New and Selected Poems (19 page)

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 cottons 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 gritstone,

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.

A priest from a different land

Fulminated

Against heather, black stones, blown water.

Excommunicated the clouds

Damned the wind

Cast the bog pools into outer darkness

Smote the horizons

With the jawbone of emptiness

Till he ran out of breath –

In that teetering moment

Of lungs empty

When only his eye-water protected him

He saw

Heaven and earth moving.

And words left him.

Mind left him. God left him.

Bowed –

The lightning conductor

Of a maiming glimpse – the new prophet –

Under unending interrogation by wind

Tortured by huge scaldings of light

Tried to confess all but could not

Bleed a word

Stripped to his root-letter, cruciform

Contorted

Tried to tell all

Through crooking of elbows

Twitching of finger-ends.

Finally

Resigned

To be dumb.

Lets what happens to him simply happen.

A great bird landed here.

Its song drew men out of rock,

Living men out of bog and heather.

Its song put a light in the valleys

And harness on the long moors.

Its song brought a crystal from space

And set it in men’s heads.

Then the bird died.

Its giant bones

Blackened and became a mystery.

The crystal in men’s heads

Blackened and fell to pieces.

The valleys went out.

The moorland broke loose.

Where there was nothing

Somebody put a frightened lake.

Where there was nothing

Stony shoulders

Broadened to support it.

A wind from between the stars

Swam down to sniff at the trembling.

Trees, holding hands, eyes closed,

Acted at world.

Some heath-grass crept close, in fear.

Nothing else

Except when a gull blows through

A rip on the fabric

Out of nothingness into nothingness

Rain. Floods. Frost. And after frost, rain.

Dull roof-drumming. Wraith-rain pulsing across purple-bare woods

Like light across heaved water. Sleet in it.

And the poor fields, miserable tents of their hedges.

Mist-rain off-world. Hills wallowing

In and out of a grey or silvery dissolution. A farm gleaming,

Then all dull in the near drumming. At field-corners

Brown water backing and brimming in grass.

Toads hop across rain-hammered roads. Every mutilated leaf there

Looks like a frog or a rained-out mouse. Cattle

Wait under blackened backs. We drive post-holes.

They half fill with water before the post goes in.

Mud-water spurts as the iron bar slam-burns

The oak stake-head dry. Cows

Tamed on the waste mudded like a rugby field

Stand and watch, come very close for company

In the rain that goes on and on, and gets colder.

They sniff the wire, sniff the tractor, watch. The hedges

Are straggles of gap. A few haws. Every half-ton cow

Sinks to the fetlock at every sliding stride.

They are ruining their field and they know it.

They look out sideways from under their brows which are

Their only shelter. The sunk scrubby wood

Is a pulverized wreck, rain riddles its holes

To the drowned roots. A pheasant looking black

In his waterproofs, bends at his job in the stubble.

The mid-afternoon dusk soaks into

The soaked thickets. Nothing protects them.

The fox corpses lie beaten to their bare bones,

Skin beaten off, brains and bowels beaten out.

Nothing but their blueprint bones last in the rain,

Sodden soft. Round their hay racks, calves

Stand in a shine of mud. The gateways

Are deep obstacles of mud. The calves look up, through plastered forelocks,

Without moving. Nowhere they can go

Is less uncomfortable. The brimming world

And the pouring sky are the only places

For them to be. Fieldfares squeal over, sodden

Toward the sodden wood. A raven,

Cursing monotonously, goes over fast

And vanishes in rain-mist. Magpies

Shake themselves hopelessly, hop in the spatter. Misery.

Surviving green of ferns and brambles is tumbled

Like an abandoned scrapyard. The calves

Wait deep beneath their spines. Cows roar

Then hang their noses to the mud.

Snipe go over, invisible in the dusk,

With their squelching cries.

Bad-tempered bullying bunch, the horned cows

Among the unhorned. Feared, spoilt.

Cantankerous at the hay, at assemblies, at crowded

Yard operations. Knowing their horn-tips’ position

To a fraction, every other cow knowing it too.

Like their own tenderness. Horning of bellies, hair-tufting

Of horn-tips. Handy levers. But

Off with the horns.

So there they all are in the yard –

The pick of the bullies, churning each other

Like thick fish in a bucket, churning their mud.

One by one, into the cage of the crush: the needle,

A roar not like a cow – more like a tiger,

Blast of air down a cavern, and long, long

Beginning in pain and ending in terror – then the next.

The needle between the horn and the eye, so deep

Your gut squirms for the eyeball twisting

In its pink-white fastenings of tissue. This side and that.

Then the first one anaesthetized, back in the crush.

The bulldog pincers in the septum, stretched full strength,

The horn levered right over, the chin pulled round

With the pincers, the mouth drooling, the eye

Like a live eye caught in a pan, like the eye of a fish

Imprisoned in air. Then the cheese cutter

Of braided wire, and stainless steel peg handles,

Aligned on the hair-bedded root of the horn, then leaning

Backward full weight, pull-punching backwards,

Left right left right and the blood leaks

Down over the cheekbone, the wire bites

And buzzes, the ammonia horn-burn smokes

And the cow groans, roars shapelessly, hurls

Its half-ton commotion in the tight cage. Our faces

Grimace like faces in the dentist’s chair. The horn

Rocks from its roots, the wire pulls through

The last hinge of hair, the horn is heavy and free,

And a water-pistol jet of blood

Rains over the one who holds it – a needle jet

From the white-rasped and bloody skull-crater. Then tweezers

Twiddle the artery nozzle, knotting it enough,

And purple antiseptic squirts a cuttlefish cloud over it.

Then the other side the same. We collect

A heap of horns. The floor of the crush

Is a trampled puddle of scarlet. The purple-crowned cattle,

The bullies, with suddenly no horns to fear,

Start ramming and wrestling. Maybe their heads

Are still anaesthetized. A new order

Among the hornless. The bitchy high-headed

Straight-back brindle, with her Spanish bull trot,

And her head-shaking snorting advance and her crazy spirit,

Will have to get maternal. What she’s lost

In weapons, she’ll have to make up for in tits.

But they’ve all lost one third of their beauty.

Wind out of freezing Europe. A mean snow

Fiery cold. Ewes caked crusty with snow,

Their new hot lambs wet trembling

And crying on trampled patches, under the hedge –

Twenty miles of open lower landscape

Blows into their wetness. The field smokes and writhes

Burning like a moor with snow-fumes.

Lambs nestling to make themselves comfortable

While the ewe nudges and nibbles at them

And the numbing snow-wind blows on the blood tatters

At her breached back-end.

The moor a grey sea-shape. The wood

Thick-fingered density, a worked wall of whiteness.

The old sea-roar, sheep-shout, lamb-wail.

Redwings needling invisible. A fright

Smoking among trees, the hedges blocked.

Lifting of ice-heavy ewes, trampling anxieties

As they follow their wide-legged tall lambs,

Tripods craning to cry bewildered.

We coax the mothers to follow their babies

And they do follow, running back

In sudden convinced panic to the patch

Where the lamb had been born, dreading

She must have been deceived away from it

By crafty wolvish humans, then coming again

Defenceless to the bleat she’s attuned to

And recognizing her own – a familiar

Detail in the meaningless shape-mass

Of human arms, legs, body-clothes – her lamb on the white earth

Held by those hands. Then vanishing again

Lifted. Then only the disembodied cry

Going with the human, while she runs in a circle

On the leash of the cry. While the wind

Presses outer space into the grass

And alarms wrens deep in brambles

With hissing fragments of stars.