My house of music,
I have left you behind
for this garden
blossoming in the country,
this sky
plain and guiltless.
The busyness of feet,
the drama of projects,
the distant city smile,
all have been left behind
for this open ploughland.
Here no shadows
slant from lamp-posts,
the long black rays
of city clocks.
And the beggar
does not doze
under his newspaper:
and the chipmaker
dressed like a stoker
does not shovel chips
out of his container.
Here, the bay
is not a hive of yachts,
wasp-striped, stingless:
and the wind-filled skirts
do not breed tales.
I shall not forget
the debt I owe you,
the flash of windows,
the thresh of shadows,
the tree-lined avenues
that never have an end.
Graves invent nothing
in a country cemetery,
aged and mossy:
and the stone bibles
shine with ancestry
under the flicker of birds.
The minister winds his robes
decently about him
as he shakes hands
with all the live people
who at Easter time
wear their flowery hats
in unchiming envy.
Overhead, the clouds
head for distant countries
in their changing marble:
and the wheel of crocuses
returns each year
above the mouldering chests.
Gemeinschaft –
Katag at the bookstall
exchanging weather.
Everyone naming each other
in this calm air
through which the water
glides, reflecting trees:
the weasels however anonymous
and the hares
at whose throats they suck.
Smoke
rises from bonfires
of bracken. Ash
badges the rowan tree.
While the birds sweetly twitter
I visit the old lady
who reads Ouspensky
and whose blue radio
converses among the glitter
of random sunlight.
‘I am frightened,’ she says.
‘of what I do not know.’
Is it of Death
with his negligent scythe
familiar as Hugh
under a blue sky?
‘I do not know,’ she says.
Just, ‘I am frightened.’
Her horned cows stare
out of her meadow,
and the rabbits race through dew
towards the weasel.
At night
I put out the ashes,
and stand amazed
beneath the blaze
of a million million stars.
The fox sings
his songs of slyness,
and lopes easily
by the hedge:
and the spare hawk anchors
by a cloud.
By rabbit-watch
I walk clothed among the naked.
Not by lamplight
does the harsh buzzard read his book,
nor change from black
will the ragged crow
whose language does not frame the No
of the soul’s delicacy.
Each morning
I cross the railway line
towards the kiosk
to collect my newspaper.
Summer,
how lovely you are,
how leafy,
just like a newspaper
composed of coloured paper.
And also the rails hum
towards the future
in the midst of such news returning,
those reds and greens.
She walks,
mumbling to herself
down this street,
big-bellied, round-faced.
She has found no one
other than herself
to talk to,
and her discussions
are infinite.
Beyond her
the sea keeps its own music
obsessive, self-absorbed,
omnivorous.
Her lips move
soundlessly,
endlessly,
in that continuous gossip
that never surprises.
She has filled
her life’s emptiness with furniture.
‘That chair is too good to sit on,
and the carpet
cost me five hundred pounds.’
There is a vase
of paper flowers on the television:
her suite
is made of rich red velvet.
The sea, the sea,
stretches emptily to the horizon.
Envy is too simple a judgment
for one who sits in her kingdom
like a queen
whose servants have left her.
It is autumn.
She sees us to the door.
I remember
the coffee had no real taste
and for her talk
it was so full of chairs
I stumbled over it.
Where there is emptiness
it has to be filled somehow.
This autumn fills it with leaves,
which storm about her legs.
The little red van
buzzes about the village.
Letters from England, Canada, New Zealand.
We communicate with each other
because of a driver
with a small black moustache.
Little red van
at the edge of the ocean
dodging among the trees
with no salt on it.
The nest
with one green egg in it
is suspended among the trees.
The thrush has deserted it.
It is a tiny earth among straw,
cold now, without the throb of life in it.
Who has touched it with his hands
and left the smell of man on it?
For the bird flies away
and will not return.
I imagine how its wings mourn
an absent greenness.
