cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite

as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,

and suddenly he hit a litter basket

with his stick, saying, ‘Your obligation

is not discharged by any common rite.

What you do you must do on your own.

The main thing is to write

for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust

that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.

You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.

Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.

Let go, let fly, forget.

You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

It was as if I had stepped free into space

alone with nothing that I had not known

already. Raindrops blew in my face

as I came to and heard the harangue and jeers

going on and on. ‘The English language

belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,

rehearsing the old whinges at your age.

That subject people stuff is a cod’s game,

infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage.

You lose more of yourself than you redeem

doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.

When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim

out on your own and fill the element

with signatures on your own frequency,

echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.’

The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac

fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly

the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.

Alphabets

I

A shadow his father makes with joined hands

And thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wall

Like a rabbit’s head. He understands

He will understand more when he goes to school.

There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week,

Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y.

This is writing. A swan’s neck and swan’s back

Make the 2 he can see now as well as say.

Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate

Are the letter some call ah, some call ay.

There are charts, there are headlines, there is a right

Way to hold the pen and a wrong way.

First it is ‘copying out’, and then ‘English’,

Marked correct with a little leaning hoe.

Smells of inkwells rise in the classroom hush.

A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O.

II

Declensions sang on air like a hosanna

As, column after stratified column,

Book One of Elementa Latina,

Marbled and minatory, rose up in him.

For he was fostered next in a stricter school

Named for the patron saint of the oak wood

Where classes switched to the pealing of a bell

And he left the Latin forum for the shade

Of new calligraphy that felt like home.

The letters of this alphabet were trees.

The capitals were orchards in full bloom,

The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches.