1

A Kind of Bright Darkness

Poems and lyrics by Giles Watson with music by Kathryn Wheeler

2013

"He has a wonderful sensibility for the layered British landscape and for a kind of bright darkness."
-

Vahni Capildeo

A Kind of Bright Darkness There is a stile still standing in the ghost of a hedge, and a broken gate beside it, opening on the pathless nowhere of a ploughed field. I don't walk there; nor do I retrace my steps down the route I did not take to get here. Cuckoos are silent, so next time, I must be gone. The nearer ground has lapsed to shadow; the middle distance echoes with a kind of bright darkness, as though the slow alchemy of sun and soil has not made gold, but crumbling crusts of verdigris. The sky is strewn, as at an augury, with molten copper: to scry it is to go blind. This aching transmutation of light into a sightless knowing is all that I can give you: my hands and feet have vanished. No one walks. The landscape is in flux.

Downland Paths Downland paths are arched to contours; their flexed backs maned with broomrapes and orchids. I have felt them shudder when I walked them, as though vexed by flies. Nostrils flare: sullen holes where beeches have blown over. There are vast eyelids lashed with stubble; dewponds are their glazed corneas. A walker risks being flipped over by a fetlock, when the wind hits gale-force. There are tracks which end in hooves. Approach them from the wrong angle, and they'll throw you into a tangle of nettles and whin. You'll wear them down, but they'll not be broken in.
The picture shows a portion of the back - and one of the legs - of the Uffington White Horse.

10

Downland Mists Sometimes on the downs, day is postponed, and at the end of the barley-field, mist melts into a sea of glumes. The vale is an etching in glass, a glimpsed mosaic of pale illuminations; there is no horizon, or there are many. Old swathes are green trails leading nowhere. The whole scene might be sedimentary: a slow settling of silts and silica beneath the glaze. Time and space condense, precipitate; earth, crops and air make a smoked pane of faded layers - whites, beiges, greys. Spaces yawn. My soul is formed of chalks, clays and the failing breath of dawn.

11

Ramparts How many miles of mist-shrouded ramparts have I walked, soaked to the knees in dew, with the solitary crow ever sentinel ahead of me on a bare branch, the vale below invisible, or emerging in puddles of light as though the clouds were melting ice and I have melted too - melded with chalk, gone eye-high to grasses, become a thistle, a path, a thorn, moulded myself to contours blurred by stubble, learned the slow and glacial art of undulations, condensed life, love and sense into an urchin test as the crow has gazed, surveyed with his wise black eye, evaporated into flight?
The picture shows the ramparts of Segsbury Castle, an Iron Age hill-fort on the Ridgeway above the Letcombes.

12

The Hindleg of the White Horse The curve of it is perfect: pure, hammered chalk, calcium-coloured, cutting out and then conforming to the line and sweep of the ancient coombe. Sunlight enlivens it: a whole landscape's equine embodiment. Put your ear to the turf: hear the urgent thrum of his warhorse-heart, white lime coursing through his pale aorta, and the inrush of downland air through a blanched trachaea, into loamy lungs. The downs become an amphitheatre of respiration: grass-roots get nutrients out of dead bivalves thrown to ground out of some antediluvian sea-bottom. Evening sweats out golden oxygen until the horse's breath is set to spill, like powdered dreams, out into space from the holy hill.

13

The Spine of the Downs The escarpment lay down to sleep, weary of flight. Its closed eye became raised ground, flattened at the summit; a long muzzle probed the Vale. The furnace in those lungs burned down to a single, buried cinder, too deep to warm the sward. The tail, vaned as a stegosaur's, threshed about a time or two, then subsided into the Manger. Great, interlocking vertebrae arched themselves, making Downs, calcified the whole heaving hill into solid chalk. The breathing shallowed itself to a whisper. About the hollow, dewy coombe, dragon-legends echoed. Twayblades split the turf. Some days, sunlight stimulates the circulation. The long spine flexes. The creature almost wakens.

14

The Moon Above the Downs The moon gave half of herself over for the chalking-in, surrendering to the lapwing's deception. The skylark eclipsed her, sang, then looped down to the wind-flattened grass. Hares caught sight of her, turned bulge-eyed and bolted crazily, negotiating unseen mazes. Primeval ways revealed themselves: paths made by sheep and glaciers. Wind continued her slow and whittling work, bearing chalk-dust, spiderlings and seeds into a stratosphere so immaculate that the lapwings fluted starward psalms, and moonglow etched out ancient forms.

