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something
a home for nonhistory
The light isn’t easy to describe,
it makes me think of a jeweller’s work:
is it true light, or some artifice of light
shining in this quiet garden
from a hidden source?
Yes quiet,
it has taken us very long to find
the mercy of quiet
here in this country that was once called the homeland of horses
where the past is still alive.
It is an edge-place, a membrane
a threshold dividing one region from another,
and that must be the reason for the unbelonging iridescent light.
2
Because we have arrived at last
because of where we came from
you can sleep now
and I will stay with you while you sleep.
I have learned about you on the journey:
you have the heart of a father
but how worried even your drowsy face is.
I would take the burden from you if I could.
Cast off into the weightlessness of the dream’s dark water:
drift, while above your searching eyes
appear not constellations but a life necklace of cameos
which aren’t exactly memories
because, strange to say,
if angles of truth and feeling intersect at a yielding point
on the curve of recollection
what already happened can after the fact change.
Look up again:
watch the one you loved who was sent away
be able by this magic of reform
to turn back and for a moment or forever,
without a sound, as in a mime, be comforted.
It is worth all the miles of our escape
to have reached this outpost
beyond which nature’s pattern begins to blur
and the past is flexible
under an alchemical sky.
3
Afterwards the current is slower
the shape of land emerges
with huge bodies looming dimly on the shore
until, as soon as it is shallow enough to stand,
you smell the almost choking equine musk
which overpowers every other sense.
You have the heart of a father
but you must walk among these creatures like a child.
Go then with all your hope and hunger:
they are letting you enter the lawless cauldron of the herd
its furnace of being and becoming,
and though the shadows lengthen
I will wait for you.
No,
it was higher up,
in the humid and sloping woods—
branches crystallise the sunshine there.
It was in this shaded place that he was left,
the predestined child
who lies so strangely quiet in the patchwork light.
No cry of pain
no call for rescue,
does he almost know what lies ahead:
the horror and hardship?
For he will be found,
someone is foraging nearby who will stumble here soon.
It is like a labyrinth where he is going,
a walled-in world quite unlike
this green and rustling shelter
where sometimes there is the crack of a stem
and always the camouflage net of light
broken up in fragments,
while the child in the brief peace and needing no company
waits in the home of the mountain god
of a schoolboy who is early awake
and goes outside to throw a tennis ball
against a cooking-apple tree
and guess the angle of the bounce off the bark.
It isn’t very noisy play
if it can even be called play
but just the same perhaps it does disturb the elderly neighbours
and if so do they make no complaint
because they understand him being there like that,
on his own,
making something out of nothing,
and won’t risk depriving him of his tiny freedom?
Long afterwards all this comes back –
the pity and the waste of time – when,
at a church of middle-class euphoria some misplaced hope has led him to,
a woman practicing what they call prophecy there
places hands on him
breathes
closes her eyes
and says,
I have this image of you as a boy in an orchard, but terribly lost:
it isn’t a tempting orchard, not a garden of delight
it’s a sort of gloomy blighted moon...
no birds are singing, the wind is sharp and cold
and worst of all there is no fruit.
this so-called scholar
who tells me there are many ways into the highlands
depending on who travels and why, and
if you can’t go on foot you can get there in dreams
or so he says,
and his dark eyes are clouded.
Thrill-seekers make the journey
runaway lovers fleeing vengeance
soldiers and burnt-out mystics
escapers and lost souls
misfits of every kind,
but also pilgrims of a different type.
The highlands are unfathomably deep and full of wonders
he says, spreading out his hands.
Far down one special path is a barn with stained work benches in it,
the ground is slippery there
and from wall hooks hang
what look like garlands of brown spiders
but are not.
More people than you might suppose seek such a place.