Ice Read online

  GILLIAN CLARKE

  Ice

  To my cousin John Penri Evans, who took me back to Nant Mill

  Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgements are due to the following publications where some of these poems, versions or translations of them, first appeared: the Guardian; Granta; Magma; the New Welsh Review; Roundy House; Taliesin; Touchstone; Love Poet, Carpenter: Michael Longley at Seventy, edited by Robin Robertson (Enitharmon, 2009); Jubilee Lines (Faber, 2012) and Ten Poems for Christmas (Candlestick Press, 2012), both edited by Carol Ann Duffy.

  I am grateful to the following for commissioning some of these poems, or where they were first heard: Abergavenny Food Festival; the Bevan Society; Cardiff University for the United Nations International Day of Older Persons; the Commonwealth Observance, Westminster Abbey 2010; LGBT History Week; Literature Wales; Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / the National Library of Wales; the Millennium Centre, Cardiff; Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno; Radio Devon; Radio Wales; the Royal Society of Architects in Wales and the RIBA Council meeting at the Senedd, March 2009; the Senedd / Welsh Assembly; the Smithsonian Festival of Washington DC; Start the Week (BBC Radio 4); the Today programme (BBC Radio 4); Pierre Wassenaar of Stride Treglown Architects and Gwent Archive; Welsh Water / Glâs Cymru.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Polar

  Ice

  Advent Concert

  Winter

  River

  Ice Music

  Home for Christmas

  Snow

  White Nights

  In the Bleak Midwinter

  Hunting the Wren

  Carol of the Birds

  Freeze 1947

  Freeze 2010

  New Year

  The Dead after the Thaw

  Swans

  Who Killed the Swan?

  The Newport Ship

  Eiswein

  Thaw

  Fluent

  Nant Mill

  Farmhouse

  Taid

  In Wern Graveyard

  Lambs

  The Letter

  Grebes

  Burnet Moths

  Er Gwell, Er Gwaeth

  Honesty

  Bluebells

  Between the Pages

  Glâs

  Small Blue Butterfly

  Mango

  Senedd

  The Tree

  Blue Sky Thinking

  A Wind from Africa

  Running Away to the Sea – 1955

  Pheidippedes’ Daughter

  Storm-Snake

  Oradour, 10 June 1944

  A Glory in Llanberis Pass

  Shearwaters on Enlli

  White Cattle of Dinefwr

  Six Bells

  Sarah at Plâs Newydd, Llangollen, 5 July 1788

  Pebble

  Taliesin

  August Hare

  Gleision

  Osprey

  Wild Plums

  Harvest Moon

  Blue Hydrangeas

  In the Reading Room

  The Plumber

  Listen

  The March

  Archive

  The Book of Aneirin

  Lament for Haiti

  The Fish Pass

  Ode to Winter

  The Year’s Midnight

  About the Author

  Also by Gillian Clarke from Carcanet Press

  Copyright

  Polar

  Snowlight and sunlight, the lake glacial.

  Too bright to open my eyes

  in the dazzle and doze

  of a distant January afternoon.

  It’s long ago and the house naps in the plush silence

  of a house asleep, like absence,

  I’m dreaming on the white bear’s shoulder,

  paddling the slow hours, my fingers in his fur.

  His eyes are glass, each hair a needle of light.

  He’s pegged by his claws to the floor like a shirt on the line.

  He is a soul. He is what death is. He is transparency,

  a loosening floe on the sea.

  But I want him alive.

  I want him fierce

  with belly and breath and growl and beating heart,

  I want him dangerous,

  I want to follow him over the snows

  between the immaculate earth and now,

  between the silence and the shot that rang

  over the ice at the top of the globe,

  when the map of the earth was something we knew by heart,

  and they had not shot the bear,

  had not loosed the ice,

  had not, had not…

  Ice

  Where beech cast off her clothes

  frost has got its knives out.

  This is the chemistry of ice,

  the stitchwork, the embroidery,

  the froth and the flummery.

  Light joins in. It has a point to make

  about haloes and glories,

  spectra and reflection.

  It reflects on its own miracle,

  the first imagined day

  when the dark was blown

  and there was light.

  Advent Concert

  Landâf Cathedral

  First frost, November. World is steel,

  a ghost of goose down feathering the air.

  In the square, cars idle to their stalls, as cattle

  remembering their place in the affair.

