A Poem for my Father
‘The first region is colour.’
(H.W. Fawkner)
November: a no-month grey sky
brings out the colours:
earth-red of a flowerpot in the garden,
brown soil and decaying leaves
washed fresh by rain.
The birch-tree is a yellow light
burning outside the window.
Inside, I pick over dead things:
a brush with stiff bristles,
tubes in an old paintbox,
battered and stained,
all magic gone except the names:
yellow ochre, burnt umber, cobalt blue ...
*
Alkali or acid?
It is the knowledge
that dies with the man who knew soils,
expert on phosphate and nitrate, on mulch.
I see him in his old raincoat
fixing a garden line,
or treading down earth round the roots
of a young apple tree,
or pruning with a knife
curved like the horn of the moon.
He liked to say he came south
in a green winter, Yorkshire
edging his voice in the soft country.
We would hear him singing in the ward
as we came up the stairs -
death-knell of a fine baritone,
the romantic, handsome man
who liked women, single in his love.
Over his bed the painting of a cornfield
he could no longer see,
splashes of bright red,
bluish-green elms, the fullness
of summer days we could feel and smell.
*
It was fear also that he taught,
white-faced, his hand
electric in my hand - a man
hugging the wall by the stone steps,
following the hedge round the field,
crouching at the simultaneous
lightning bolt and thunder crack,
crying out,
‘Who should we help’.
Fear, and a pride
that might have been humility -
a man with Constable’s
‘God’s gift of seeing’, who avoided public view,
making his home his gallery.
‘A perfectionist,’ he said,
‘that’s what I was’ - an artist
who destroyed more pictures than he left,
who found a place out of his time,
and set up his easel by river
and in field corner
painting
impossible
peace.
*
I have never seen a stranger thing
than his dead face,
false smile on an effigy,
an immaculate, dressed up corpse.
Outside, a downpour,
the streets of Christchurch
running with water,
the Avon racing full,
spray jetting from tyres,
leaves whirling or dancing
or plastered to the road.
I could think of nothing, only
a story he liked to tell - when
he was a young man working in Scotland,
one day, he did not go out in the boat
which was caught in a storm on the loch,
was not drowned with his two companions,
as his landlady thought,
who ran about the house crying,
‘Wheer’s my laddie, wheer’s my bonnie laddie’.
*
Oak branches tufted with grass
mark the winter floods. On banks,
between leafless trees, yellow
of primroses, first daffodils.
In the stillness,
a woodpecker’s hammer-notes vibrating.
From a wooden bridge, I scatter ash
which the current gathers,
bears down,
moving in snaking lines,
smudging dark water,
reflections of branches and sky.
I follow the way of the water with my mind
flowing -
through wood and meadow,
under Boldre Bridge,
past the Shallows, where he painted
and I fished with my first bamboo,
the quick mirror-surface distorting us,
as here, it twists the trees.
And for a time
all seems colourless,
until I look close and see again
the darkest dark that is depth
of colour - sky-and-water mix
of yellow and blue and brownish-green,
the surface bark, or a nest of snakes
shedding their skins,
flicker-tongued adders of fire
dissolving in depth, the bodied
escaping appearances,
the bodiless the broken the whole
flowing through.
*
It is the knowledge that dies,
stories one half-remembers
without the voice,
no particle of the living
reducible to an image or a word.
In this region
there are no appearances,
no painted surfaces, only fire
that burns with the life in things.
To hold it
is like putting your finger in a flame,
or trying to bring back an object
from a dream -
treading down firmly on the stairs of water,
rising slowly to the air.
And at the last something clutches
at your wrist and you wake scared,
hand tingling, your empty, open hand.
Page(s) 173-175
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