines
Completely cover the ground.
This is too much for the crocuses.
But here come the kingfishers,
Crossing it all out
With swift azure strokes.
THE BLACKBIRD REPLIES.
He cocks his head on one side,
An old man listening to a child.
Or a terrier tensed for the rabbit
To leap into daylight
Just ahead of the ferret.
Silent as a cheese-taster
Listening to the taste of the cheese.
Or the off-duty seismologist
In the roar of Los Angeles,
Gauging his underground feeling.
A G.P. listening again to the body
Articulating its complex pathology
In baby language.
Not an anthropologist
Interrogating a shaman,
But the shaman
Replacing his ears with the wind.
Mozart on a visit to Leipzig,
Listening to Bach for the first time.
Thin from the larynx
Of exhausted mines,
The seed of a sound,
‘Passchaendaele, Auschwitz, Soham,’
The earth sighs
And
“Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace!”
The blackbird replies.
FOUR CORMORANTS.
We are four cormorants flying
Away to the east.
Not in the least geese,
Not pigeons. Primitive birds.
You would not have to take away
Much from us to make us nothing.
Strip us to a flying spine,
Put an end to everything.
Still we come round again,
In a different world, the same
Four cormorants flying.
SWALLOW
one two three four then lost it
concentrate concentrate
(how without weight or wit?)
one two three four then all
over the place then
one two three four then lost it
APRIL SWALLOW
You slapstick sparrows in a gang,
You black-cloaked lurking jackdaw villains,
You fairy seagulls trailing tinsel,
You starlings wittily ad-libbing
Have all been suddenly outdone
By this trapezist who has swung
Shining around the globe to end
Your long-extended pantomime.
WREN.
Among the sticks
The wren has evolved briefness.
Were you once otiose,
Sweeping the air like seagulls in long alexandrines?
Now you are a pinprick
Among the bramblehooks.
In the treetops Great Tits recite the dead epics -
You are shrinking a sonnet.
All the great paragraphs have gone down into the earth,
But you persist,
Micro-tyrannosaurus,
Critic of the thicket.
Your ambition,
To be an instant.
SOUTH WEST WETLANDS FIELD BIRDS SURVEY
It was the morning of a day.
In a green field the wind was crawling
Backwards, old lady with her dogs
And bags, with many snags and struggles,
Through the spiked hedgerow gaps. The sky,
Absent-mindedly mouthing silently,
Unravelled its white suit, blue fingers
Teasing out strands the earth was spinning
Into a bright new piece of nothing.
Stiff stood the hollow squares of hedges,
Blind, after such a long bombardment
Of airy light and all that tumbles
Heavily through the weather’s fingers,
Hail, that can travel horizontal,
Struck by the wind’s straight bat. They pointed
Crookedly bayonetted muskets
In all directions, only certain
That these were not the fields of Eton.
Over the green a bird came whirring,
Like a flat stone that slaps the water
And makes a single leap grey-blurring
To the far bank. It sank between
Its lifted wings into the stirring
Of spears. The shining sky turned over
In its grey sleeping bag that foundered
Like a great sodden corpse of timber
Sucked by a circle of swift water.
And now another bird. It fluttered
With its legs dangling, swiftly closer
And low, a smear of rust-red feathers,
And quickly sank. It clearly reckoned
It could be wriggled any second
Out of its own skin, seemed to crave
Invisibility like whiskey.
And now a motley Lord, knock-kneed,
Came flopping down along the sky,
Like a born clown auditioning
Against the odds to play the King;
Black-crested helmet, wobbly wings -
Shrugged once and suddenly was standing
With its sad face above the green.
Now came a tumbled scrap of bunting,
Like a blown frag of dust, an outfling
Of a disintegrating mountain,
High as a schoolboy’s hopes its piping,
Almost unheard, almost unseen,
Almost but not quite not existing;
Swung hard into the hedge and clung
To a tall aerial of ash, slow-bending.
Then suddenly another bunting,
Greyer, beside it. Now a vision
With blackrimmed amber eyes came racing
Triangular, from wind to wind,
Cornering sharply, wings of sand
Black-streaked, and calling like a mother
To her son lost in foreign waters.