15

Downland Harvest Whittled down to stubble, the cut straw reveals the hills' taut musculature, as though the blade were practised in the art of making-plain. The thin skin of earth is stretched, tight as drum-leather, over every flex and distension. A bird in flight might pick out striations, bunched tendons, and high on the escarpment, ancient scars, soiled and grassed over: the only angular things for miles. Hillsides are fusiform: gigantic lines and curves, laid naked, draped for life-class, one scored with an arching, bleached tattoo. Cold water-courses source themselves in groins; armpits bristle with wild oats. Have patience - wait - and feel the respiration.

16

Downland Thorns They cling to places that can't be tilled ramparts, edges of escarpments, sullen slopes and thrust out thorns with a wise misanthropy, as if to say, "Axe me, and I'll spill blood." Only the wind is obeyed: it sculpts them, wakes them, withers them in the sere, and when they die, uproots them, rolls their gorgeous torsoes down the coombes. Others have a gnarled agreement with gales, thrust deeper roots, fleck the frozen air with withered haws, their sagging arms laden with the sodden wool of lambs. They earn the permanence of stones, stark as menhirs guarding ancient tombs.

17

Swallows at West Kennet Long Barrow There were dull susurrations in the clouds, and a stirring in the ripened wheat, the burial mound sagging under its burden of wildflowers. Those great sarsens were dark sentinels, lichen-mottled and looming at the threshold of the tomb. As I probed, the swallows flecked out like smuts stirred from a dormant furnace, whirling into the atmosphere, the quick, dissonant chit-chits of their distress borne thinly on the wind, rising and plunging whole fathoms, out of fear. I withdrew. Rain fell. I turned to dust. Like struck sparks, they swept into their nests.

18

A Thistle at Avebury Rampart, ditch and stone have been here four or five thousand years; the butterflies, bees and hoverflies were pupal soup just days ago, resolving themselves into miracles of wings and compound eyes. Tourists are more ephemeral, clouding like midges, dallying at the Cove, humming around the Barber Stone, fleeing for pubs and buses - but it's the thistle I've come for, with its chalk-riddled roots, stem fibrous as a hempen rope, and that serried armoury of spines. I crouch, admire, shudder. It's already higher than the smaller stones, spiked for survival, determined not to die.

19

Scabious Let your eyes slip out of focus, and the blooms are lilac interpunctions in a meadow almost gold. In a wind, they turn to blurs, and bumblebees must cling with all six claws, their eyes knocked by pastel-coloured stamens. The unopened flowers are a stippled green. Petals break out at their edges, turn spatulate. At the centres, half-formed corollas are crosshatched with stamens. Fat spiders crouch, expecting hoverflies, and haired stems are astir amongst the longer grasses. Walk through them: a spider drops insensate; butterflies flit to more distant flowers. The heat-haze wafts and sways. Come closer. Stand beside me, with that quietness of yours, in the gilded meadow all splashed with sky.

20 Downland Poppies

The sepals fall. Petals flare, crumpled as tissue-paper torn from a gift, and a thin fringe of anthers scatters pollen on the wings of hoverflies. Landscapes recede: chalk fresh dug for drainage, a blurring slope of blue-stemmed wheat, a hedgerow marking a road, recumbent breasts of downland hills and wind-sculpted beech hangers, all slipping out of focus. The petals flake away like filo-pastry, scatter their wilting crimson on the heated earth, and the haired stems lengthen, catch themselves in wind, knock against the sky. Seeds pour out like smoke, or black ashes from an urn half-unsealed.

21

The Meadow The drier blades are brittle as grasshoppers' legs, the swathe hissing in the heat. Yellowhammers' voices punctuate the lazy hums of bumblebees, tweezering the air with needled crescendos. Purpled knops, yellow rattles, bright orchis-smudges, sky-echoing scabious and cranesbills, bow under the weights of insects: marbled whites, ringlets rich as chocolates, tortoiseshells flashing open, and pairs of little skippers, dropping their hindwings as they drink. Lizards still themselves, heartbeats visible beneath their skins. Snakes bask on tussocks. A burnet-moth slips out of a chrysalis, half-way up a grass-stem, as my soul begins to flit across the meadow, lit up with memories, ephemeral as a skipper. Picture by Buffarches.

22

23

Autumn Comes to the Downs The land becomes an etching, a criss-crossed panorama of fine-scored lines, painstaking in its details: chalk-graphs of ploughed fields, the Ridgeway's own thin scouring, the sudden swerve in the stubble before a tower of straw, and the black sides of the stacks, echoed by shadows obliquely cast - firm notches filled with welling ink. Then, it's the way rise leads on to rise glimpsed hills in ever thinner striations that brings Palmer, Griggs and Sutherland out with their burins, angle-tints and florentines: fix-faced men, ghost-engravers surface-scratching for the spirit of place.

