Wind, cloud, rain gullied slopes.
Border country, lawless by habit,
nature, habitat, ungovernable.
Snores from the corner. Someone
scratching his itch. A ripe fart, a groan.
Oh for the blessing of sleep and forgetfulness.
Outside a nightbird, nightingale, robin?
They say in sleep we travel,
talking in another time.
Messages rise from the muck:
Lydia, please come to my birthday.
I send you Flavius a gift of woollen socks.
Part of the world’s mundane chatter
to itself. Men drinking after work,
embellishing stories that become legends.
Voices behind voices; behind each thought
the ghost of another thought, travellers
arriving with their dogs and sandwiches,
cameras, backpacks, their own preoccupations.
Ghosts, drifting through, out for the day, here
to say they’ve been and gone. By the south gate
a loud woman describing the dress from was it
C&A or M&S, or is or is not that out there
the 3rd cohort ala I Pannoniorum glittering
in the long sunlight over the fell side,
come to relieve us at last?
Me, I’d abandon this place
to the wild beasts howling all night
and the painted men skulking
in the bruised hills, the dumb
contradictory panorama of the north
from which cries come: Go home Rome.
Watching north where I’d rather turn south.
I praise the horned god of the hunt
Lord of all the Animals
I praise the three hooded ones
in their stitchery of stone
I praise the blood red calling of the rooster
I praise the black beak of the raven
I praise him as the lightning
I praise him as the courier of the sun
I praise him as the lion
I praise him as the stag
I praise him as the eagle
I praise him as the bear
I praise him as the snake
I praise him as the ring dove
I praise him as the swan
I praise him as the owl
I praise him in the language of all the birds
I praise the hawthorn’s pink bloom
I praise the purple on the blue hills
and the gorse that is always in season.
I praise the hare and the spider and the wolf.
By day by night I stare over the blank space
we call landscape, my share of the watch
my share of the world. Some days
a messenger, others a sulky sentry,
on a bad day skiving in the shithouse.
I make all sharp and bright burnished,
my watchword in whatever tongue, my password,
motto muttered in the wind’s mouth
don’t mess with me,
my chorus and my long refrain:
we’re here because we’re here because…
My brother is to be the man bride
of the evening star. Think of that.
It is a secret, a mystery among others.
I praise the old ones and all
that come in threes, what
can be devised from the flight of birds,
glimpsed in the whorlings of water
My brother will be Miles the soldier
under Mars. He will kneel, naked,
blindfold, his hands’ bounds
cut at a stroke, he will step up
to be crowned and refuse the crown.
In this half lit theatre there will be
scorpion, raven, dog, snake,
the sun and the moon, brass, drumming.
He is crowned, then he is free,
he can see at last in so much smokey gloom,
declaring Mithras is my only crown.
Words put into the mouth of a god,
words that get men killed.
I praise the sun and the sun’s rays.
I praise all that lives and struggles,
and those that have power over water,
appearing at the crossing wearing
the armour of those to die that day.
So what can he see now that not before?
So what is he? – a soldier or a bird,
or does he think himself a god in feathers,
the corpse bird speaking from the other world
in all his colours that are all of them black?
He will be the sun runner, dressed
in the colours of fire and blood and the sun,
his cape the star map of the night sky,
his pointed cap, he will straddle the bull,
yanking his nostrils back, he will slit
the bull’s throat and scatter his blood
glittering like the constellations down the sky.
I am in praise, especially of Orion.
I am in praise, especially of the raven,
The raven says time for a new dispensation,
there is a wobble in the constellations,
a long slow shift among the stars
and therefore some shift in the complex
arrangements of the gods, therefore
the long war between the dark and the light,
between chaos and order, therefore war
and therefore men will die for this.
We’re here because.
Because.
Because the Wall.
Because because.
Because we do what we’re told.
Go where we’re sent.
Because the commandant.
Because the Emperor.
Because it’s here.
Because the government.
The government says so.
Because.
There would otherwise be barbary.
So we’re here because it’s here.
And it’s here because we’re here.
Because.
Iberia, Dacia, Pannonia, Gaul, Syria,
from the watery lands at the mouths
of the great rivers, some from Africa,
some from these parts, how I envy
that for them is no country of childhood
to long for, or I despise them this vacancy.
As well envy another man his prick.
Our lives a dice game in the crapper.
My world is not much though my life
is filled with it, its tune the same
over and over, quick march, halt,
at ease, attention, present arms,
in my head counting the arithmetic:
2 steps equals one pace, one mile
a thousand paces, a wall one sea
to the other sea. Mine is a world
all in the wind and the wings of birds,
their cries that foretell our deaths.
Of my own I think what women
and what offspring left behind.
There are limits not built of stone.
I am myself a wall, thick,
nothing gets through me. All the walls
have two sides, I could be on the other.
I could get lost and never found,
don’t mess with me, wandering
the boglands all my days and after
what life to remember, sent off
abruptly at a sharp edge, drowned
under hooves, choked, dumped in the midden,
forgot, chucked at last into the sharp yellow gorse.
Always in season.
So be it. So it goes. Here.
There’ll always be a big wall,
Big walls keep us free.
Without a wall there’d be bugger all at all,
There’d be nothing here but you and me.
I am that sort of man who bears all
to the last, happy when an old kettle
comes to the boil still, content
with my porridge and hard tack
and share of sour wine, in hopes to live on
with my limbs all in all the right places
and my eyes to see and my strength still,
25 years if I’m lucky enough,
a bit of land somewhere and sons
to work it, living my days out
still tight mouthed, weathered,
scarred, wearing the same tattoo:
don’t mess with me.
Scarp. Ditch. Crag. All the north
and the south of it, edge of empire,
blue cap of the sky, cloud splattered.
Sometimes the shadowlands
of the great mountains of mist
shuttering the hills, sliding over
my eye corners as I run, bearing
my message, sheep voicing
their complaints, bull braying
in so much weather. And all the birds.
Voices behind voices. Where was
my beginning, my eyes opening
to the foggy river banks, woods,
wide snakey water lands, glimpse
of my own stranger’s face
in the moonlit pool at midnight,
cries of the flayed ox, the stuck pig,
flogged horse, dogs hunting
along the horizon’s line, always?
Someone who sang to me,
a woman, milk and tears flowed from her.
Suddenly it all melts inside the head.
According to my base logic there is
water and there is the moon
on the one side, and on the other
fire and the sun. I have seen the sea
rise and fall to the moon’s gold mouth,
to the horns of her, new above spring woods,
nameless with all her many names.
I speak from the lost world of all the living.
I am someone becoming someone else,
I have a name somewhere about me.
I am muddy with others, a body
separating itself from the common grave.
I send you Flavius a gift of woollen socks.
I am in praise. Of the sun. Of the bear, the wolf, the deer.
I am in praise of the horned god that hunts them all.
I am in praise of all that breathes.