It seemed about to hit the ground
Like a kite, sideways, but was standing,
Suddenly, folded, by the other
Tall bird among the six now gathered
In the thick grass and in the upgrowth
Of the spare hedge. The sky leaned over
And cried a little on the clover.
Crex, crex, the Corncrake began.
Now silence descended again,
As if the birds reckoned their thoughts better put
By the rips in sky and hedge,
Absence of words so apt that their silence
Might have sailed on like the Marie Celeste,
Unstoppably,
Till it fixed in the ice
At the end of all speech.
But the wrongness of their flock, a Grey Partridge,
A Lapwing, a Cirl Bunting, a Corn Bunting,
A Stone Curlew and a Corncrake,
Flicked a sandgrain into the cogs of their silence.
I do not know why I am here, said the Grey Partridge.
There are not many of us left, said the Lapwing.
Crex, crex, said the Corncrake.
Where there was arable and grazing,
Now there is only arable.
Where there was grazing and arable,
There is only grazing, said the Lapwing,
The hedges are thin,
Ripped by the trimmer too often,
Poor Hawthorn;
Scant shelter there for the buntings,
Few perches for their display singing.
This Disney field
Of one colour will be cut soon,
All skylark eggs broken,
And they will lay again soon, but too soon
Comes another cutting;
Four times in one season!
Nitrogen
Favouring what thrives on nitrogen
Persecutes the insects our chicks eat,
Sawflies and moth larvae!
Weevils, aphids, ground beetles!
It is the lateness of the sowing
And the earliness of the cutting,
Right in the middle of the breeding season,
And the scarceness of barley;
It is the miserliness of the field margins
Where the small birds feed
That will not stray far from cover,
Even if starving.
And you can’t argue with a tractor,
Taking every inch, ploughing right up to the hedge,
Maybe carrying away a part of the hedge, why not?
It is the cutting from edge to centre,
Leaving no corridor
From the desperate diminishing island,
It is the speed of the tractors,
It is the tiredness of the drivers!
It is the tallness of the sward,
Too high for our nesting,
Under the whip of the ubiquitous nitrogen;
It is the ever increasing
Density of stock, trampling
Our nests in the almost insectless improved pasture;
It is the tidiness, the vanishing
Of odd field corners, rich in weeds and therefore in insects;
Where are the brambles?
Where are the nettlebeds,
Perfect for partridges,
Where are the wetlands?
The stubborn scrub, the wandering magnificent gorse,
The mix, the patch, the rough grass
Round telegraph poles, unstrimmed,
Round ponds, the this and the that, the tangle and the maze and the mess,
The ragged track, the tatty thatch.
Fat hen, redshank, chickweed,
All the unwanted weeds, these are what we want!
Knotgrass, bindweed, hemp-nettle,
The spilt grain, the undersowing
Of clover or turnips or mustard for fodder in winter,
Tussocky Cock’s Foot and Yorkshire Fog,
Large standard trees
For summering turtle doves!
And the dead wood left where it lies
For the tree sparrows,
And in the wetlands,
Alders and Willows.
The farming year that turns with the stars
Has turned against us,
All our needs are denied.
It is the fault of the farmers! Cried the Stone Curlew.
Do not blame the farmers! Said the Corn Bunting;
It is us, it is us, with our late breeding,
Right in the middle of his cutting!
Let him change his ways if he likes,
Let him change his mind!
Farmers love birds! Sang the Cirl Bunting.
If you only talk to them,
Once they have done one good thing, and seen the change,
They will come back and ask you what more they can do.
And they talk to other farmers, if to no one else!
And they get jealous -
Oh have you heard, Jones has lapwings?
How did he get them?
Consider the farmer, cried the Stone Curlew.
Who is this man or woman?
What has he done?
By what heavenly election
Has he grasped this position,
Where he holds us all in his hands, old or young?
The air we breathe, the ground we tread on,
The colour of our rivers,
It is all down to him!
Do we love trees?
We must ask the farmer for them!
Delight in the foxcry?
Pray to the farmer’s shotgun!
The barn owl’s face?
Pray to the farmer for provision!
Who is this fellow with powers wider
Than any archbishop or pope ever?