24

Downland Sunset I love it when it all smashes into silhouette. You'd think the beech branches had turned to cracks in the enamel - fortuitous breakages and gradually the sun scorches its course down the glass, obliterating smaller twigs in a network of explosions. Sometimes it is eclipsed behind some impossible knot, thicker than a trunk, where the hanger-trees have coalesced - or perhaps a whole channel has been bashed out into blackness - great ruptures in the pane, snaking like rivers with inky oxbows, whirlpools and ominous blots of beechwood. If you could walk through soil, you'd see: questing roots do much the same to chalk.

25

26 Raven

I look down on a raven In flight above a sea So still there is no reason For fear in her or me. The raven knows of nothing This moment, but of flight And air and wind and breathing And joys of warmth and light, And though I'm tired of loving And my own light gutters out And my heart is torn for leaving And my stomach churns with doubt, She is rising, she is plunging With no effort and no art And there's nothing but the flying In her breastbone, brains and heart. Could I learn this of the raven Who is one with wind and sea? Have I wings, or only reason? Am I fettered, am I free?

27

The Swallow The world has grown too big, The firmament too wide: I could lose you in a moment Like a leaf borne on the tide, Like a swallow on a cloudy day, Like a feather in the storm, Like a flame that's fading in the grate Though I'm longing to be warm. Leaf, come drifting back to me Like some miracle of fate; Swallow, turn and fly my way By autumn, it's too late; Feather, blow against my face I'll feel your touch at night; Flame, rekindle in my hearth There is no other light.

28

The Swift I held her in my hand When she had no strength to fly; In her dilated pupils Were reflections of the sky. Her claws were clenched and helpless; Her wings were folded up. She made no show of struggle, Secure within my grip. I held her in my hand; She had rested overnight, And when my fingers opened She turned towards the light. She went off in an upward arc I knew she lived to fly And soon a flock of others Had joined her in the sky. I held you in my arms When you had no strength to fight; In your dilated pupils Were the echoes of the night. Your hands were clenched and helpless And tears etched your face;

29

You showed no inclination For leaving my embrace. I held you in my arms. When time was right, I let My hold on you grow tender, And I knew you would forget. I only ask, my swift one, Now you have shaken free: With sky-winds in your pinions, You'll fly once over me.

30

Too Much Like a Burr I know I'm too much like a burr, Though you don't seem to mind I wonder, do you chafe sometimes, Or is your heart too kind? I cling to you like velcro when The path is spiked with seeds; I'll be there in the winter when The wind bends down the reeds. Those little hooks that hold me fast Are loyalty unbroken, And where my flower used to be Are cares that bloom unspoken. I know I'm too much like a burr, And now the going's rough, I wonder why you've never paused A while - to pluck me off.

31

Hoverflies I saw two hoverflies attend A willowherb in bloom. One perched to drink and would not shift To give the other room. The other levelled in the air Unable to alight, But fixed his eyes and kept the flower Steady in his sight. Satisfied, the drinker dropped Half-senseless by the way; I cannot tell what happened next Because I did not stay, But by my heart, I hope the other Sought no deeper share, But stared with longing all his life And lingered in the air. One was like a constant friend, One like a passing lover: One glad to drink and and fall away, And one content to hover.

32

The Wild Pear I lay beneath the wild pear At the mowing of the meadow And in a moment, must have been Asleep beneath its shadow, For it was but a sapling now The one spared by the scythe And lovers danced: a swarthy swain; A maiden light and lithe. They tasted of the wild pear; He spat, and she turned pale. The little fruit he cast away As bitter as betrayal. She breathed the blight of cold distrust And withered every shoot; He took the axe of wayward love And felled it at the root. My dog it was who wakened me, Nuzzling my face In time to find the wild pear Was gone without a trace.

33

Crab Apples She meets him in October; he loves her by November By the next September, it burns down to an ember. Love is less than logic; he knows that it is wrong: The flowers smell like sugar; the fruit will bite the tongue. He saw her first in autumn; she loved him by the winter It was the chill that caught him, the snow that dragged her under. She thought that love would ripen; he hoped a while too long. The flowers smelt like sugar; the fruit soon bit the tongue. "I met you by the wayside; I kissed you by the hedge, But the touch of tongue on lips was all an empty pledge. The petals fell; it came to fruit; it seemed as sweet as song. The flowers smelt like sugar; sour fruit bit my tongue." "Love is a green apple; friendship is a flower But friendship lasts a lifetime, and love a little hour. I was yearning to take root with you, but I did not belong. I thought you'd taste like sugar, but you turned and bit my tongue."

