some poems from the old human

Solitude, for a moment or two
Stretched in the web of summer’s beginning;
Countless fragile stars, pensive, wishless flowers,
As the new sun releases the dew,
Unfettered in feathers of mist uprising
To seek the high, reclusive cloud.
White chamomile, blue larkspur, the early bee:
All journey apart but here consist in me.

Today I buried a mute swan.
She was floating at the water’s edge
And could have been feeding, neck down,
But that her back was part unfledged,
Peeled raw, and when I lifted her out
The head had been ripped clean away.
She wasn’t so heavy, and I put
Her in a wheelbarrow. Across the lake
Liquidambar bayed vermillion, bared
Against the frigid winter air.
I crammed down her webbed foot hard,
So people would not be alarmed.

Under the big horse chestnut
I made her grave, pushing apart
Leaves that lay thickly, hands with deep-cut
Fingers, damp and turning, burnt
Umber to black, softening like wet skin.
Scraping back layers, I sunk a spade
Into the crummy earth, digging
To keepsafe the corpse in its decay;
Tipped out the swan; threw back the soil.
Done. A vicious scragging, senses roiling,
Then, slumped in darkness. No living
After. We prefer them hidden.

Many times at an early hour I have come here,
To watch as the lake reclaims the sky;
An archipelago of days lays out a year
In winter white, to lucent May, through blue July,
To deep November shades which reappear
As a skein of geese, loud as the heron is shy.
Dawn draws in the shapes of what will be:
Wind-ruffled water, the upward reaching trees.

The old human lived amongst the sublime:
The scents of rosemary and lemongrass,
The May Philadelphus;
Fragments of phrases,
An upward cadence,
Or the step-missing minor inflection
Which seemed to him to be heaven;
Was it the words (which failed him)
And yet defined them,
Or was it the way he could claim
The chemicals in the air,
The sound waves on the stair,
And explore them, discover their long approaches,
Gently rising slopes,
To find such immense fields of sky;
So wild to have been alive.

Sometimes he found himself preposterous:
The sense of continuous unfolding,
In every second blooming
Out of the shadows -
The light on the primrose,
The mad whinny of the nuthatch,
The sudden insistent chiffchaff;
All that he could not remember
(Not all together),
Yet each impression was as clear
As the minutes spent
With those who’d meant
Something, only to be released
To the sad seas;
But that was the roll and fall of water;
His part was not to surrender.

As the day dropped down to stillness and slept,
He thought out his quiet messages
To the dusty images
Of faces long gone;
And to those carrying on
Without him, somewhere synaptic,
Blood-warmed, separate, connected
By voice, by sight, by touch,
By the past:
All that he recollected
In them still,
Whose mysterious will
Had bound with his and been severed,
Settled, forgotten, rediscovered,
Ruffled by slight ripples at depth;
By echoes of that which was kept.

Several things lost their lives as the night grew:
The bedraggled mouse the cat left on the lawn;
The tulip I uprooted,
Making space for sweetcorn,
And left, forgotten on the flower bed;
The shiso, new leaves marbling deepest blue,
Eaten by a slug.

Every year I re-find the root trainers buried
In the junk under the greenhouse bench, fold them,
Brush away white spiders’ lairs,
The faded algal scum,
Smell the dried loam in the warming air.
You, my distant children, will inherit
These from me,

Sort in the beans, white pills in a dark bed,
Water their seeking roots, the slow shoots,
Offer them to the trenched earth;
Follow the flowers to fruits.
This is the take and give, the frantic birth,
The 24-sided web I found in the shed;
The cupped hands

Of seedling parsley seeking forward.
And here am I remembering you,
Your jewelled existence,
Like these sudden blooms,
Seraphs, certain, transcendent;
Yet now I’m not sure you really occurred.
I turn to water,

Finding again these fragile treasures.

Loveliest of trees to look up into,
Leaves shadowed and shadowing,
A tapestry ascending,
The geometry of division
Against the randomness of excision.

The regular, planned, systematic,
Obscured as limbs twist and fall
Threatening chaos over all;
Yet swaying in the deceitful wind
Here, softly, a wholeness still rings.

Loveliest of trees to look up into
For a mind shrunk, hollowed
By uncomprehending sorrow;
Martins swim and dive in the sky beyond,
Flash white back to the cloud and are gone.

They are the words we shared, true and sharp
As on the day they fell between us.
Loveliest of trees to lie beneath,
Watching as the silence comes, and then
You hold out your uncertain, reaching hand.

Now everything falls away,
Pain and malfunction become routine,
Unknown humans congeal to a daily drain:
Fear and frustration, mistrust, make me seem

Outside, always stepping behind,
Stretched to a fine line between stones.
Balancing: the cost of my need,
Against my need to succeed alone.

Outside, more and more the answer:
The unremitting wind, sounds of sun
Rock and gravity-reasoned river;
Not talk. Long, glittering views fall down,

Rise in textures green and dun
To tarns in cirques which ripple and slide,
Sea blue and sky blue collide in a spumed
Plangence of rough-harrowed blustering. Outside,

Its own logic of violence,
Nerveless and taut, waiting
For restive minds to reach silence,
Regather the elements, break

Out the energy. It has been
Before speech, before thought, eons
Of stripped wildness, unmarked and clean,
Separate. Outside this brief bewildered reive.

It must have been in 1985
They came to visit Edinburgh,
Alison’s Dad and Mum,
Though I never met them.

I heard that they were a little rum -
Not so good at crossing the street -
Country types needing help from no-one -
Ate road-kill, had a big walled garden.
(They seemed old even then.)

Been in Kenya, after the War -
Forestry, outdoor stuff - you know.
He smoked a pipe, she was kind
To everyone; had five children,

Sent them off to school somewhere terrifying,
Came back home, set up camp
In the beautiful run down place
Where Granny had always stayed.

They seemed to keep going forever,
Talking about the stars, and soup;
And those birds with prominent wing bars -
That kind of thing.

She went batty and died,
And now he sits in a home
All day long with the telly on loud,
Goes to the toilet in a hoist.
(Doesn’t listen.)

You know?