I should have loved Paris
when Picasso was there
or Braque,
when they stuck morsels of news
to their paintings:
when the concierge
was a cube
like a French mountain:
and in gaunt attics
the easels
thirsted for the paint.
Excitement,
discovery,
a new world,
quotations from Africa,
triangular faces like deer.
But I have to live
where the black bibles
where the heads are bowed
over eternal fire.
Last night
you attended a lecture on Vermeer
on the Island of Mull.
How clear
the mountains are,
and these rooms in which symmetry was humanised!
The deer
are elegant,
though the men have been prised
loose from their moorings.
In these pictures
such light, such light!
Remember the girl with the jar
pouring milk into the ewer,
her arms are so muscular!
Or at a table the soldier
talking to his sweetheart.
Dutch maps on the walls.
The echoing bibles and the sails, the sails!
Under the green hills,
the exiled bodies.
Open the windows!
Let the light flood through!
Space, such endless space,
so framed by joy.
The old lady is dying
among the roses,
and at night
she hears the hoot of the owl,
the fluting of the blackbird,
the excited cry of the thrush.
Doctor,
she knows well what is wrong,
she is adjusting her shoulders
to the stone cloak.
She has put out the ashes
for the last time.
And yet, who is dying
in this summer of stunning splendour
when the rhododendrons are ablaze
by the hedge,
when the pansies
are bowed in thought,
and the azaleas
are a constant fire?
We are part of the earth,
its blackness nestles about us,
and the rowan
is a constellation of blood drops.
There is no sorrow
in the song of the blackbird,
and the rabbit
runs easily towards its death.
I have seen a cat
stiffly dead on the road,
the crow pecking at it,
its eyes staring upwards
in an illusion of agate:
and I have seen the children
in their butterfly frocks.
Summer, we love you,
there is no end to your manifestations,
to the freshness of your plots.
The white curtain
in the bedroom of the old lady
freshens the window.
A man is ploughing the land
with a red tractor.
Today
as the trees sparkle
in the sunshine,
I remember my university days,
the historian
who lectured on the French Revolution
with exact primness.
Robespierre died in Aberdeen,
and so did Danton,
a whole structure
of chandeliers fell.
And also
Lear died on the moorland,
his crown melting
in reality and age.
The trees sparkling,
these tales I remember,
and the clear
cemeteries also I recall
on whose slabs I lay revising
Virgil’s Aeneid.
This morning,
the snow falling,
the children
are building a snowman.
How white it is.
How they toil
to shape it
behind the schoolhouse
with its chalky blackboards.
This blank squatness,
Buddha of silence,
beyond questions,
sitting in the world,
temporary art,
a structure of water.
I read of Sevastopol
by Tolstoy
in a train going to my village.
This Russian is my contemporary,
though my sky
is Gaelic.
I hear the guns
in the holy silence
of your prose
which casts its shadows,
just as it was,
bravery and cowardice.
All the aristocrats
whom I never knew
in peasant Lewis
dying like lilies
which are unable to bend.
Writing
is easier than experience.
In Halifax
you suffered the tax
of exile,
and in dosshouses
you nailed your shoes
to the wooden floor.
There is no sorrow
worse than the sorrow
of the exile,
for he wakens early
with ash in his mouth,
and there are only shadows
in the world around him.
Open your purse
to the shadowy exile:
as for my book,
leave it.
For pages do not starve,
do not die of
the thirst of salt.
They can easily be remade,
though not so the sails
that reflect new sunsets.
Bags over shoulders
the kids make their way
to the country school.
There is a smell of roses
and an untaught sky.
Geography is here
in the wandering perfumes
and the chalk-white roads:
where the larks sing high
above the scrawled bushes
and the dewy rowans
wear their red dresses
in these parishes of green.
The raspberry tree
arches the garden,
the crocuses
are bent by the wind.
The small birds beat the rats
to the bread,
among all that red
and yellow and white.