34

The Tip of the Briar The root of the briar can weather the frost And live through the drought, let the sun do its worst, Rotted and knotted, dug up and regrown, Dark at the heartwood, harder than bone. The stem of the briar can flex in the gale, Grim and impervious, harsh as a flail. You will not break through it; by tangle and thorn, The briar will leave you bleeding and torn. The flower of the briar is blown in a day; Bitter winds carry the petals away. The hip of the briar is tender indeed Until you bite into the fibres and seeds. I'm harsh as the briar, for seasons have turned: I have been harvested, frozen and burned These, my defences, lest love take its grip, And leave me as tender, as green as the tip.

35

Walking Barefoot My instep curves to meet the flint Protruding from the path; The straw slips between my toes The stubble of the swath A burr catches on my leg; My trouser-cuff is torn A thistle lies across the way; I leap to miss the thorns. I turn aside, where others walk, For nettles in the grass, And patience finds a winding way; It opens, and I pass, And climb down to the earth-cold spring Gushing from the chalk, And on the sarsens, leave a trail That glistens as I walk. So that is why the ancient hill Thrills me to the heart, And every pitted standing stone Becomes a work of art,

36

For though the bramble and the briar Conspire to make me stall I'd rather pluck a thorn or two Than never feel at all.

37

The Knotted Tendril The hum of bees at bindweed flowers, Tremulous as love, Fills my heart with honey. The dragonflies above Are hawking, darting, perching fast Upon a bindweed stem: And somehow they persist, and live Yet no one cares for them, And where the bindweed seeks to choke The nettle, out of spite, It fills the humming, shadowed glade With flowers, ghostly-white, And sends a tendril on a quest For stems that are not there: That is why it cannot help Curling into air. It cannot grip, it cannot hold, Though it is long and lithe: It looks for something to enfold And all it does is writhe, Or lovingly, it chokes itself On what it has not got

38

By gyring on and grasping air And ending in a knot. Ending in a knot, I stop With nowhere left to twist: I've strangled everything I am And yet I still exist. The dragonflies will perch on me When the glade is lighter But noontide has no remedy; The knot grows ever tighter.

39

A Feather A titmouse dropped a feather Upon the village green: Be sure, there is no other Sign of where she's been; For she has flown - another Is growing in its place And of her swift departure There is no further trace. I look into the future, I hold it to my eye; She's not inclined to bother She only wants to fly. I stoop each day to gather Whatever quill may fall: I only wonder whether I'll ever find them all.

40

The Elm-Man This man's like the silver birch: Papered all about; He grows fastest in the glade But rots from inside out. That man's like the downland beech: Bronzed against the sky, Stolid 'til the lightning strikes; Then he'll split and die. Yonder's like the darkling yew: He lives on, huge and hollow, Yet no lovely thing survives The poison of his shadow. But I am like a skeleton elm, And here I raise my head: I come up green from underground Although you thought me dead, And though I'll never make a tree And always will be dying, I live in hope you'll care for me, And never give up trying.

41

The Preening Grebe Pride spilt from the preening grebe As sun spilt through his wake, His haloed head an icon in The surface of the lake. He shook the water from his bill Like pearls spilt from a string, And all the dazzling ripples Moved outward in a ring. His lover trailed behind him, Drawn onward in a trance, And in the lucent water The grebes began to dance, And all was spilt with radiance, Their feathers edged with gilt, The waves as bright as gladness, The troughs as dark as silt, For beauty spills unheeding Like a splash that blinds the sight, And love that lasts a moment Spills all the world with light.

42

Thistledown It's a wonder to watch the ants Emerging from their mound Wearing each four flimsy wings. They were confined to ground, I thought, but, to my delight, Those whose lives were made for earth Express their loves in flight. It's joyous to see the thistledown Emulating clouds, Or to watch the spiderlings Emerging out of shrouds So small, a little gust can be Enough to lift them off the world And set their spirits free. I am a globe of thistledown, A little ant with wings: An easy thing to crush, or drown, But something in me sings Despite any loss or pain: I hope one day to find the sky And not touch down again.

43

The Bee at the Balsam The bee at the balsam pushed open the door, Enclosed on three sides, with one way to withdraw, In a nectaried bliss, his eyes veiled in pink; The world disappeared as he started to drink, Enwombed or entombed in a state of delight, In a tissue of flesh suffused with soft light. The buzz of his wings touched a climax of pitch; Powdered and pollened, he started to itch, And bliss turned to panic - so when will he learn? Once you're inside, there is no room to turn.