  Headlamps bloom and die; a hullabaloo

  dances on ice to the golden door.

  Inside a choir of children sing, startled

  at a rising hum over their shoulders

  like a wind off the sea, boulders

  rolled in the swell as, sweet and low,

  Treorchy Male Voice Choir’s basso profundo

  whelms them in its flow and undertow,

  and hearts hurt with the mystery,

  the strange repeated story

  of carol, candlelight and choir,

  of something wild out there, white

  bees of the Mabinogi at the window,

  night swirling with a swarm of early snow.

  Winter

  When the white bear came from the north

  its paws were roses,

  its breath a garland,

  its fur splinters of steel.

  Where it lapped at the lip of the river,

  water held its breath.

  Where it trod, trees struck silver,

  fields lay immaculate.

  The river froze, and broke, and froze,

  its heart slowed in its cage,

  the moon a stone

  in its throat.

  The Geminids come and go.

  Voyager crosses the far shores of space,

  leaving us lonely,

  stirred by story.

  On the longest night the moon is full,

  an answering antiphon

  of dark and light.

  In winter’s cold eye, a star.

  River

  As if on its way to the sea

  the river grew heavy,

  a knife of pain in its heart,

  slowed, slewed to a halt,

  words slurred in its mouth

  frozen in a dream of death,

  came to, foot on the clutch,

  engine running.

  Struck dumb,

  in a curb of ice

  stilled in its sleep

  under a hail of stars.

  Where a river barge cuts upstream

  in aching cold the surface cracks.

  The drowned stir in their dream

  as boat and boatman pass.

  The shoals lie low,

  silvers of elver, salmon like stones. />
  The backwash cuts the floe

  to spars and bones,

  the brimming ribcage

  of a drowned beast.

  Ice Music

  Locked twelve floors up over the frozen Ely,

  I show you the silver bones of the river

  afloat on black water.

  A hundred miles away, checking the sheep late,

  you show me the light of the full moon through the larches

  magnified in every lengthening snow-lens.

  Stretched between us across the cryosphere,

  white counties, fields, towns, motorway, blocked B roads,

  the deepening geography of snow.

  We both hear the music, the high far hum of ice,

  strung sound, feather-fall, a sigh of rime,

  fog-blurred syllables of trees, sap stilled to stone,

  morning and evening, a moan of expanding ice

  a timpani of plates colliding, a cry of icicles

  tonguing the flutes of our tin roof.

  Home for Christmas

  A pause in the blizzard and you fetch me home

  by motorway and marble corridor,

  the last hill from Blaen Glowan slippery, slow,

  the car crawls slipshod to the door.

  Tonight we lie together listening

  as miles of silence deepen to the coast.

  Snow blinds the rooflights.

  Roads forget themselves to north and east.

  I sleep, wake, sleep again dreaming in stories,

  turning, turning, landlocked in a myth,

  our white room drifted deep

  in moon-work of the silversmith.

  All night a breath from the east

  drives drifts off the fields through the avenue of beech

  to fill the lane with waves of a frozen sea

  so wild and still by morning nothing can pass.

  We rise, dress, light fires, carry hay

  to twelve ewes waiting hungry at the gate.

  Birds gather in the garden for their feed

  of crumbs, crusts, peelings, nuts and seed.

  Our wild-tame neighbours, fellow inhabitants,

  eye my scattering hands in hunger’s silence.

  I set soup simmering, dough rising in a bowl

  as in the old days in our early glow,

  like being new here, in this house, this place,

  like being young and bold, bravely in love,

  like staying alive and brazening out the ice

  and snow, like being up for it, the shove

  to sharpen up, to take the great adventure

  of living the difficult day, the glamour.

  Snow

  We’re brought to our senses, awake

  to the black and whiteness of world.

  Snow’s sensational. It tastes

  of ice and fire. Hold a handful of cold.

  Ball it between your palms

  to throw at the moon. Relish its plushy creak.

  Shake blossoms from chestnut and beech,

  gather its laundered linen in your arms.

  A twig of witch hazel from the ghost-garden

  burns like myrrh in this room. Listen!

  Ice is whispering. Night darkens,

  the mercury falls in the glass, glistening.

  Motorways muffled in silence, lorries stranded

  like dead birds, airports closed, trains trackless.

  White paws lope the river on plates of ice

  in the city’s bewildered wilderness.

  White Nights

  In the luminous pages of the night,

  under the deep drift of the duvet,

  that silence like the world gone deaf.