Sun, you are shining
from your old socket,
as Peggy carries her bags
of groceries home.
How calmly the dead
lie in their worn ground,
wrinkled like carbon
above which the clouds call
briefly, whitely.
Death strides freely across the countryside,
swinging his stick.
Sometimes he stops at a cottage
where an old woman
is fraying fresh water
from a bucket.
Sometimes he watches a weasel
sucking the throat of a hare
beside a rowan tree.
Sometimes he watches a cat
trotting with a lark
through the shrubbery.
He takes out a cigarette and smokes it,
a small cloud at his mouth
and listens to a radio
playing Greensleeves.
Sometimes he knocks on a door
of a large house
where a man with white hair
is reading Everyman.
Death is a polite fellow
who loves azaleas
and the blur of bluebells.
‘Without me they would not exist
without my sickle and scythe
without my empty circles.
And what would the shepherd be then
singing of his sweetheart?
And as for Greece or Rome,
beyond the Dark Ages
they shine like jewels of fire.’
Days when the rain brims
the teeming barrels,
and plain wet windows
reflect no drama:
and the small birds peck
at the soaked bread.
Days when the clouds loom
over the chimneys,
and, like old women, the trees
forget themselves
in demented stories.
It is a fine morning,
the frost is sparkling.
It is said of you, Raphael,
that you learned
from Michelangelo,
from the study of armies.
So happy you were,
contented creator,
whose Virgin and Child
calmly foresaw their fate.
It is a fine morning,
the frost is sparkling,
glittering diamonds.
Let me open my hands,
to the visitations of clouds.
Let me see Florence
in these mountains of pure white.
Hang out your washing
like paintings
in the calm day.
Raphael,
Botticelli,
each beside the other
in a gallery of blue.
Rag-darned goddesses,
the sweat of the present
drying towards Venice
and its fine cloudy towers.
Sundays, how awful they are.
All day the grass does not change
and the clouds that visit us
drift off elsewhere.
We try to think of
the beauties of religion but
in fact we feel aggression,
inward furies,
the torment of silence.
Dear birds,
flying from the south
can you bring us contentment?
Can we hear in your tones
the dry classical voices?
Sundays,
when will the dead abandon us?
When will the living
no longer be a sacrifice
to the gnaw in the bone?
let the stranger enter
with dust on his feet
all the way from Galilee,
that serene profile.
At Easter we sit in church.
The organ pipes
are pointed like missiles.
The minister
assails all nuclear arms (pushing
a curl back from his brow).
What does he know of it, they think,
the crofters, the wives.
His passion
is, they would say, indecent
among these calm grey graves
where their forefathers lie
so placidly
having travelled their single rut
on a bony cart
towards the cemetery.
See,
the women’s hats are like wheels,
blue, green, purple,
as the ball
sparkled high in the sky
above Japan,
that ‘foreign’
unintelligible region.
His plan
is, for the good, heaven,
for the bad
an earth converted to ashes,
and the bushes
wearing their blossoms of grey.
The cat
brings the rabbit
home between his teeth.
It is a gift
to the lank god
who feeds him,
to the magic
that renews his dish.
The rabbit mews
piteously
more winning than the mouse
with its tail of string.
Stunned, it lies
under the cat’s negligent gaze.
To rescue it
is, now,
out of the question.
That fatal blow
has brought it low
for this is a savage circuit
on which the cat, lazily blinking,
thornily turns.
These roots stretch
deeply into the soil
almost unpullable.
White and tough,
how can they know death,
aged lady,
who too die
very slowly
so that you have to be tugged
which is burning there
in a priceless sunset.
Today,
you send me a letter
from Lewis,
saying
how much my writings mean to you,
the tragedy, the comedy,
the child who remembers
and the man who grieves.
Island,
you are moving away from me,
and yet
there is a mirror
with images in it,
the headlands
which wail of exiles,
the stiles
over which ghosts leap
like angels,
the daffodils
that will yellow the moors,
my remorse
for not being word perfect.