44

Peacock Butterfly You flashed your wings at me; I was frightened by your eyes. I might have sought the shade in fear of your disguise, But then you disappeared, and folded into bark, And while the eyes were closed, I came out from the dark, And watched them snapping open, like leaves inside a book, And blue and black and golden, you transfixed me with one look. Peacock butterfly - like a dreamer, like a sigh, Like a grace that whispers by: look upon me. Peacock butterfly - like a love that flits away, Like a hope that will not stay: far beyond me.

45

Beech Pollard What should I think? She bends her back Like a dancer gone to leaf: She might pirouette for joy; She may arch her back for grief. I've come a hundred times to see her; I love each blemish in her form, Yet I cannot claim to read her: Is she cold, or is she warm Is she too weighed down with green, Is she longing for the sere, Does she wait, and wish me gone, Does she weep, and want me near? I cannot know unless she tells me: She's inscrutable and calm. If she wishes to repel me, Why is she opening her arms? I've no idea if she forgives me, Or what she thinks I may be worth. Will she dance when she outlives me, Or mourn me when I've gone to earth?

46

Boundaries The rocks are different sizes; There are some that we must break. We'll build the wall together If it's the only thing we make. We'll keep the stone between us Dale and hillside, mile on mile, I know when I come back alone I'll be searching for a stile. You're busy with your billhook, And the light gleams at its edge As I bend myself to plashing On the dark side of the hedge. The thorns we lay beween us Put our constancy on trial; When I come this way tomorrow I'll be searching for a stile. You pound the fencepost into earth; I reach to twist the wire. I wonder, is your heart unscathed Or riven by desire? The barbs we stretch between us, The scars we gain the while -

47

I hope they'll be forgotten In your arms, beyond the stile.

48

The Snow in the Stubble The snow in the stubble, The tracks of a hare, The marks of a field-mouse, The crows path through air, The rime on the oak branch, The frost on a stone: This is the way, though I walk it alone. The snow in the stubble, The path by the bridge, The spraint of the fox At the edge of the ridge, The autumn-shed antler, The pale, bleached bone: This is the way, though I walk it alone. The snow in the stubble, The snow in the brake, The snow that deceives And covers a lake: This way of bewilderment, Heart overthrown This is the way, though I walk it alone.

49

How Like a Cocoon How like a cocoon is the spider's larder Death and rebirth out of order Cradled, swaddled, entombed complete Within a loving winding sheet. How like a spider is this pent desire With its spinnerettes and its fangs of fire. I die. I wake; the barb impales. I rend the silk with my fingernails.

50

Downland Sunset The grass sways in my line of sight, a stir against the sky: its filaments are fringed with light and still I wish to die die into the shadowed coombe where once I dared to walk, my bones as red as setting suns, my flesh as white as chalk die before the sun can swerve into the realm of glass, surrender heart and brain and nerve and live into the grass, until my love and thought and sense are nothing but an essence, desire a gush of chlorophyll, and hope - an inflorescence.

51

Downland Butterflies In wide-eyed sleep, the butterflies take sky into their wings, leach colours from the blade of grass that stirs and idly swings upon the rampart of the fort where no one cares to mow, and where the work of wind and field is like an ebb and flow where cares are only foolish things lost in downland light, where joys are instincts on the breeze, flitting into flight, where mottled wings of butterflies are treasures none can keep, where sky and seeds and open downs are dreams in wide-eyed sleep.

52

The Ant on the Wild Thyme The ant on the wild thyme is a thing of wonder, her eyes the size of pollen-grains, her touch precise and tender. The wild thyme's a world to her and though her waist is slender she walks between the dew and rain and does not heed the thunder. Her feelers touch the trembling pink; she makes the anthers shudder she's imperturbable. She scorns the hawk and writhing adder, and underground, a thousand more are piling up the plunder: the seeds, the pods, the pollen grains, the time, the dew, the wonder.

53 The Orchids are Going Over

The orchids are going over, scorched by a sudden fortnight of relentless sun. Today is cooler, but the damage is done and the field is empty of everyone: they turned away when the petals withered. I could have brought you; said, "Look, here." A little furrow of observation would have touched your brow. I'd have gone to any trouble, loved you for too long, but summer turned and the petals withered. The orchids are going over. Seeds turn dry. Pods crack open in the sun. There's a hint of thunder. It's all done: I stand bereft. The colour turns in every one: each petal browned, each memory withered.

