Northborough sonnets
1
Finding John Clare’s name carved into a bridge
I pitch our tent for the night no one will
see us from the road but then before dawn
some drunks making a racket uncouth sorts
not safe for a young mother and child try
the next field this goes on for some time then
key to a flat from stranger in pub then
the rent unpaid and a cat left behind
linger in the station ladies’ close the
door and lift our feet when the attendant
comes round let ourselves out in the morning
fetid from pools of wee on the floor and
be on our way and whatever you may
choose to remember none of this happened
2
A man on a bicycle come to see
he says his daughter slam door goes away
best keep on the move if they’re coming for
us now pin in map and move to northern
town not open door to them either when
they catch up bundling food and clothes through the
letterbox bewildered old couple stood
on the path shouting we know you’re in there
grandmother is a very ignorant
woman she will stop at nothing to turn
you against me for spite I know she is
watching do not get undressed in front of
the TV letters pile up no money
now but safe where nothing can touch us safe
3
Until fetched home skulking vanquished at bay
mother pushing ninety now cataracts
fogging her view on the drive to the shops
sheer madness but still full of vengeful spleen
don’t read in bed barks at me it’s a fire
hazard don’t think you’re having your own front
door key spits while you’re under this roof old
so-and-so I keep my enemies close
now wily stratagem I know her game
I am in my childhood bedroom the view
remains the same the woods full of bluebells
hedges full of bloom as the poet wrote
family connection there I fancy
ah blue celeste of poesy and the
finer things in life you have seen me right
4
John Clare tracks the placid snipe haunter of
remotest shades marshy flats and stagnant
floods flushes only when approached closely
follows a zigzag course as it takes flight
walk out to Rutland Water and hear it
drumming away to itself mottled brown
and black in the reeds below the osprey
nests and incubating her secretive
revelation that may never take place
soldering the shallows with her needle
bill when the poet moved a few miles up
the road to Northborough his mind darkened
mourning the snipe’s peace that in dreariest
places will be a dweller and a joy
5
Mother whose figment of whose mind is who
you do know I’m here don’t you unsleeping
your voice carrying entering under
the door is it time for tea yet what are
you doing in there or have you slipped out
on one of your flits again carrying
your things in big heavy bags then slinking
home no acknowledgement and creeping back
upstairs to your hidey-hole yes mother
I hear all unless it is you not there
and who slipped away unnoticed while I
drag out my vigil and scribble my notes
on tissue paper not for reading not
for you mother years of this left long years
6
Going through old family photographs
removing my face emphatic scratching
cancellation of the never happened
or snip you out mother all the photo
cutouts tumbling under the bed into
the archive hand-copied parish records
births deaths marriages long generations
of pig finishers pure collectors their
gammon faces in the tavern gaslight
the ignorant unkillable bloodlines
following me from curtain to curtain
down the village street not seeing me though
not the secret laugh of the struckthrough face
scissored to flitters that pool at my feet
7
Splash damp ground ahead I enter the woods’
marshy acres far from the fruit-pickers
on the horizon and the rifle-shots
of the Stamford bus exhaust there is a
clearing where the roots open outwards like
two hands the spew of a low sinky foss
among the flaggy plots investing me
in old sallow stumps unwanted and warped
last-gasp commonage not worth fencing off
I see the sky smile on the meanest spot
and water pooled in my shoes now the damp
leaked in through any old hole stumble on
a brown-black bird tell me its name again
shot drowned in the reeds and its eyes pecked out
A pine wood in North Africa
‘I am in a great hurry. Could you keep this for me until this war is over?’
Sorley MacLean to Douglas Young, 25 September 1939
Among El Alamein’s
reversing dunes a pinewood
of the mind walks the shifting
ridge whispers rumours to
its roots of a waterhole
and rings with a great music
of helmets hammers banners
of the great wood in motion
in the scirocco, the divided
wood bright with the brightness
of the face remembered
in the phosphorescent
night of another sky.
Under another sky
the ringing of exploded laughter
and the creak of the opening graves
to salute the men departed
and welcome the men returned
the wounded Actaeon
bleeds on the sand and slowly
brain and heart converge
on one belief; it is the depths
from which they climb
that burden the mountains so
and the sap is known as it oozes
rising to its proper work.
Dear Douglas in the event
of my death preserve
my poem on the pinewood
watching over this sandy
foxhole file away in an
airless drawer its branches
and their steely shadows
sweating under a cloudless
sky and keep in your breast
pocket the needles I stooped
to gather once in a musky
handful somewhere Scotland and this
waiting desert met and touched.