Altogether
you take twenty-two pills,
to keep you sound.
In your calm weather
you have little to do
but, like water,
pass time in talk.
Animals,
we are talking animals,
gregarious.
Without gossip
we fade and die.
And sometimes more than gossip
there is Homer,
the very high stair,
towards azure,
the former monkey can climb.
Our brains bulged
to differentiate us from the animals,
and our eyes became bifocal.
We could stand upright
and clutch the sharp stones.
Fate
was on our side; to the local
we weren’t tied, but could explore
by entering foreign doors.
Tigers
we sank in pits,
and we ate
the marrow bones
of mammoths.
O, the wind brought stories
to us, and in the fires too
we saw the shadows of flesh,
and on the walls of caves
we drew the first trembling strokes.
Oaks
bowed to us.
In the sunshine of April
to the clouds above.
And then
galleries we made, draughty paintings.
Food they became to us,
poetry,
epics and tales on the breeze.
Clumps of bees built
their fences of sharp stings
to protect their honey;
and the ants too
learnt their grades and classes
on a fine morning.
Hermit, you are strange
in your soiled blanket,
singing to yourself
under a slum of cloud.
On a breezy morning
we visit the market.
The lady at the cosmetics stall
is making up her face,
and another is trying on the opal
of a new ring.
Clothes hang on rails
above the dry people,
and the fiery curtains
flutter bravely.
Pick up the toy horseman
who rocks backwards and forwards
on his metal horse.
‘How much in this world we don’t have need of,’
said bald Socrates,
strolling through the market
on a Greek morning
I, on the contrary,
love the sly
cries of the salesmen,
who have to live, don’t they,
just like us
on this plenteous
market most various
among white dishcloths and rings.
Tonight the moon’s so close
I could almost pull it towards me.
And I hear the dancers’ feet
on the hall’s bare boards.
The moon of autumn,
unrustable and red,
in which the sailor sees
his mother’s exiled face.
The village has its own sky,
its own river,
its paths are unrepeatable
among the tangle
of bracken and fern.
It is visited by birds
from the horizons of Africa,
who return annually
to build their own hammocks.
It has its own sun, its own moon,
those unstable rings
that remember it.
Its cemetery is a treasury
of previous coffins and bones.
On its gates stone lions
snarl in silence,
and its roses
redden the air.
Echoes everywhere,
prints and resonances;
a single cloud
is part of the narrative,
of the story
which bursts in fragrance
from the dewless tips of bones.
The sun goes down
and is then reborn
above paths, ruts:
under its rays
the boys run
towards their graves
on bicycles:
and girls too
graduate to kitchens
and the fierce breezes
of bedroom curtains.
All this has happened
day after day,
year after year,
the sun a red
ball that’s returned
every morning
from over the wall.
From Italy
you come to our bare land,
from Venice
prodigious
with paintings.
Here the sky is clear,
lacks the fierce fire
of the Renaissance,
and the villages
sleep among sheep.
The drunks sing
‘Flower of Scotland’ to you
in echoing stations:
and the purple-crowned thistle
vibrates with thorns.
Tender Virgil,
dead in Mantua,
in the ice of perfection,
this is not your land,
you, exquisite saint
of the compassionate metre,
sleep elsewhere.
Our sun shines
(not burns)
beyond a grille of cloud,
and winter
is our typical season.
From Italy
you come to our sky.
It is like shifting
from a warm flat
to a lonely castle
hissing with ghosts.
The rainbow arcs
at the end of the water:
it is a frail bridge
prepared by God.
In this field I find it,
then in another,
its fine colours anchor
among the sharp corn.
How strange it is
that angels can walk
among the cornfields,
the tares, the poppies,
the frail hint of blood.
The rainbow reminds us
that heaven is present
among the maggots,
the brown carriages of worms.
Last night
I saw a snail
eating the cat’s food.
