Ice
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.