Drip-tree stillness. Spring-feeling elation
Of mid-morning oxygen. There is a yeasty simmering
Over the land – all compass points are trembling,
Bristling with starlings, hordes out of Siberia,
Bubbly and hopeful.
We stand in the mist-rawness
Of the sodden earth. Four days to Christmas.
We can hear the grass seeping.
Now a wraith-smoke
Writhes up from a far field, condenses
On a frieze of goblin hedge-oaks, sizzling
Like power-pylons in mist.
We ease our way into this landscape.
Casual midnightish draughts, in the soaking stillness.
Itch of starlings is everywhere.
The gun
Is old, rust-ugly, single-barrelled, borrowed
For a taste of English sport. And you have come
From eighteen years Australian estrangement
And twelve thousand miles in thin air
To walk again on the small hills of the West,
In the ruby and emerald lights, the leaf-wet oils
Of your memory’s masterpiece.
Hedge-sparrows
Needle the bramble-mass undergrowth
With their weepy warnings.
You have the gun.
We harden our eyes. We are alert.
The gun-muzzle is sniffing. And the broad land
Tautens into wilder, nervier contrasts
Of living and unliving. Our eyes feather over it
As over a touchy detonator.
Bootprints between the ranks of baby barley
Heel and toe we go
Narrowed behind the broad gaze of the gun
Down the long woodside. I am your dog.
Now I get into the wood. I push parallel
And slightly ahead of you – the idea
Is to flush something for the gun’s amusement.
I go delicate. I don’t want to panic
My listeners into a crouch–freeze.
I want them to keep their initiative
And slip away, confident, impudent,
Out across your front.
Pigeons, too far,
Burst up from under the touch
Of our furthest listenings. A bramble
Claws across my knee, and a blackbird
Five yards off explodes its booby-trap
Shattering wetly
Black and yellow alarm-dazzlings, and a long string
Of fireworks down the wood. It settles
To a hacking chatter and that blade-ringing –
Like a flint on an axe-head.
I wait.
That startled me too.
I know I am a Gulliver now
Tied by my every slightest move
To a thousand fears. But I move –
And a jay, invisibly somewhere safe,
Starts pretending to tear itself in half
From the mouth backward. With three screams
It scares itself to silence.
The whole wood
Has hidden in the wood. Its mossy tunnels
Seem to age as we listen. A raven
Dabs a single charcoal toad-croak
Into the finished picture.
I come out
To join you in the field. We need a new plan
To surprise something.
But as I come over the wire
You are pointing, silent.
I look. One hundred yards
Down the woodside, somebody
Is watching us.
A strangely dark fox
Motionless in his robe of office
Is watching us. It is a shock.
Too deep in the magic wood, suddenly
We meet the magician.
Then he’s away –
A slender figurine, dark and witchy,
A rocking nose-down lollop, and the load of tail
Floating behind him, over the swell of faint corn
Into the long arm of woodland opposite.
The gun does nothing. But we gaze after
Like men who have been given a secret sign.
We are studying the changed expression
Of that straggle of scrub and poor trees
Which is now the disguise of a fox.
And the gun is thinking. The gun
Is working its hunter’s magic.
It is transforming us, there in the dull mist,
To two suits of cold armour –
Empty of all but a strange new humming,
A mosquito of primaeval excitements.
And as we start to walk out over the field
The gun smiles.
The fox will be under brambles.
He has set up all his antennae,
His dials are glowing and quivering,
Every hair adjusts itself
To our coming.
Will he wait in the copse
Till we’ve made our move, as if this were a game
He is interested to play?
Or has he gone through and away over further fields,
Or down and into the blueish mass and secrecy
Of the main wood?
Under a fat oak, where the sparse copse
Joins the main wood, you lean in ambush.
Well out in the field, talking to air
Like quiet cogs, I stroll to the top of the strip –
Then pierce it, clumsy as a bullock, a careless trampling
Like purposeless machinery, towards you,
Noisy enough for you to know
Where not to point your blind gun.
Somewhere between us
The fox is inspecting me, magnified.
And now I tangle all his fears with a silence,
Then a sudden abrupt advance, then again silence,
Then a random change of direction –
And almost immediately –
Almost before I’ve decided we are serious –
The blast wall hits me, the gun bang bursts
Like a paper bag in my face,
The whole day bursts like a paper bag –
But a new world is created instantly
With no visible change.
I pause. I call. You do not answer.
Everything is just as it had been.
The corroded blackberry leaves,
The crooked naked trees, fingering sky
Are all the usual careful shapes
Of the usual silence.
I go forward. And now I see you,
As if you had missed,
Leaning against your tree, casual.
But between us, on the tussocky ground,
Somebody is struggling with something.
An elegant gentleman, beautifully dressed,
Is struggling there, tangled with something,
And biting at something
With his flashing mouth. It is himself
He is tangled with. I come close
As if I might be of help.
But there is no way out.
It is himself he is biting,
Bending his head far back, and trying
To bite his shoulder. He has no time for me.
Blood beneath him is spoiling
The magnificent sooted russet
Of his overcoat, and the flawless laundering
Of his shirt. He is desperate
To get himself up on his feet,
And if he could catch the broken pain
In his teeth, and pull it out of his shoulder,
He still has some hope, because
The long brown grass is the same
As it was before, and the trees
Have not changed in any way,
And the sky continues the same –
It is doing the impossible deliberately
To set the gun-muzzle at his chest
And funnel that sky-bursting bang
Through a sudden blue pit in his fur
Into the earth beneath him.
He cannot believe it has happened.
His chin sinks forward, and he half-closes his mouth
In a smile
Of ultimate bitterness,
And half closes his eyes
In a fineness beyond pain –
And it is a dead fox in the dank woodland.
And you stand over him
Meeting your first real Ancient Briton
In eighteen years.
And I stand awake – as one wakes
From what feels like a cracking blow on the head.
That second shot has ruined his skin.
We chop his tail off
Thick and long as a forearm, and black.
Then bundle him and his velvet legs
His bag of useless jewels,
The phenomenal technology inside his head,
Into a hole, under a bulldozed stump,
Like picnic rubbish. There the memory ends.
We must have walked away.