54

55

Pentre Ifan Pentre Ifan defies sense; is a stone sermon on dying. You trust it, or are crushed. The rock is held suspended in gorse-yellow air, buttressed by grass-roots hooked invisibly to clouds. They strain downwards in clots of cumulonimbus to hold it; kestrels fan it skyward with incessant hoverings; lizards put their backs into it. The soil that held it up eroded before Christ; drystone walls were crumbled. Chieftains, foetal in repose, had their bones nuzzled by lambs.

56

Death of a Willow Down one side of the river, the great willows, with their wet, white wood and submerged roots are cheating death. Left unpollarded, top-heavy, they rend down their hollowed centres, then grow horizontally, rooting from their trunks, fledging lines of saplings: lithe and pliable as the necks of swans. Others bulk themselves into fortresses, rinded, wrinkled as elephants, or split themselves and go on growing, leaning outwards on furrowed elbows. One grew isolated, in a swamped field, a vast turret of grimness, fissures and decay. Overnight, half of its head peeled away - lay sagging on a strip of its own skin. Elders colonised its crown; a thorn seedling spiked its way through the ruptured wood-flesh, until fire licked out the interior, and lapwings fled the field, frighted by gaspings too deep for us to hear. The splinters lie, bleached as the jawbones of whales, bristling with shags of baleen. The lapwings plummet, cry; the grass-swell echoes with an undulating sigh.

57 Valley of the Ock

The Horse himself is a source: chalky water spills from his eye, cascades down the marks of glaciation, puddles itself under Dragon Hill, and courses into the copse, gushing with a cold profligacy. There is a burgeoning of waterweed, and ditches form a hundred confluences. Uffington is fen reclaimed in the Bronze Age; flint tools work their way from alluvial soils; there are bits of pots which predate Christ. That church, with its lancet windows and octagonal tower, is an innovation, and the barn, built of breeze blocks, merely ephemeral: its bare rooftree a temporary perch for buzzards and rooks. And still the dark-watered Ock digs a deeper channel, chokes itself in silt, floods, is dug out again, and the hillsides do obeisance. You can rip up hedgerows, cover whole fields with acres of rape, cut down the oak, neglect the dying ash, and the Ock will wind on after you have gone to ground, and all your cash

58

is meaningless as it always was. Be still and know: hubris cannot stop the flow.

59

Above Bishopstone There is a skylark above each hill, weaving needled trills with notes of others, his bill a little shuttle of joys. Swathes wend through the wheat: pathways for hares - bent, ephemeral, dying into the gilding. The village sleeps, groined in a coombe, still and glinting with the gabble of the chalk-stream. Between here and there, the landscape takes a plunge, goes sub-glacial: gouged and fissured, the grass whiskered as a fox's chin. Sheep regard me with a chilled indifference, hunch their backs against the wind. The sky begins to glower. Here I sat with two friends, looking out over Oxfordshire, a year ago, eating bread where the landmarks have worn themselves in. We perched above the lynchets - just here, where I cannot sit again. Silence descends: the larks muted. I am not quite here: I came a wraith-pale fetch, breathless, formless, numb. My ghost-eyes search the ground for crumbs.

60

The Thinking-Path It begins like a deer-track, at a tangent to the Ridgeway, where a stand of mugwort greys the verge. The upward gradient of the trail is just enough to tense the thighs and make me breathe a little faster. That chalky wayside is the place to dump awhile this wreckage of cares, shrug it off like a knapsack full of stones, where campions splash the hedge with spindle-pink, the grass abristle with cranesbills and burrs. There is a loving, breathless listing: nettles, agrimony, burnet, weld, wild strawberries and St. John's Wort; then the path becomes a tunnel: hawthorn, blackthorn, elder, dogwood, sycamore, whitebeam, beech. Ivies, bryonies, blackberries bind the whole in living wicker. Self-heals, restharrows, docks, thistles, ragworts, buttercups, silverweeds, crossworts, milfoils, toadflax and rattle, bent-necked scabious, plantains, melilot, willowherb, toadflax, fool's gentians, a rash of knapweed, hogweed, gangly ragwort and the gone-over remains of orchids

61

and cowslips blend with the flittings of marbled whites, blues and speckled woods. Now I have arrived - back at the spinningplace, with half my self erased; the other whirling into brightness as the great grassy wave of downland looks ready to break across the vale, my light soul at its crest. I lie looking up at the catstail-tufts of grasses, and a yellowhammer sings. That is when the rain comes. I could descend, pause, take up the old swag of separation and blank-faced pain, or stay, eyes blind with raindrops, soaked to my too-thin stretch of skin, careless, dreamless, thoughtless, formless, endless, empty, melting into ground.

