brown,
and acorns. It must be October.
4
What is this high wind coming,
leaves leaping from the trees to bite his face?
A storm. He should have noticed the signs.
But it doesn’t matter. Ah, turn into it,
let the rain bite on the warm skin too.
5
Cold. Suddenly cold. Or hot.
A pain under his breastbone;
and his feet are bare. This is curious.
Someone comes with an injection.
6
They have brought Kurt Schwitters to see him,
a clumsy-looking man in a beret
asking for bits of stuff to make a collage.
Here, take my stamp-collection
and the letters my children wrote from school
and this photograph of my wife. She’s dead now.
You are dead too, Kurt Schwitters.
7
This is a day for sailing, perhaps,
coming down from the fells to lake-level;
or for something gentler: for idling
with a fishing-line and listening to water;
or just for lying in a boat
on a summer evening in the lee of a shore
letting the wind steer, leaving the hull
to its own course, the waves to lap it along.
8
But where now suddenly? Dawn light,
peaks around him, shadowy and familiar,
tufts of mist over a tarn below.
Somehow he is higher than he intended;
and careless, giddy, running to the edge
and over it, straight down on splintery scree
leaning back on his boots, a ski-run
scattering chips of slate, a skid with no stopping
down through the brief mist and into the tarn.
9
Tomorrow perhaps he will think about Helvellyn…
In the Unicorn, Ambleside
I want to have ice-skates and a hoop
and to have lived all my life in the same house
above Stock; and to skate on Lily Tarn
every winter, because it always freezes –
or always did freeze when you were a girl.
I want to believe your tales about Wordsworth –
‘Listen to what the locals say,’ you tell me:
‘He drank in every pub from here to Ullswater,
and had half the girls. We all know that.’
I want not to know better, out of books.
I sit in the pub with my posh friends, talking
literature and publishing as usual.
Some of them really do admire Wordsworth.
But they won’t listen to you. I listen:
how can I get you to listen to me?
I can’t help not being local;
but I’m here, aren’t I? And this afternoon
Jane and I sat beside Lily Tarn
watching the bright wind attack the ice.
None of you were up there skating.
Downstream
Last I became a raft of green bubbles
meshed into the miniature leaves
of that small pondweed (has it a name?)
that lies green-black on the stream’s face:
a sprinkle of round seeds, if you mistake it,
or of seed-hulls holding air among them.
I was those globules; there they floated –
all there was to do was to float
on the degenerate stream, suburbanised,
the mill-stream where it is lost among houses
and hardly moving, swilling just a little
to and fro if the wind blows it.
But it did move, and I moved on, drifting
until I entered the river
where I was comported upon a tear’s fashion
blending into the long water
until you would not see that there had been
tear or bubble or any round thing ever.
The Hillside
Tawny-white as a ripe hayfield.
But it is heavy with frost, not seed.
It frames him for you as he sits by the window,
his hair white also, a switch of silver.
He pours you another glass of wine,
laughs at your shy anecdotes, quietly caps them,
is witty as always; glows as hardly ever,
his back to the rectangles of glass.
The snow holds off. Clouds neither pass nor lower
their flakes on to the hill’s pale surface.
Tell him there is green beneath it still:
he will almost, for this afternoon, believe you.
This Ungentle Music
Angry Mozart: the only kind for now.
Tinkling would appal on such an evening,
summer, when the possible things to do
are: rip all weeds out of the garden,
butcher the soft redundancy of the hedge
in public; and go, when the light slackens,
to stamp sharp echoes along the street
mouthing futilities: ‘A world where…’
as if there were a choice of other
and acorns. It must be October.
4
What is this high wind coming,
leaves leaping from the trees to bite his face?
A storm. He should have noticed the signs.
But it doesn’t matter. Ah, turn into it,
let the rain bite on the warm skin too.
5
Cold. Suddenly cold. Or hot.
A pain under his breastbone;
and his feet are bare. This is curious.
Someone comes with an injection.
6
They have brought Kurt Schwitters to see him,
a clumsy-looking man in a beret
asking for bits of stuff to make a collage.
Here, take my stamp-collection
and the letters my children wrote from school
and this photograph of my wife. She’s dead now.
You are dead too, Kurt Schwitters.
7
This is a day for sailing, perhaps,
coming down from the fells to lake-level;
or for something gentler: for idling
with a fishing-line and listening to water;
or just for lying in a boat
on a summer evening in the lee of a shore
letting the wind steer, leaving the hull
to its own course, the waves to lap it along.
8
But where now suddenly? Dawn light,
peaks around him, shadowy and familiar,
tufts of mist over a tarn below.
Somehow he is higher than he intended;
and careless, giddy, running to the edge
and over it, straight down on splintery scree
leaning back on his boots, a ski-run
scattering chips of slate, a skid with no stopping
down through the brief mist and into the tarn.
9
Tomorrow perhaps he will think about Helvellyn…
In the Unicorn, Ambleside
I want to have ice-skates and a hoop
and to have lived all my life in the same house
above Stock; and to skate on Lily Tarn
every winter, because it always freezes –
or always did freeze when you were a girl.
I want to believe your tales about Wordsworth –
‘Listen to what the locals say,’ you tell me:
‘He drank in every pub from here to Ullswater,
and had half the girls. We all know that.’
I want not to know better, out of books.
I sit in the pub with my posh friends, talking
literature and publishing as usual.
Some of them really do admire Wordsworth.
But they won’t listen to you. I listen:
how can I get you to listen to me?
I can’t help not being local;
but I’m here, aren’t I? And this afternoon
Jane and I sat beside Lily Tarn
watching the bright wind attack the ice.
None of you were up there skating.
Downstream
Last I became a raft of green bubbles
meshed into the miniature leaves
of that small pondweed (has it a name?)
that lies green-black on the stream’s face:
a sprinkle of round seeds, if you mistake it,
or of seed-hulls holding air among them.
I was those globules; there they floated –
all there was to do was to float
on the degenerate stream, suburbanised,
the mill-stream where it is lost among houses
and hardly moving, swilling just a little
to and fro if the wind blows it.
But it did move, and I moved on, drifting
until I entered the river
where I was comported upon a tear’s fashion
blending into the long water
until you would not see that there had been
tear or bubble or any round thing ever.
The Hillside
Tawny-white as a ripe hayfield.
But it is heavy with frost, not seed.
It frames him for you as he sits by the window,
his hair white also, a switch of silver.
He pours you another glass of wine,
laughs at your shy anecdotes, quietly caps them,
is witty as always; glows as hardly ever,
his back to the rectangles of glass.
The snow holds off. Clouds neither pass nor lower
their flakes on to the hill’s pale surface.
Tell him there is green beneath it still:
he will almost, for this afternoon, believe you.
This Ungentle Music
Angry Mozart: the only kind for now.
Tinkling would appal on such an evening,
summer, when the possible things to do
are: rip all weeds out of the garden,
butcher the soft redundancy of the hedge
in public; and go, when the light slackens,
to stamp sharp echoes along the street
mouthing futilities: ‘A world where…’
as if there were a choice of other
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