Red House Page 3

  Asleep in their wagons, the stove door ajar

  The oil lamp tipped. And scores stamp

  A last ghastly dawn patrol – their crook a rifle

  Cigarettes for their bible.

  The hills are not high. High enough

  To exist outside us, our low troubles

  At the school gates the children look up

  And see with a shock of memory

  That the earth gathers itself

  Into another world

  One closer to the sky

  Once peopled by shepherds,

  Who inherited the high roads from kings and saints

  As they passed, withy ropes about their shoulders.

  Who spoke little, and wore tall hats

  Bawled gently at their dogs,

  Who were themselves

  Creatures apart

  Times when the mist comes up

  And rolls like weighted grey

  Down the scarp, up there

  The cars see their lamps reflected back

  A metre ahead, and the back of her is silent

  But never like a moor, never fierce like that

  She’d carry you back to your own gate

  On the palm of her hand – not bury you alive.

  Her spine is a landshed, and a land of itself

  A land of haunches and shoulders, and glistening fields

  Impossible that they weren’t in love with her

  The kindness of her miles, the smalls of her back,

  The blazing white of her summers.

  The Bible is her book: she wrote it for her shepherds

  To train them in oblivion and seasons

  And the time she knows, the slowest time on earth.

  She wrote it in chalk, in rabbit droppings, and lady’s smock

  She wrote it in sweet marjoram and she adorned it with bells

  And it has no meaning for anyone, except the shepherds

  Who are gone.

  All Souls’

  After Charles Causley

  Summer is over. Autumn’s lovely cells

  Are collapsing and the yellow pears are underfoot

  Call it mellow call it rotten, until the frost comes

  And stops the rot like a knife, and the wasps fall midflight

  Masses of apples slowly becoming the soil. I am not afraid of the cold

  But every year wheels round and its deafening crescendo cut short

  When the temperature drops, plummeting like the weighted line

  Into the black sea. November, black sea, more terrible than the last –

  And only her busy fingers to weave charms, and her laugh

  Tickling ribs on All Souls’, food and drink enough

  For all the dead, when she sees the first frost edging the last leaves.

  Oh she proves that life, short life, is the only prize

  And don’t the dead know it, lifted from the oceans

  The cold earth, they nudge the windows and whisper:

  Never… ever… been… away…

  Annunciation

  i.m. Irena Sendler

  Take my child, take it quickly now and have

  Done by it, do by it as you would any child

  And place it in your toolbox, gently

  Amongst the pliers and the rags

  Anoint it with linseed and make it a bed of copper.

  From here in there are two worlds. One bought of this

  Transaction, weighed and found wanting,

  The other in which the womb is soldered shut daily

  Death is your mother, slipping you mercury in her breast milk

  Letting the gold from her finger drown in the toilet bowl

  Wrenching you from her heart with an iron bar

  Take my child, let me never see it again

  Let me never feed it again, or run my finger down its spine

  Or open its palm and press it against my lead-filled mouth

  From here in there are two worlds. One drops like the cold rain

  In the cold streets, as you hurry away with your weight of flesh

  The other crumples and is gone

  Irena Sendler rescued many children from the Warsaw Ghetto. She entered the Ghetto on the pretence of inspecting sanitation. Most of the children she saved were orphaned by the Holocaust.

  The Alphabet of Emigration

  Aaron was the first letter of the alphabet

  And how it seemed then, a sort of greed

  Hugging a name which opened the alphabet not once

  But twice, and going on to envelop anteater and antelope

  And all manner of beasts, down to the zebra who cantered

  To that town, because he had heard the fame of Aaron who took everyone.

  Alef-bet, from a to zet, their last possession sold, their books, their gods

  Their neighbours, the old kings, the hard winters, gone, gone, gone

  And even the memories reduced and wrung out on balconies

  Jettisoned like old clothes, shorn like the wolf’s fur, the leopard’s spots

  Ot a do ya the new is much like the old, it has the same horrors

  Similar joys, it is only new, Aaron, the first time you hear it

  The old creatures brought their mocking tongues, Aby

  They say to the bears, the cheetahs, their daughters,

  If only your souls will be at home, for we look back at the waters

  From the bows of a boat, paying out the past

  Like a rope which will jam fast, in this, Aaron’s place,

  Aaron’s bath where the carp dive, the eel flitters

  Ghosts, says Aaron, like the horses drinking at inlets, the jetties

  The cool water, the nightingales, the open river

  Stacks inhabited by the lonely stork,

  Tracks up to villages, walnut and willow

  Empty windows where bills once yellowed

  Odessa, Hamburg, Liverpool, Cork

  From anywhere in Europe via Rotterdam

  Sail on the Zaandijk, the Zyldijk, the Zaandam

  Agora

  Athens, 2010

  All along the road their standing silhouettes

  Behind the makeshift tables, the stretched sheets

  Heaped high with sunglasses and brass-clasped leatherette –

  And only disregard from the Sunday crowd, the slow mockery of feet.