Its mouth was busy
like a miniature snake,
its delicate horns
were tiny aerials
above the red plate.
Such a strange feeding,
this being from wet grasses
in the dry kitchen,
an alien entering
our warm kingdom,
with its black body
questioning our food.
In the garden
among the birds
my typewriter chatters,
It too has its own voice,
its astronomy of letters,
its interpretation of the world.
It too guards
its own territory
with ignorant metal.
Such happiness
among the green leaves
with its derived foliage.
Cathy walks past,
and I am writing:
she sees through the window
my infirm hand.
‘The corn is doing well,’
she told me this morning.
‘After all, I’ll take
the bread for my hens.’
Such a marvellous light
that binds us together,
even I who grow
words on the page.
Cat, today you caught a bird,
I found its feathers in the lobby,
and that, I must admit, disturbs me.
That the song should be stopped,
that the wings should be stripped,
from the slim body.
I don’t mind you impaling mice
on the sharp protruding vice
of your claws.
But that you should have chewed the lark.
That you should have sent to the dark
the quick linnet.
I consider you, rising humpbacked,
a witch of the beautiful fact,
a thorny shadow.
And a white hunter, along the trench,
of the orange-breasted bullfinch
bitter-toothed one.
Who will nuzzle my shoulder
affectionately later,
bird-murderer,
feather-scatterer in the porch.
O let not in March
my songs be silenced
by that prowling inquisitive doom
which will devise harm
in a ring without mercy.
You died
more a connoisseur of Latin
than of English.
The rabbits played in front of your house
but you did not notice them
and as for the buzzard
he was the unseen Caesar
of your farm.
In togas they chatter among marble
who were your obsession
and the fountains of Rome
jetted out of your garden.
Virgil
has written for your gravestone,
and Ovid sings of exile
in the depths of your library.
It was a life of quotations
that you lived,
and an absence of mind
your biography.
It was only latterly
that you really saw the sky,
changeable:
the wind of your century.
As for the rest, footnotes,
the relentless boredom of the classicist,
the verb at the end of the sentence
revealing at last your fate.
The fire sparks up the chimney.
It is a hedge of thorns,
bright, purified, and simple.
Without it the art galleries
would have foundered in the marsh.
Rubens and Vermeer.
Statues replace glaciers,
and books, water.
Ghosts are born in fire.
They run about the world
breeding.
In summer
the blur of warm mist
over the water,
and the tall girls in green
riding horses
along the level road,
clip-clop by shop-front.
Such mornings
opening like books
fresh and novel,
such fresh black shadows
humming among the leaves.
The dog runs away
with the hen in his mouth.
Catch him!
He must not be allowed such traffic.
What bundle of feathers will be safe from him?
He will snatch the cockerel from the dawn.
Solid and meaty have been some of our poets,
our theologians, philosophers.
They can feel in their teeth
the theme of a new world.
Eat them thoroughly,
the bouquets of new stars.
Leave the bones, Copernicus,
to the starving Jesuits.
The cat mews at the window
trying to get in.
It rears on its hind legs, like a stoat.
Beggar of the wind,
this is your house,
your fire is here.
It has the red sparks
of furious claws.
There were ghosts on my island
that chewed at the pane.
They were the many exiles
with their teeth of ice.
Why therefore should you not enter
with your eerie white fur,
having prospected all morning
for the absent mice?
Art, how marvellous you are.
You bring us a birth,
a second birth in reflection,
and these reflections
seem more real than the real,
O wine red sky,
I burn in your vase.
I travel your winding road.
Art,
it is in the city
that you flourished,
were cherished
against the thirst of grass.
Redder than skies
your reds,
and your greens
greener than mountains.
Your windows opened
on to a banded rainbow
that absolutely sang:
and nature does not know
your perfect circles.
Breughel,
you brought your proverbs
home in the evening;
Chagall, your bride and bridegroom
waft through the air.
Put out your paintings:
someone will notice them,
even in the passing,
in the wind of everyday.