Here in her snooded garment and bare feet,

All ringleted in assonance and woodnotes,

The poet’s dream stole over him like sunlight

And passed into the tenebrous thickets.

He learns this other writing. He is the scribe

Who drove a team of quills on his white field.

Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab.

Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold.

By rules that hardened the farther they reached north

He bends to his desk and begins again.

Christ’s sickle has been in the undergrowth.

The script grows bare and Merovingian.

III

The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O.

He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves.

Time has bulldozed the school and school window.

Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves

Made lambdas on the stubble once at harvest

And the delta face of each potato pit

Was patted straight and moulded against frost.

All gone, with the omega that kept

Watch above each door, the good-luck horseshoe.

Yet shape-note language, absolute on air

As Constantine’s sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO

Can still command him; or the necromancer

Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house

A figure of the world with colours in it

So that the figure of the universe

And ‘not just single things’ would meet his sight

When he walked abroad. As from his small window

The astronaut sees all he has sprung from,

The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O

Like a magnified and buoyant ovum –

Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare

All agog at the plasterer on his ladder

Skimming our gable and writing our name there

With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.

The Haw Lantern

The wintry haw is burning out of season,

crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,

wanting no more from them but that they keep

the wick of self-respect from dying out,

not having to blind them with illumination.

But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost

it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes

with his lantern, seeking one just man;

so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw

he holds up at eye-level on its twig,

and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,

its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,

its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.

From the Republic of Conscience

I

When I landed in the republic of conscience

it was so noiseless when the engines stopped

I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

At immigration, the clerk was an old man

who produced a wallet from his homespun coat

and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

The woman in customs asked me to declare

the words of our traditional cures and charms

to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.

You carried your own burden and very soon

your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.