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for Lesley

The fortified farm of childhood stories repeated
so that they have been familiar dreams for years
scenes of stories from Border yarns half-forgotten
mart-nights in the steamy ‘cafes’, gossip-in-arrears
the cheviot Hotel and then lock-ins in the Fox.

Their names are in such lines as Hoggs and Scotts
natures the same, breeding true to their Name
and Nature; Robsons, Armstrongs, Milburns, Dodds
and we came on such a one after carry House, Catless
it earned ‘Middleburn’ precisely between steep burns

where the tongue of land commanded and demanded
pastures round-about but mostly below and sloping
away all for the Tyne far down the track we had come
and still missed the place in its hill as if hoping
it hadn’t been that, so counterpoint, hidden under glint.

Reivers had missed it had they not looked into the sun
and the weather, then passed it by as impregnable
without harry-ladders - “we’ll gan on ti’ Carrycoats”...
“I hope,” said the departing-widowwoman at our parting
“that you two get the place.” “It gans weel for oats.”

good oats, off just a few in-bye roods, or tetties, barley
once. She had read our interest, love, in its past then
as if we had felt its long dark rangeside nights hardly
already dismissed by electric burning over bits of its valley
where, dark, I’d watched otter and marts at their den.

We hadn’t so much walked round as climbed in if
hidden rooms in the bastle, added-on, passageways
low ceilings, and suddenly higher ones for no reason;
that lived-in, largely ummodernised lively unison
of diversity we could expand with, renew our ways

inside and out; for the flags ran into kitchen-garden
with wren and toad, rowan and casual herb-bed
growing the proven ‘hardened’ of our home lazy-bed
she said again “in here there is room for that lizard!”
for I’d forgotten showing the slow-worm to Marian.

1999