62

Convolvulus The vale is wakening, but up here the fringe of the downs skulks under clouds. Butterflies sleep, their vacant eyes jewelled with dew; dark, uneven spots, deep beneath the froth of compound lenses, are strangely magnified. Grass seems to breathe; stamens quake on long, wet inflorescences, and the bindweed, seeing its chance, twines an extra inch. I am sucked into its vortex, held between the lips of sweating petals, licked into a dreaming white oblivion, and the complex, fleshy pistil thrusts and divides in a hazed, silk-veined interior so pure it fades to green. From here I go down into the xylem, phloem, urgent stem and plunging root into the chalk that bore them into the eyes and groins and pert nipples of urchin-fossils, into the corals that flexed sensitive tentacles with stinging

63

cells when the downland was a reef, and the vale was sunk and drowned. And out of the thin brown smattering of topsoil, I marvel how orchids are made, how the sainfoin masters strange alchemies, and the restharrow distils the earth to pinkness until the bindweed drags it down. The clouds divide. I look up from out of the flower's soft orifice, half-choked, spluttering, blinded by the sun.

64

The Red-Flowered Thorn For too long, I ignored you, when you were gaunt and leafless, and the blackbird stropped his bill where the groins of bark were worn. I wrote songs to the yew, praised the maplike forms of lichens, scrawled eulogies in grass among the gravestones. I tried to catch the tones of church-bells, found words for shadows, wore paths across the lawn, drew down the church-tower's grave octagonal form, but the truth of you eluded me. It's only now, with my heart half-set awry and my back part-turned to go, that this strange way of noticing comes over me, and your blossoms, warm as spilt blood, spray about the churchyard wall. I've been bitten, thorn. I cannot stop to staunch you any more.

65 Bliss

You can forget about civilization: I've got this. Orchids in the inebriate light of evening send a bright splatter of pulses through my extremities. It is as though Pollock has hit the marsh-edges with his paints, his swing, and a half-swigged bottle of whisky. Inflorescences lean and bend like slashes of acrylic, plastered against the grasses. Lips drip with pigments; flowers twist to turn themselves upright; pollinia quest at the nubs of their own silent yellow orgasms, pulsing against the pastel colours. The orchids come in spurts and purple tints. The sun goes nearly down. The horizon tilts.

Inspired by orchids of the genus Dactylorhiza at Dry Sanford Pit, Oxfordshire, and by Katherine Mansfield's gorgeous short story, 'Bliss': "... you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss! - as though you had suddenly swallowed a piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe... Oh, is there no way you can express it without being 'drunk and disorderly'? How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?"

66 Buttercups

Even the attendant insects take on their glamour, shimmering and burnished, and the five-petalled, five-sepalled flowers have an enamelled gleam, attractive to compound eyes. There are five nectaries each for probing tongues; the field hums with metallic wings. But it's the way the sun glances off them, in that rare appearance between clouds, that sets off the perfect radiance. Every step, I am wading through this elaborate, trembling, butter-coloured smear of loveliness, and the crows fleck the sky like smuts, jackdaws clacking down the chimney-pots above the house where the ghost-rhymer sits, and the ancient gate swings and claps, counting the petals of buttercups. The right hand house in the picture is Garrard's Farmhouse, Uffington: once the home of John Betjeman.

67 Bluebells and Hazel Coppice

It did not happen entirely naturally: there was a quiet consipiracy of deer and human beings. The sapling trees were grazed to ground, letting the sky in to spill itself. Hazels were sawn off, level with the earth, the wattle hauled away. That was when everything spun itself into a blue and green epiphany: ferns crimping upwards like scrolls of violins, yellow archangels opening wings and singing, stitchworts trimming the edges like psalms of lacework. Then the hazels sent out their electricity, and the bluebells opened themselves: a firmament thrown to earth.

68 Stitchworts

My grandmother could make embroideries bloom from her needle, a quiet detachment erasing her emotion, her bifocals angled downwards. The thread would loop and tug to the rhythm of her breathing; bluebells or peacocks' feathers would form themselves, like ringlets of sweet-scented smoke from my grandfather's pipe. They never said a word. The rocking chairs went back and forth like shuttles. The clock kept time. Coals settled in the grate. Now, only summer can satin-stitch like her, and I cannot find her in letters or photographs: only in the way stitchworts thread themselves among ferns.

69

Robins in Spring Last summer's umbels are broken now, interwoven with newer growth. Robins twine bird-claws with stems and barbs. They flit unscathed through snagging weaves of brambles, disappear behind lime-white lichened stones, re-emerge among gorse-spines and stiles: whin flowers gilding winds with fragrance, breathing haloes of midges. Every thorn wears a nimbus, through which sun-stung robins burst in flurries of wings and pinions, piercing insects with bills stropped by ice and hunger. The wasp sting quivers. Spring is on the cusp.

