for Michael Vince
In the hedgerows
along this walk
songbird nests abound; and –
as my dog runs on
interpreting
on air and earth
rank traces and warm lingerings that
her cold nose pursues
ahead of me –
the birds flutter out and away;
and beasts of undergrowth and hedgerow,
rabbit, fox and weasel,
stir within the radius of her scenting
unseen mostly,
though from time
to time
ahead of us
a red or brown
streaks
the crisp white of the chalk ridge, and passes
through the eye’s enduring field
of green
and brown-and-green
bound
in the clasp of the arched blue.
There the skylarks
our footfalls drive from the warm clench of
nestling in the grass
appear and disappear,
become what is the
audible extent –
beyond sight – of the sky
*
One might as well
be walking further south,
the chalk hills there, it could be
the South Downs.
But no:
this is a made place, here
in the deep bone and sanctum
of the land
is stamped the signature,
the homo fecit,
still call
(as the feared Norsemen did)
a dyke –
no Saxon ditch (where a tramp
might bed down).
*
Defence
was what they had in mind who
with this causeway
bridged the fen to guard
their landward flank and
insulate
a territory
plants, birds and beasts
ignore.
And though you pass
from time to time
into some tangled hedge,
are drawn into –
enmeshed in, even –
green of the earth’s making,
yet you emerge
on the bare ridge-way
and across the trench
survey
the furrowed ploughland in retreat,
envisage
the advance of bristling armies
held
in your long watch.
*
A spring day
and I lie back
on the full flank of the earth,
the sloped wall of the bulwark.
I am weight, borne by what
holds me down –
as the larks
rise, till they are
out of range and
the blank sky is all
the eye beholds,
the heart and ear
tugged
by a lilt and stagger that ascend
beyond perceiving: air
their scope of territory, their
earthly dwelling.
Listen!
sing the larks
down to me: you,
a man, live in a place. More,
in a palimpsest of places:
landscape history creed the word.
Through us you may infer those
other worlds your map
and composite of places must at best
imply.
Worlds often glimpsed
beyond your earthworks, ramparts, palisades.
East Anglia