To be first on the road,

Up with the ground-mists and pheasants.

To be older and grateful

That this time you too were half-grateful

The pangs had begun – prepared

And clear-headed, foreknowing

The trauma, entering on it

With full consent of the will.

(The first time, dismayed and arrayed

In your cut-off white cotton gown,

You were more bride than earth-mother

Up on the stirrup-rigged bed,

Who were self-possessed now

To the point of a walk on the pier

Before you checked in.)

And then later on I half-fainted

When the little slapped palpable girl

Was handed to me; but as usual

Came to in two wide-open eyes

That had been dawned into farther

Than ever, and had outseen the last

Of all of those mornings of waiting

When your domed brow was one long held silence

And the dawn chorus anything but.

Fosterling

‘That heavy greenness fostered by water’

JOHN MONTAGUE

At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness –

Horizons rigged with windmills’ arms and sails.

The millhouses’ still outlines. Their in-placeness

Still more in place when mirrored in canals.

I can’t remember not ever having known

The immanent hydraulics of a land

Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.

My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.

Heaviness of being. And poetry

Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.

Me waiting until I was nearly fifty

To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans

The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,

Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

from Lightenings

viii

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

from Crossings

xxvii

Everything flows. Even a solid man,

A pillar to himself and to his trade,

All yellow boots and stick and soft felt hat,

Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet

As the god of fair days, stone posts, roads and crossroads,

Guardian of travellers and psychopomp.

‘Look for a man with an ashplant on the boat,’

My father told his sister setting out

For London, ‘and stay near him all night

And you’ll be safe.’ Flow on, flow on

The journey of the soul with its soul guide

And the mysteries of dealing-men with sticks!

The Rain Stick

for Beth and Rand

Up-end the rain stick and what happens next

Is a music that you never would have known

To listen for. In a cactus stalk