Do you wish to dance with God in the springtime?
Ask the farmer!
That is precisely right, said the Grey Partridge,
Who is this man, how has he been chosen
To bend beneath the pressure of mountains
Of sugar and grain,
Wade through milk lakes,
Climb butter dunes?
Consider the farmer, sang the Cirl Bunting.
The Green Man’s shadow, the secret dancer
With the moonmad hare when his vertebrae juddered
By ruts are a heap of snores by the fire.
Once a man, now he is a coin
In international hands,
His fear is no longer the weather, his terror
Is the man in a blue suit reaching over the water!
I have heard that his heart has wings like ours,
Though his song is somewhat harsher and deeper.
My friends, will you not believe what I tell you?
Crex, crex, said the Corncrake.
No, said the Stone Curlew.
Then, said the Lapwing, who was their leader,
If it is not to be the farmer,
Who will restore these fields?
The courts? The Crown?
Poets? Actors?
Soldiers? Airmen? Sailors? The Circus?
Schoolchildren? Nurses? Firemen? Film Cameras?
The Church of Rome? The Church of England?
Who will give back life to this land?
A consortium of museums?
No, it must be us, we must do it, said the Corn Bunting.
We must shake off the weather,
We must drop to the ground,
Leave our stretching nests,
Leave off singing
Our invisible javelins,
Leave the life of the trees,
The life of the air,
The brief life,
With sprinting heartbeat,
The rush of the flock,
The picking through dust,
The quick step
From path to branch,
Cursing at cats;
Shed crests,
Take on weight,
Reek of smoke,
Moult flight,
Walk, speak,
Sleep through the dawn, and on,
Changed into trudging men, and telling them
What is lost,
What can be done.
Black silence.They had all been talking
At once, but suddenly midwinter
Fell on the present like a tiger,
Out of its ambush in the future,
Ripped out spring’s throat, and left it there
Bleeding to ice. The mad full moon
Of the truth rose in all their minds:
That they would have to take this on.
Each bird must change into a man.
Then they began to tremble, crying
Like cattle at a railway station,
And as they shook, their feathers fountained
Like an exploding coast. Their breasts
Balooned, their stick legs stretched and thickened,
Their sharp heads drifted upwards, bloating,
And their pink wingbones flexed and lengthened,
Gripping binoculars and folders
As they walked down to the big town, talking.
OWL
Frankly, blankly,
the owl has looked at me.
Black sky behind,
head inclined slightly.
One moment, two moments, three.
Now all the black I have looked at
is looking at me.
THE NIGHT-DOVE
The night dove sings in the thick of the willow,
Meadows of bone, meadows of bone,
Where the souls of the blessed are skylarks, strings
Of cobweb tethering them to blue electric thistles, tall, tall.
The night-dove sings
And the stars are anemones
And the Hanged Man dances on the lawn
With the Iron Maiden
The night-dove sings
By the river of razors,
Moon-whetted.
All down the stream of sickles
The night-dove sings,
Skimming the grass with blight wings.
And stands in the road and stares with eyes
That are strawberry coffins, soft coffins to lie in
Gazing at the surface of the sea
Far
Far
Above
Thee
The souls of the damned are bluetits
In the buckthorn
The night-dove wins them reprieve
For as long
As her song
DAWN CHORUS.
In death row this morning
The silence is appalling.
Not silence -
Not even the silence of Cage,
Broken only by the swish of your breathing
And the thump of your bloodstream
And the faint crackling of your brain’s caffeine.
Not the silence
Of the mind’s mouth
Or the wild horses
On cavewalls escaping;
Only the amplification of small sounds,
The D flat sodium hum of depression,
Bishops being picked up
And with a click set down,
The slow munching of the inmate determined
To beat his sentence by eating.
And now in the orange pre-dawn
In a tree of bare hope
One solitary convict
Starts singing.
Now the hills are being lifted
Out of the silence where they have been lying
In the indolence of chaos,
Lions in circus wagons,
Bewildered by the earth’s night-journeying.
A rush of green sound
Places them with the accuracy
Of space stations remotely manoeuvred
Into position.
