I.

John, this is the sea

and don’t imagine that I mean it

beautifully. We know

how silt-and salt-thick sea is,

how uneasy, ulterior, insatiably

lightless once the play

of surfaces is done with,

how it nearly did for us

both once, near Polzeath,

in the undertow. Sea:

it’s in the dissolution business,

particles suspended for a while

round sunken matter, dis-

cohering, smoking off in strands,

and don’t imagine that I want

to go there. But

(you’re saying, in the slur

and backwash of your deep aphasia

where we’re drowning men clutching at words)

we’re there already. Where we were

at the very beginning.

*

No peace in your deafness,

just clangorous muting. Then, by degrees:

                                   ‘an expressive

aphasia,’ say the doctor’s notes. Too true.

As if released

from ninety years of reticence, the sentences

                                  unreel

in grand gestural sweeps, like starlings wheeling,

a high rhetoric

in which only you seem not to know

                                   that the meaning is gone,

regathered elsewhere maybe — but from here

it’s all rattle and flux

till a stray phrase drops from the sky, a

                                  but anyway…

you know….? You know where you are. Me,

I’m the boy who turns

at the call of a bird, that seemed to speak

                                 a syllable,

his name, in the darkening wood.

*

Or you beat, you can’t

let go of beating, at a lost, a-

gainst the nothing-there, the

not-word:

                                     stop-

start and unstoppable, you beat

against the glass which, being nothing,

cannot (though it longs to) break.

*

At best, it’s a bad line, crackling out between us.

No knowing for either how much of the other’s been lost.

Just the interim. The straining out

into the interference, waiting for a word

to come clear. Be a clue.

Just a clue to a clue.

*

You are my window,

             you say, suddenly

                          word-perfect.

Window, not door; true,

there’s no way out of this,

              this once and onliness,

                           this body. Window

of the senses, fogging with the effort.

Words mouthed at the glass.

             The ache

                          of faces—strangers,

loved ones—peering in.

*

There has to be a country

in which what you have for speech

is language.

                   Swamp land, surely. Or

unsurely, because channels shift.

Congealing oxbows. Head-high reeds.

Flood-wrack like nests of something

strong, undextrous,

                               gone. Detritus

from the cities of wherever Upstream is.

No distance.

                   Sometimes you catch voices,

rasped to almost nothing,

when the wind moves and the rushes hiss,

sometimes a word

                              behind that wading willow but

there’s nobody there when you look,

just a sodden inconclusive causeway,

the ribs of a coracle half sunk in mud.

All this

             is waiting, in abeyance, for you

to create it.

                  All you have to do

(and we could wait a whole world’s history for this)

is speak its name.

*

A spy

into your crumbling diary

I track neat tight script

into a week of thicket,

faint scratchy capitals

whose panic I can almost hear,

as you try to hold to fact.

No news. No you. Just weather. So

today, a breath-length lull:

the code for, if not peace,

a brief truce, signalled

in three languages:

                                    TÄNA

             PALE MORGAN

STILL

*

Washed up at the tideline these days,

             jetsam: words

in Estonian, German, Russian, history

             ditched out at sea

between coasts sixty years ago—

              too much, too

heavy, you said later, what child

              could need it—

languages I never heard you speak

              and so I grew

bilingual in English and silence,

            grew a stammer

                         that said something, too. 

*

One day you woke to find that you’d lost barley.

Oats. Wheat. Tried each of your five languages

and nothing answered to its name.

You stared through a sixty-year gap in the trees,

past the farmhouse, out into the fields

(all-angled, small, pre-Soviet)

of wordlessness. What you were seeing there

wasn’t nothing. This one… You tensed

your fingers, upwards. And this…

Your fingers tremble-dangled. ‘Oats?’ Yes!

Yes. And that itching-and-scratching

down the back of your neck:

threshed husks in the shade of the barn. Later

hordeum and triticum came to you, then

some English, some Estonian.

But you’d been back there, in the gone place,

absolutely, with each Ding an sich.

You’d been it, and no words between.

*

Stalled:

the old farm horse

that, you infallibly recalled

on my childhood’s interminable

car trips, went faster, its nose

towards home. (And you,

how far from home?)

Called,