Between the canal and the river
We sat in the gummy dark bar.
Winter night rain. The black humped bridge and its cobbles
Sweating black, under lamps of drizzling yellow.
And the hillsides going straight up, the high woods,
Massed with tangled wintry wet, and the moorland
Almost closing above us. The shut-in
Sodden dreariness of the whole valley,
The hopeless old stone trap of it. Where shall we live?
That was the question, in the yellow-lit tap-room
Which was cold and empty. You having leapt
Like a thrown dice, flinging off
The sparkle of America, pioneer
In the wrong direction, sat weeping,
Homesick, exhausted, disappointed, pregnant.
Where could we start living? Italy? Spain?
The world was all before us. And around us
This gloomy memorial of a valley,
The fallen-in grave of its history,
A gorge of ruined mills and abandoned chapels,
The fouled nest of the Industrial Revolution
That had flown. The windows glittered black.
If this was the glamour of an English pub, it was horrible.
Like a bubble in the sunk Titanic.
Our flashing inter-continental sleeper
Had slammed into a gruesome, dead-end tunnel.
Where could we camp? The ideal home
Was trying to crawl
Up out of my Guinness. Where we sat,
Forty years before I was born
My drunken grandad, dragged out of the canal,
Had sat in a sheet singing. A house of our own
Answering all your problems was the answer
To all my problems. All we needed
Was to get a home – anywhere,
Then all our goblins would turn out to be elves,
Our vampires guides, our demons angels
In that garden. Yes, the garden. The garden
Swelled under all our words – like the presence
Of what swelled in you.
Everything
Was there in my Guinness. Where, exactly?
That was the question – that dark
Peculiar aftertaste, bitter liquorice
Of the secret ingredient. At that black moment
Prophecy, like a local owl,
Down from the deep-cut valley opposite
Made a circuit through its territory –
Your future and mine. ‘These side-valleys,’ I whispered,
‘Are full of the most fantastic houses,
Elizabethan, marvellous, little kingdoms,
Going for next to nothing. For instance
Up there opposite – up that valley – ’
My certainty of the place was visionary,
Waiting there, on its walled terrace – an eyrie
Over the crevasse of trees and water.
You had no idea what I was talking about.
Your eyes were elsewhere –
The sun-shot Atlantic lift, the thunderous beaches,
The ice-cream summits, the whisper of avalanches,
Valleys brimming gentians – the Lawrentian globe
Lit the crystal globe you stared into
For your future – while a silent
Wing of your grave went over you. Up that valley
A future home waited for both of us –
Two different homes. Where I saw so clearly
My vision house, you saw only blackness,
Black nothing, the face of nothingness,
Like that rainy window.
Then five bowlers
Burst in like a troupe of clowns, laughing.
They thumped down their bowls and ordered. Their star turn
Had a raging ulcer, agony.
Or the ulcer was the star. It kept
The five of them doubled up – tossing helpless
On fresh blasts of laughter. It stoked them
Like souls tossing in a hell, on a grill
Of helpless laughter, agony, tears
Streaming down their faces
Like sweat as they struggled, throats gulping,
To empty their glasses, refilling and emptying.
I had to smile. You had to smile. The future
Seemed to ease open a fraction.