This could be the rallying
Of every voice on earth for the final
Attempt to wake up the dead God
In his porphyry tomb,
But it is in fact the gracious invitation
To one dandelion to open
And people the universe with a shake of its infinite head.
Pause
In this up-pour,
And you are water in water;
You are turning around and around
In a curve of a rock in a stream
Where golden sandgrains are dancing;
The falling of all the waters of the world
Condensed to one sound,
The distillation
Of every tin cup on the planet
Accidentally clattering down granite steps,
The laughter of a prisoner
Into the eyes of his daughter
As she tosses the noose into the furnace.
Pause
And your ears are seacaves
In which the roar of the storm has risen
To a bat-note far above human hearing.
You are utterly sunk, sodden,
Gone green.
The occasional explosion of foam
Is a pheasant suddenly getting
A joke he was told before he was born.
Now he has stepped on a landmine,
In the sweet grass.
The blackbird is keeping its head
In the general confusion,
Where two armies of sound have rushed screaming
Into collision
And are now milling around,
Hacking, collapsing, crying
To their comrades, holding the gateways,
The high trees.
The blackbird leaps about,
Shouting commands, as in a sea-fight;
In a blink,
Up the rigging and along the yard-arm.
Who likened these singers to monks?
They are conjuring
The green roar of the hills,
They summon what the rivers are running from.
Robin and thrush and chiff-chaff and linnet and wren,
Lost in one voice, where song meeting song
Sparked a great conflagration.
Now they are hopping here and there in separation,
Having survived themselves,
Fragments of their own passions.
But the work is done.
Someone on earth has given
Every shred of their breath to do justice
To the beginning.
THE COCK IS SCREECHING IN THE HENHOUSE
The cock is screeching in the henhouse.
Light like the scent of sex
leaks through the cracks in the wood.
Again he shrieks.
Delicate birds with their beaks touch the air’s invisible strings.
The visible nerves of the trees, this winter dawn,
wait to be shocked into squawks or stroked into soft songs.
Again in the wounded gloom he is shrieking,
all round him his wives like small rainclouds,
shifting a millimetre and then
shifting back again,
opening an eye of water.
The weight of night is draining away
like the weight of a cancer patient;
the weight of light is impossible,
increasing like the grief of the relatives;
again and again he screeches, and beats his wings,
as the light bites him like lice.
All the outside birds are now ranged in the trees
like thoughts in a brain, calling their connections.
He screams like Christ and strains his wings,
and the wives shift and shift back again,
and now the traffic is flowing to a stop and flowing again,
people are walking, even dogs are set loose,
freighters appear out of the mist, with boasting of foghorns.
His screeches increase and increase again,
but look now, look, it is lifting,
the black roof of the henhouse like a hat
is lifting right off, it has blown right off
and the cock is exploding
azure and scarlet and tangerine
out of the henhouse
and all of the hens, like damp flames,
are fluffing their feathers and shaking their heads and
turning back into chickens
BLACKBIRD
Lover without hands
or lips or visible skin,
or soft feet to press together
in the first cold under the covers
lover whose lizard fingers
clutch at the tree’s bones
no words of deferring
or any defence,
no dreams
in the day or the night,
phonecalls or photos or rings
no doubt.
Fixed by a spear
through the heart to your theme
of the one, of the one
out on a limb
that is out on a limb
that is out on a limb
of the afternoon stars
sharp mask held up, up
in the cold and the crippling wind
of your own lovesong
POEM FOR WOODWIND
Ok try this.
Close your eyes
in a place where there’s pigeons.
Now imagine they’re musicians
on wind instruments
sitting in the trees.
They can look like whatever you like.
What are they up to, all day sitting in the trees,
blowing through their wooden pipes?
Several now are playing together. Now just one.
Now three together again,
more or less the same tune, more or less the same rhythm.
Over again. One plays near,
now another answers far away, in the green tree invisible.
One shakes a branch, for a joke, one claps,
now all clap together.
A long pause. What are they all doing,
what are they all talking about, whispering between playing,
sitting in the trees all day, playing the same tune
over and over? The first one they ever learned.
Called something like
‘The Almost-Identical Grass Stems,’
or ‘The Inaccurate Repetition of Bison,’
or ‘The Planks of the Schoolroom Door,’
or ‘The Mottles on the Shed Window.’