  In clouds of cold our bedroom holds its breath

  like wartime winters. Roads unmake themselves

  across a trackless land caught in the Mabinogi.

  I’m wakeful, stalled by a stuttering line of verse.

  By dawn, the garden hasn’t stirred. Not a breath

  shakes off the snow. Trees stand like death,

  locked in that cold wedding in the story,

  house, fields, in forever’s frozen air.

  Day after day the wait, weighted, bridal.

  This is what Marged knew under this roof,

  thatched then, I suppose, a hundred years ago,

  quilt and carthen weighing her bones like stone,

  hay-dust, cold, the sickness in her lungs, the knell

  of the cow lowing to be milked, kicking its stall,

  lamp and stove to light, on her last winter dawn.

  carthen: a traditional Welsh blanket

  In the Bleak Midwinter

  trees stand in their bones

  asleep in the creak of a wind

  with snow on its mind.

  Come spring they’ll need reminding

  how to weep, bleed, bud, grow rings

  for cruck, or crib, or cross,

  to break again in leaf.

  The heartwood’s stone, grief

  of sap-tears frozen at the root.

  While trees are dreaming green,

  ice unfurls its foliage

  on gutter, gate and hedge,

  ghost-beauty cold as snow,

  like the first forest, long ago.

  Hunting the Wren

  Darkness.

  Dawn a wound in the east.

  The garden’s a ghost.

  I set the kettle purring,

  switch on the tree lights

  in the glass-walled room.

  Above the flight to Bethlehem,

  the angels and cherubim,

  the electric galaxies,

  on the tree’s top mast

  something alive, a dark star,

  a flutter of flight,

  of bird-bewilderment.

  A wren has dreamed a forest

  multiplied in glass,

  as tree dreamed bird into being,

  its boughs and shadows spread

  on a forest floor of snow.

  I catch it in two hands,

  a cup of wren,

  release it to a frozen land.

  Morning again and it’s back,

  a star of bird shit on the piano.

  Good luck, my mother used to say.

  Carol of the Birds

  Winter sun is cold and low,

  cry the kite and crake the crow,

  bird of flame, bird of shadow,

  ballad of blood on snow.

  Owls are calling llŵ, llŵ, llŵ,

  Kyrie, hullabaloo.

  Small birds come without a sound,

  starving to the feeding ground

  where the robin with his wound

  carols the ice-bound land.

  Noctua, hibou, gwdihŵ,

  owl’s lullaby – who? who? who?

  The story tells of pain and blood,

  the troubles of a restless world,

  a star that lights the snowy fields,

  towards a newborn child.

  Owls are calling llŵ, llŵ, llŵ,

  Kyrie, hullabaloo,

  noctua, hibou, gwdihŵ,

  owl’s lullaby – who? who? who?

  Freeze 1947

  Long ago in the first white world, school closed.

  The park disappeared, the lake froze,

  the town lost its way, sea struck dumb

  on the beach. Birds held their tongues.

  Land lay spellbound. World was an ice garden

  beyond fern-frozen glass. Trees held out white arms,

  waltzed with the wind and froze to stone.

  On doorsteps bottled milk stood stunned.

  The polar bear rug on the living room floor

  rose from the dead, shook snow from its fur

  and stood magnificent on all fours,

  transfigured, breathing flowers.

  And a girl on the road from school was stolen, her breath

  a frozen rose, her marble sleep, death.

  They hid
the paper. ‘Babe in the Wood’ it said.

  I thought of her school desk, its name-carved lid

  slammed on slurred air, her face blurred

  over books her eyes of ice would never read,

  her china inkwell emptied of its words,

  the groove for her pen like a shallow grave.

  Freeze 2010

  A girl found murdered by the road,

  like detritus half-buried in the snow.

  Grief howls in a suburban street, wild

  as Demeter, who put the world to sleep,

  a mother in perpetual winter weeps

  for Persephone, her stolen child.

  New Year

  In the fields cold deepens in layers.

  Sheeted in blizzard the farms drowse

  in the dark, their living names ablaze

  across the fields in golden windows.

  Dead houses shut their blind eyes long ago.

  Their dead lie ruined under snow.

  See the footprint of the old school by the Glowan,

  whose waters under the bridge chant children’s games;

  the wound of a forge, where still the field-name

  rings with iron, the stamp of a hoof on stone.