70

Skippers Little, aimless, fluttering flecks above the sward might once have been elm-seeds on an eddy - but they're skippers, flitting from scabious to knapweed to tufted vetch, their stub-bodies stuffed with life. Club-antennaed, like butterflies, they settle splay-winged as moths, the one raised vein in each forewing standing clear above the scales. I wish I was walking with you now, in an English meadow, with the grasshoppers hissing, and everything else going impressionistic - except for lips, and eyes and skippers.

71

Green Aeshna Green Aeshna on the wrong side of my window, blue-gazed as a sunspilt lake, how you zazz and batter in resisting your escape. Green Aeshna, your wings of honeycombed cellophane bash out their little windowpanes. Your eyesquashed brain rings loud with glazed concussions. Green Aeshna, like an alien god, grappling with my curtain-rod, sit still. I approach you with saucepan and magazine. My intent's benign. Green Aeshna, scooped up flash and angry with glance and frazz as fierce as a bite: your freedom is my desperate design.

72

Nettles In Memoriam: Dylan Thomas and Edward Thomas They're a sea of chlorophyll and histamines between you and the praise-fields; a symphony of stinging hairs. You could wade through them, your skin stippled with a constellation of welts - undergo a thorough smelting. There's something tender in their viciousness: a merest brush is enough to set them off in a thousand tiny paroxysms of impalement, a whole rash of miniature smitings. A slight breath of steam would wilt them, subvert their primed hydraulics so that each spike fell flaccid, but as it is you might as well traverse a vale of needles, each one a prick of conscience, as the whitesocked, heedless horses go flashing into light.

73

The Altons And whether Alton, not Manningford, it was My memory could not decide, because There was both Alton Barnes and Alton Priors. All had their churches, graveyards, farms, and byres, Lurking to one side up the paths and lanes -Edward Thomas, Lob (1915) The living folk I met had too few words: Five beaters waving flags to scare the birds, A girl who barely spoke, her mother Laughing, but not really saying. The other Waskeyholder to the church. Under that Trapdoor, theres a fallen stone, lying flat And dusty. New Age sorts leave behind Crystals heres one we dont exactly mind, But its strange. And they hang ribbons From the yew, for obscure reasons. Edward Thomas? No, I didnt know. Was he from hereabouts? Did I show You this Last Judgement, done in brass? Outside, it is raining. The sodden grass Squelches underfoot, and the brook Is swollen. I sloshed through it. Rooks

74

Called, and a woodpecker chipped away, The wooden turnstiles slimed with rain. There are two churches: Alton Priors And Alton Barnes. A hedge of briars And hazels divides the ground. A cobbled Path joins them. Ghost-men have ambled Down it, paused to see the Horse, looked Up at Adams Grave, lit pipes, linked Arms with ghost-women, and disappeared. I walked there, weary, my eyes bleared With wet. The landscape seemed to quiver. When the old mans speech was over I went outside, and stood before the yew. It was bigger than the church, needles strewn On bare soil, and split in two right down The trunk. Gaping holes had grown In its bulwark. I glimpsed the window Through the cleft, and from a shadow He stepped out. It passed my ear, The shell. I fell, and woke up here, Cold as a buried sarsen. These roots Seemed to burrow through my boots. At night, the owl, a silhouetted shape, Calls me. There was no escape After all. The barns, graveyards, byres, Curving downs, barrows, nestled spires

75

Were churned up in a wide morass Of mud, guns, decaying bones. Pass Me some tobacco. You are kind. Life Was mourning in itself. I didnt love My wife; there were others. At times I preferred the lapwings cry to the arms Of any lover. I walked out alone, Watched, waited as you have done. I looked up where the whiff of smoke Coiled among the branches. I spoke Calmly to the wind, but he was gone. The ground oozed. The rain pattered on.

76 Forget-Me-Not

"Forget me not," I thought you said, and your gaze was straight and true. I wondered, by your garden's edge, could I disremember you? The light refracted at your heart: a warmth that radiated through. "No, I dare not let them fade: those powdered hues of pink and blue." "Forget me not," I hoped you said as the summer bleached to white: it was the hope that startled me, like a swallow, into flight. "Forget me not": I know it's true, little flower of grace and light. The time must come, whate'er I do when I remember in the night. "Forget me not," I know you said, and I was aching with the need to cry that I could not forget so deeply planted was the seed that it would germinate in drought or in soil too choked by weeds

77

for any other plant. "Forget me not," you said - and I agreed.

78