  How black they are. The night unpierced by stars

  Absorbs less light than them, but they throw off passing stares

  And make an emptiness of themselves, like the desperate anywhere.

  Who on earth would want their desolate luxury?

  The dark rows of sunglasses gazing at the sky

  They stand listless guard over the daylight fakery

  Without a word, a pleasantry – not even a welcome lie.

  Come see, come touch. Instead they keep watch

  Their genius is this: to haul away their catch

  And be bodily transformed to nothing, whilst we see nothing much.

  A police car, still far away, and the drivers in sunglasses

  The very same as these, but wearing the authority of a brow,

  Swims slowly downstream and makes several passes

  Each time the men draw further into their own halo

  Seeming trees, railings, dark ghosts with bundles and table-cases.

  It passes. They are men again, and upon all their faces

  Their feelings. One works his mouth in fear and dumbly paces

  But another looks down the road in bold indifference

  And unties his bundle so it flashes out like a cry

  And hears his mother’s sharp voice: have some sense

  A childish act like that – you’ll lose your living, boy

  The police car begins again its fateful round

  At last he bends to gather plastic from the ground

  And bears it on his shoulder like a wound.

  Now he slips into the crowd, for the crowd is sweet
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  Unfettered, desiring pleasure, bearing its own cheap goods

  Constant, like the tide, it swells to fill the street

  And those borne in it have no past and no roots:

  They have forgotten the enterprise of migration

  And believe again in the hibernation

  Of swallows in the water’s deep.

  Sweet Companions

  After Marina Tsvetaeva

  On the next day there was a funeral for the traveller boy.

  All the travellers came and stopped for the day

  And formed a procession, for he had been a golden one

  Cut down in flight by a car without headlights on.

  Two twin girls walked behind the coffin

  Keening like lost hens, arm in arm and sobbing

  They were peaches, thought the men, ripe for the picking.

  Pick us, they urged silently, our mouths are old with sobbing

  So place your hands on us and be our first intimation of

  Death. And these men, whose core was empty as an oak

  Pared from them by wasp and rot and the sight of him

  Laid out like a splintered choir boy, needed no second

  Asking. Telling that night the tall tales of bravery

  About the fire, not on the steppe as the fiery sun

  Is eaten by the earth, but alongside the dump

  Where the vans are parked up, in a stink of green

  And shit, and two signs say no pikeys we say no paying

  For pikeys there is no humility nor yet cast asunder

  Nor yet touched by death and I tell you like an evangelist

  There are places where love is still possible tangled in lust

  Like two bodies, and sons born of the earth’s dust

  Which ate the sun as it dipped

  Behind the municipal recycling and resource renewal plant

  Which passes round here by the name of tip.

  Laughter

  When I awoke it had snowed

  And it was the old geological snow

  Snow upon snow, snow

  Upon snow, and the sky was wet clay

  As if the potter’s wheel had just ceased spinning

  When I awoke, the farmer pushed back the steel door

  Of the barn, and the cows were blinded.

  Not a week before when the hose to the trough

  Split out there on the down, the water sprinkled out

  Like manna from heaven, and settled on every blade

  A million glass thumbs all pointing upwards:

  Spare him, that even with his wound

  He made a ring of beauty.

  We went over the fields

  And the mist met the snow, which had found every berry

  Wised itself to the holly curl,

  The fox had gone, but he had danced a new time –

  And into the woods bent down like wild beasts to veer

  Fast over ditches and warm streams licking brown leaves

  To themselves, fast like that, there was a sound coming from us

  And it was laughter.

  Wolstonbury

  for my children

  I leave to my children Wolstonbury Hill

  An island in the morning, with the mist at its heel

  Pressing like a tide at its silent green slopes –

  Day at the top – yet the underworld sleeps.

