Poems 1960-2000 (16 page)

There is no safety

there is no shelter

the dark dream

will drag us under. 

                       *

I married a man of metal and fire,

quick as a cat, and wild:

Harry Percy the Hotspur,

the Earl of Northumberland’s child. 

He rode to battle at fourteen years.

He won his prickly name.

His talking is a halting spate,

his temper a trembling flame. 

He has three castles to his use,

north of the Roman Wall:

Alnwick, Berwick, Warkworth –

and bowers for me in them all. 

I may dance and carol and sing;

I may go sweetly dressed

in silks that suit the lady I am;

I may lie on his breast; 

and peace may perch like a hawk on my wrist

but can never come tame to hand,

wed as I am to a warrior

in a wild warring land. 

                      *

High is his prowess

in works of chivalry,

noble his largesse,

franchyse and courtesy. 

All this wilderness

owes him loyalty;

and deathly rashness

bears him company.

The Earl of Douglas clattered south

with Scottish lords and men at arms.

He smudged our tall Northumberland skies

black with the smoke of burning farms. 

My Hotspur hurried to halt his course;

Newcastle was their meeting-place.

Douglas camped on the Castle Leazes;

they met in combat, face to face. 

It was as fair as any fight,

but Douglas drew the lucky chance:

he hurled my husband from his saddle,

stunned on the earth, and snatched his lance. 

I weep to think what Harry saw

as soon as he had strength to stand:

the silken pennon of the Percies

flaunted in a foreign hand. 

‘Sir, I shall bear this token off

and set it high on my castle gate.’

‘Sir, you shall not pass the bounds

of the county till you meet your fate.’ 

The city held against the siege;

the Scots were tired and forced to turn.

They tramped away with all their gear

to wait my lord at Otterburn. 

I sit with my ladies in the turret-room

late in the day, and watch them sewing.

Their fingers flicker over the linen;

mine lie idle with remembering. 

Last night the moon travelled through cloud

growing and shrinking minute by minute,

one day from fullness, a pewter cup

of white milk with white froth on it.

These August days are long to pass.

I have watched the berries on the rowan

creeping from green towards vermilion,

slow as my own body to ripen. 

I was eight years old when we married,

a child-bride for a boy warrior.

Eight more years dragged past before

they thought me fit for the bridal chamber. 

Now I am a woman, and proved to be so:

I carry the tender crop of our future;

while he pursues what he cannot leave,

drawn to danger by his lion’s nature. 

Daylight fades in the turret-slit;

my ladies lay aside their needles.

They murmur and yawn and fold away

the fine-worked linen to dress a cradle. 

And I should rest before the harvest moon

rises to dazzle me. But now

I stitch and cannot think of sleep.

What should I be sewing for tomorrow? 

It fell about the Lammastide –

the people put it in a song –

the famous fray at Otterburn,

fought by moonlight, hard and long. 

The Percies wore the silver crescent;

the moon was a full moon overhead.

Harry and his brother were taken,

but first they’d left the Douglas dead. 

Who was the victor on that field

the Scots and the English won’t agree;

but which force won as songs will tell it

matters little that I can see:

it surges on from year to year,

one more battle and still one more:

one in defence, one in aggression,

another to balance out the score. 

                      *

Crows flap

fretting for blood.

The field of battle

is a ravening flood. 

There is no safety

there is no shelter

the fell tide

will suck him under. 

He did not fall at Otterburn;

he did not fall at Humbledowne;

he fell on the field at Shrewsbury,

a rebel against the crown. 

He might have been a king himself;

he put one king upon the throne,

then turned against him, and sought to make

a king of my brother’s son. 

Families undo families;

kings go up and kings go down.

My man fell; but they propped him up

dead in Shrewsbury Town. 

They tied his corpse in the marketplace,

jammed for their jeers between two stones;

then hacked him apart: a heavy price

he paid for juggling with thrones. 

Four fair cities received his limbs,

far apart as the four winds are,

and his head stared north from the walls of York

fixed on Micklegate Bar. 

                       *

Now let forgetfulness wash over

his bones and the land’s bones,

the long snaky spine of the wall,

earthworks and standing stones,

rock and castle and tower and all. 

                      *

There is no safety

there is no shelter

the fell flood

has drawn him under. 

Caterpillars are falling on the Writers’ Union.

The writers are indifferent to the caterpillars.

They sit over their wine at the metal tables

wearing animated expressions and eating fried eggs

with pickled gherkins, or (the dish of the day),

extremely small sausages: two each. 

Meanwhile here and there an inch of grey bristles,

a miniature bottle-brush, twitches along a sleeve

or clings to a shoulder. The stone-paved courtyard

is dappled with desperate clumps of whiskers,

launched from the sunlit mulberry trees

to take their chance among literary furniture. 

A poet ignores a fluffy intruder

in his bread-basket (the bread’s all finished)

but flicks another from the velvet hat

(which surely she must have designed herself –

such elegance never appears in the shop-windows)

of his pretty companion, who looks like an actress. 

The writers are talking more and more rapidly.

Not all are writers. One is a painter;

many are translators. Even those who are not

are adaptable and resourceful linguists.

‘Pardon!’ says one to the foreign visitor.

‘Permit me! You have a worm on your back.’

Coming out with your clutch of postcards

in a Tate Gallery bag and another clutch

of images packed into your head you pause

on the steps to look across the river 

and there’s a new one: light bright buildings,

a streak of brown water, and such a sky

you wonder who painted it – Constable? No:

too brilliant. Crome? No: too ecstatic – 

a madly pure Pre-Raphaelite sky,

perhaps, sheer blue apart from the white plumes

rushing up it (today, that is,

April. Another day would be different 

but it wouldn’t matter. All skies work.)

Cut to the lower right for a detail:

seagulls pecking on mud, below

two office blocks and a Georgian terrace. 

Now swing to the left, and take in plane trees

bobbled with seeds, and that brick building,

and a red bus…Cut it off just there,

by the lamp-post. Leave the scaffolding in. 

That’s your next one. Curious how

these outdoor pictures didn’t exist

before you’d looked at the indoor pictures,

the ones on the walls. But here they are now, 

marching out of their panorama

and queuing up for the viewfinder

your eye’s become. You can isolate them

by holding your optic muscles still. 

You can zoom in on figure studies

(that boy with the rucksack), or still lives,

abstracts, townscapes. No one made them.

The light painted them. You’re in charge 

of the hanging committee. Put what space

you like around the ones you fix on,

and gloat. Art multiplies itself.

Art’s whatever you choose to frame.

A small dazzle of stained glass which

I did not choose but might have, hanging

in front of the branches of a pine tree

which I do not own but covet; beyond them

a view of crinkly hills which I do not

etc and did not etc but might have

in another life, or the same life earlier. 

The cat is fed, the plants are watered,

the milkman will call; the pine tree smells like

childhood. I am pretending to live here.

Out beyond the coloured glass and

the window-glass and the gully tall with

pine trees I dive back to wherever

I got my appetite for hills from.