A long pause.
Why haven’t they ever learned another one?
Now they all come in together again,
and stop, gasping for breath, giggling –
the kind of joke only musicians get.
What are they doing, are they on drugs?
Blowing through their wooden pipes,
all day sitting in the trees, what are they doing?
Now open your eyes again.
RAVEN
Who will pick up the raven
That dial-tones in the dark pine this morning?
Gives up, tries again,
Urgent enough to try a third time.
Love or death alone enough
To make it try again now a fourth time.
Who will pick up the raven?
BIGGER AND BIGGER BIRDS.
Bigger and bigger birds
Are tried out on the air.
They stall, spin, dive.
Wider and wider areas
Are crushed flat with feathers.
The air cannot bear such fliers,
It sags like a straw chair
Under the Lord Mayor.
They strain, their eyes flash terror.
Weight compels them down
Into field, marsh or town,
As if to demonstrate a theorem
Over and over again
And never move on.
NOTHING
The nothing-rooks are in the air,
Nothing to me –
I free of them, they free of me.
Nothing deciphered of each other’s tongue.
They will not come to tea,
I will not climb
Into their city,
To sit among the eggs and sing,
Or like a vicar try to fire
Their charcoal souls
Or catch
The feather of their faith that drifts downwind
Into the crap and boneheap of their sins.
Nothing to me, the rooks are in the air.
Not in my head, nowhere I find
Them in my mind,
Only the air
Like a Rosetta stone wiped clean.
Nothing to them, I leave them be.
Also the ground, the grass, the stars, the wind,
And every type of shrub and tree
And all of cloud and mineral history.
THE BIRD.
Each time I reach the field
The bird has got there first,
And quivers in the grass, too big.
With greasy quills out-fanned,
And scraps of crabs around,
And stars of guano and the puke
That it jets in its rage.
And in the hedge all around,
The crazy chorus choirs its praises,
And in the air, higher and higher,
The note of its refinement rises.
My human mind is smashed and scattered,
A bee-swarm by a shot shattered.
SAVED BY BIRDS AGAIN.
Dust in the head’s abandoned library,
abstract mice in the weak spines feasting,
words turned to nothing droppings.
Reach in a magic hand, scoop them out and scatter them:
rabble of real sparrows in the dust-puddles scrambling
to the empty hedge now chattering kindergarten.
Increase of cries in the ears all night, curled skeleton
a leaking refugee boat
and the chorus of the waters merciless.
Reach in a magic hand, scatter all the scratching sounds:
stick in the morning trees,
starkmad lovesongs.
Razors racing in the heart’s soft corridors,
cutting in their rush, the castle walls of sodden cotton.
Reach in a magic hand, scoop them out and scatter them:
fishingfleet of seagulls,
silver-blade calls here and there-ing
random slashes in the clouds, scarred golden.
Heaviest stone in the head, world-headstone,
swan has evolved wings wide for carrying
right round the riverbend
and dropping, bouncing-baby-bomb!
Absolute verdict of the night now imminent,
tick-tock axeblades forward marching.
Endlessly riposted by starlings filibustering,
unravelling with their irrelevance tight arguments,
splicing scillia, quite happy all day long
to quibble on an aerial
till night with a magic hand
scoops them up and scatters them
CROW
Where are your roots, black rose?
Your song is thorns
That snag the ear.
Your bed is air.
You flower suddenly there and there.
Suddenly a field is all black roses,
With thorn cries, suddenly a tree,
Suddenly the air.
Stillness that shifts
In jumps and flutters,
Instantly rooted
Forever and ever,
Though you just left,
Having just got there.
Standing stones
That flock and scatter,
You were always there
Wherever you are.
LITTLE STINT
Hastily flung together out of found materials –
scraps of feather and bone mudstained,
and the light off the river,
I must now nevertheless,
in obedience to my ordained
but still slapdash creation,
with all my gathered powers
(a small fanatical force)
put back together this place
that has been ingeniously ripped apart
by an insanely complex intellect.
(So I suppose.)
These are my gifts:
needle eyes,
a dash of rush,
tweezer beak,
bones dry-grass-light,
simultaneous presence at all points of the compass.