  In winter the dewpond slithers with ice

  And the trough glances back with the swiftness of skies

  The branches are empty that the moth-wren shook

  Where we broke our path through the wreck of the dock.

  I saw a crow and her damp children once

  They squatted and watched the cows from a fence

  The calves trailed bloody umbilical cords

  I never thought crows to be tender before –

  Wind-kicked, the hawthorn’s a stumbling boy –

  But a blossoming hawthorn once witnessed joy

  I have not breathed enough of the steep of the hill

  But none of our kind ever quite had their fill.

  In summer we climb the steps of thin root

  And hear the grass squeal and wrench underfoot

  And the blood in our ears and the scratch from the briar:

  Are all the proof we need we’re alive.

  Yarrow and ragwort, clover and thyme

  The earth echoes hollow. It says: I am your home.

  And you have lain down so often to touch

  The bedstraw, the sheep’s bit, the violet, the vetch.

  This is your hill and this is your home

  I bequeath it to you, and here you will come

  And here you shall be kings and walk tall –

  And be crowned by the buzzard, like Wolstonbury Hill.

  (I do not think there’s a luckier king

  Than he that knows how the skylarks sing –

  Like unravelling tangles of sky-blue wool

  And that I learnt on Wolstonbury Hill.)

  Wolstonbury Hill – a finger of sound

  A knuckle, a kneecap, a grassed shoulder-round

  Take care of my children, and let them be still

  On the bright palm of Wolstonbury Hill.

  Late winter, like the tide retreating,

  Throws ever hollower frosts across the grass

  A complicated battle has been won, a port taken

  The ships of spring allowed to pass

  Still under the dead of night, and crasser

  Greasier, shrunk – inconceivable like frozen rope

  And still for many days it is unclear:

  Winter cycles jaunty out to see his lover

  A rifle slung across his shoulder

  And ambushed, cannot even muster fear.

  How can fortunes change this fast?

  Light is suddenly divided and increased

  Like a flank action stemming in the south

  Shivering with redwings in the hedge

  Faltering with spring’s irresolute core.

  Is this the meaning then of war?

  A few hours when all hangs in the balance

  And spring prepares to hang its head in shame

  And who knows why winter then surrenders?

  How every trembling victory is the same –

  And history, happening like the seasons,

  Spring is righteousness upon despair

  And with a thousand pretty reasons

  Trusses winter, beats it, shaves its hair.

  Blessing

  for Livvy and Jamie

  That your love may be a walled garden

  Newly tattered by rain, which comes suddenly

  And stutters its few pearls on the lady’s mantle

  And in this walled garden, which is your love

  Lupins spread their fingers, honeysuckling

  Moths bear the walls’ patterns, goldfinches tap –

  Teasels tickle. This for you, who are no ordinary lovers

  Who drink rain and mist and above all light

  That dances and creeps and hopes

  That your love may be wild and rampant

  Multiplying like the mysterious foxgloves

  Sweet and persistent as mallow

  Fire-tipped like phlox

  In its fierce dance of reconciliation

  And meadowsweet and woodruff

  Come to scent the cool halls of your

  Marriage. Your love is a walled garden

  May season follow season

  Scent follow scent

  The pattern of love flourish and root itself

  Deeper and wider and lay its own seeds

  Bluebell and harebell and comfrey and sage:

  In the naming of love how sweet it grows

  A hundred greening names to your young garden

  In its ancient walls. Your love

  Is a walled garden, and yet there will be

  No name to contain it

  About the Author

&nb
sp; SASHA DUGDALE was born in Sussex. Between 1995 and 2000 she worked for the British Council in Russia, where she set up the Russian New Writing Project with the Royal Court Theatre. She currently works as a translator and consultant for the Royal Court and other theatre companies. Many of her translations have been staged, one of which, Plasticine by Vassily Sigarev, won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. She has published two collections of translations of Russian poetry and, with Carcanet, two collections of her own poetry, Notebook (2003) and The Estate (2007). In 2003 she received an Eric Gregory Award.

  Also by Sasha Dugdale from Carcanet / OxfordPoets

  Notebook

  The Estate

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2011

  by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  All rights reserved

  © Sasha Dugdale, 2011

  The right of Sasha Dugdale to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  Epub ISBN 978–1–84777–943–4

  Mobi ISBN 978–1–84777–944–1

  The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England