The Dark Dialogues

I always meant to only

Language swings away

Further before me.

Language swings away

Before me as I go

With again the night rising

Up to accompany me

And that other fond

Metaphor, the sea.

Images of night

And the sea changing

Should know me well enough.

Wanton with riding lights

And staring eyes, Europa

And her high meadow bull

Fall slowly their way

Behind the blindfold and

Across this more or less

Uncommon place.

And who are you and by

What right do I waylay

You where you go there

Happy enough striking

Your hobnail in the dark?

Believe me I would ask

Forgiveness but who

Would I ask forgiveness from?

I speak across the vast

Dialogues in which we go

To clench my words against

Time or the lack of time

Hoping that for a moment

They will become for me

A place I can think in

And think anything in,

An aside from the monstrous.

And this is no other

Place than where I am,

Here turning between

This word and the next.

Yet somewhere the stones

Are wagging in the dark

And you, whoever you are,

That I am other to,

Stand still by the glint

Of the dyke’s sparstone,

Because always language

Is where the people are.

Almost I, yes, I hear

Huge in the small hours

A man’s step on the stair

Climbing the pipeclayed flights

And then stop still

Under the stairhead gas

At the lonely tenement top.

The broken mantle roars

Or dims to a green murmur.

One door faces another.

Here, this is the door

With the loud grain and the name

Unreadable in brass.

Knock, but a small knock,

The children are asleep.

I sit here at the fire

And the children are there

And in this poem I am,

Whoever elsewhere I am,

Their mother through his mother.

I sit with the gas turned

Down and time knocking

Somewhere through the wall.

Wheesht, children, and sleep

As I break the raker up,

It is only the stranger

Hissing in the grate.

Only to speak and say

Something, little enough,

Not out of want

Nor out of love, to say

Something and to hear

That someone has heard me.

This is the house I married

Into, a room and kitchen

In a grey tenement,

The top flat of the land,

And I hear them breathe and turn

Over in their sleep

As I sit here becoming

Hardly who I know.

I have seen them hide

And seek and cry come out

Come out whoever you are

You’re not het I called

And called across the wide

Wapenschaw of water.

But the place moved away

Beyond the reach of any

Word. Only the dark

Dialogues drew their breath.

Ah how bright the mantel

Brass shines over me.

Black-lead at my elbow,

Pipe-clay at my feet.

Wheesht and go to sleep

And grow up but not

To say mother mother

Where are the great games

I grew up quick to play.

Now in the third voice

I am their father through

Nothing more than where

I am made by this word

And this word to occur.

Here I am makeshift made

By artifice to fall

Upon a makeshift time.

But I can’t see. I can’t

See in the bad light

Moving (Is it moving?)

Between your eye and mine.

Who are you and yet

It doesn’t matter only

I thought I heard somewhere

Someone else walking.

Where are the others? Why,

If there is any other,

Have they gone so far ahead?

Here where I am held

With the old rainy oak

And Cartsburn and the Otter’s

Burn aroar in the dark

I try to pay for my keep.

I speak as well as I can

Trying to teach my ears

To learn to use their eyes

Even only maybe

In the end to observe

The behaviour of silence.

Who is it and why

Do you walk here so late

And how should you know to take

The left or the right fork

Or the way where, as a boy

I used to lie crouched

Deep under the flailing

Boughs of the roaring wood?

Or I lay still

Listening while a branch

Squeaked in the resinous dark

And swaying silences.

Otherwise I go

Only as a shell

Of my former self.

I go with my foot feeling

To find the side of the road,

My head inclined, my ears

Feathered to every wind

Blown between the dykes.

The mist is coming home.

I hear the blind horn

Mourning from the firth.

The big wind blows

Over the shore of my child

Hood in the off-season.

The small wind remurmurs

The fathering tenement

And a boy I knew running

The hide and seeking streets.

Or do these winds

In their forces blow

Between the words only?

I am the shell held

To Time’s ear and you

May hear the lonely leagues

Of the kittiwake and the fulmar.

Or I am always only

Thinking is this the time

To look elsewhere to turn

Towards what was it

I put myself out

Away from home to meet?

Was it this only? Surely

It is more than these words

See on my side

I went halfway to meet.

And there are other times.

But the times are always

Other and now what I meant

To say or hear or be

Lies hidden where exile

Too easily beckons.

What if the terrible times

Moving away find

Me in the end only

Staying where I am always

Unheard by a fault.

So to begin to return

At last neither early

Nor late and go my way

Somehow home across

This gesture become

Inhabited out of hand.

I stop and listen over

My shoulder and listen back

On language for that step

That seems to fall after

My own step in the dark.

Always must be the lost

Or where we turn, and all

For a sight of the dark again.

The farthest away, the least

To answer back come nearest.

And this place is taking

Its time from us though these

Two people or voices

Are not us nor has

The time they seem to move in

To do with what we think

Our own times are. Even

Where they are is only

This one inhuman place.

Yet somewhere a stone

Speaks and maybe a leaf

In the dark turns over.

And whoever I meant

To think I had met

Turns away further

Before me blinded by

This word and this word.

See how presently

The bull and the girl turn

From what they seemed to say,

And turn there above me

With that star-plotted head

Snorting on silence.

The legend turns. And on

Her starry face descried

Faintly astonishment.

The formal meadow fades

Over the ever-widening

Firth and in their time

That not unnatural pair

Turn slowly home.

This is no other place

Than where I am, between

This word and the next.

Maybe I should expect

To find myself only

Saying that again

Here now at the end.

Yet over the great

Gantries and cantilevers

Of love, a sky, real and

Particular is slowly

Startled into light.