With these alone, I, alone, must
simplify, for heaven’s sake,
this collapsing slag heap,
pick out the one clean grain
from among filthy billions.
Thanks for my bee-busy wings!
Tidy mind!
The tide of forgetting!
LARK BESEECHING THE EARTH TO RISE.
Get up dead thing get up,
Leap off the bedrock,
Spit out your gizzard's flints and get up!
Wake up honey wake up, be more beelike,
Float up into my wings, take a tip
From your hurtling beetles,
And your weather-map swifts,
Fling up like shell-bursts arms of blasted sod!
Get your head off the void,
Heave like your seas and smoke,
Space is waiting to waltz!
Shake loose, freak out, wake up, step out
Of the tomb of your time -
Get up, dead thing, get up!
THE AIR
Now I will go up into the air,
And twist my mind into the wind’s weave.
Much more is rising than falling -
Steeples reaching a certain height
Break open releasing
Seeds that gyrate in the vane-spinning
North to south stepping,
Bright blue eyed twelve league booted
Invisible hurrying
That will turn, at the absolute limit of all things,
And stream back to the beginning.
Listen to them, hatching on the wing,
Bubbles of music bursting,
High up above the leads and the flagstones,
Instantaneous rainbows of sound.
As the congregation
Drop like sacks to their knees,
Blue flames are flickering
From their nostrils and mouths.
Much more is rising than falling,
Even my own wings,
Shedding what is wrongly called down -
It curls away up very quickly.
The surface of the earth now
Is sweating rivers of steam.
Someone flicks a match into a rick
And the whole thing is leaping
Up like a demon,
Shuddering and rolling, pulling
Itself up by its own skin,
Shaking out in all directions,
Raping the pale clouds,
Rushing off into nothing.
Much more is rising than falling.
Here come the thoughts of old men,
Wrapped in brown tissue paper,
Unwrapping, revealing - nothing.
Hearts like hot air balloons
Clutter the airlanes,
Flare-off of opinions,
Confused updrift from colleges
And hospitals, roiling fog over prisons,
Repetitive hours sloughed off
As gossamer skins,
Shop window reflections,
Abstractions, girl magazines,
Blueprints, cancelled plans, missed meetings
Of eyes, all insubstantial things,
Limp in the updraught
Of the inverse autumn,
Swift in the slipstreams,
Extinctions, abortions,
Earth’s onion skins,
In endless perpendicular procession,
Kites without strings
And rice paper paintings.
And the pre-speech of infants,
Blown about husk-winged
And jewel-eyed,
With legs dangling.
Not one word falls to the ground.
All rise, a good haul
For the wind’s fishing,
Letters decoupling, tangling,
Paragraphs pulled apart by the crosswinds,
Where the swallows dive like dolphins
In the sardine run,
And schools of starlings flash turning
Through the radio waves,
Chat chopped by the chinook.
I flinch through crowds of sighs,
The daily trade of small deaths,
Lives lighter than air
Floating out of the flesh,
Shrews, fleas, field mice, lacewings, soldiers,
Plummeting upwards
Through the transparent webwork
Of shifting hexagons,
A beehive construction,
Turned inside out and
Inside in
At the speed of breathing;
Seven mile high shafts of
Invisible steel
Bending and twisting,
Plates of air
Like oceans on end,
Tilting, colliding, smashing, with no debris,
Except the strings of gulls, dangling.
Emerald and topaz crystals
Crash straight through me.
Now the earth breathes in her sleep,
Odour of seeds, odour of cities.
Entire seas rise
With a yawn, half asleep,
Climbing the stairs of the sky
In the furnace of dawn,
To the bathroom.
Cobras of smoke uncoil
From the baskets of cities.
Much more is rising than falling,
All things desire to be cloud,
And will have their turn
In the centrifugal machine,
Joy riding,
All the heavy mourners by the grave,
Will shoot up like rockets one day!
Now the whole earth is rising,
Lifting her head from the pillow
To me bending,
The far lines drawn together
As if by a string’s tugging,
The grand reach and scale of fences and woodlands
Collapsing and vastly expanding
To this one damp green field
In which I am standing.