Part One--North Yorkshire
Above Settle
The contour lines come fast, like flood-marks,
or the ancient tracks of animals circling a fire.
Finally, I reach the top, and in all four directions
there they are: the stone barns, the moors,
the sheep scattered like crumbs. Then a mist
takes everything away, as if someone had
put white hands over my eyes and said,
I will not let you see, you cannot stand this.
*
A Landscape without People in It
Has no scale, so you pose me as yardstick again.
Don't. I'd rather think this bracken-strewn
slope the size of my thumb, and the sheep
that nibble its windy sky as small as
the knots on the dotted swiss that
crossed my bed when I was a child.
That white. That infinite.
*
Cow in a Yorkshire Meadow
She has Asia on her flank, and part of Africa.
The rest is water-- the white you have to cross
to arrive anywhere. When you started,
you were so poor you had only a map.
You could never have conjured
the dark green mountains
steepening to shore, the jewels
that hover who knows how far below
in the transparent sea.
*
After Kettlewell
The road leans backwards
through stone-strewn fields
whose walls climb
to the ends of grass
as though their builders
had intended
to wall off the sky
then bumps
over iron bars
onto
open moor:
heather gorse sheep
and, in the distance,
one stone house.
And Maggie looked at Ian
come off the tops to drink
and Ian the shepherd
unshaven
with his partridge-wing of hair
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looked at Maggie the publican's wife
as she knelt to draw
his pint
from the barrel
on the floor
and the foam flowed
over the rim of his glass.
And they ran away
together
and he built her this house.
Now a rare sun carpets the floor
through rafters
black as Ian’s teeth,
and the front wall's
fallen
to the steps
where Maggie used to sit
but the sheep
avoid it still,
leave even the tenderest nettles alone,
to breed their stinging gardens
among the stones.
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*
The Ballad of Foot-and-Mouth
West Yorkshire, 2001
One-ery, Two-ery, Ziccary, Zeven,
Hollow-bone, Crack-a-bone, Ten-or-eleven,
Spin, Spun, It-must-be-done
So they push them up-- the ewes,
the wethers, the lambs, the tupps--
With their yellow dozers like flowers o
Eena, Deena, Dina, Dust,
Catt’lla, Jweena, Wina, Wust
` `With their yellow dozers like flowers o
The ewes, the half-grown lambs, the tupps
in mountains now with their legs stiff up
Ein, Tein, Tethra, Methera, Pimp,
Awfus, Daufus, Deefus, Dumfus, Dix
In mountains now with their legs stiff up
The wethers, the half-grown lambs, the ewes
And what is motherhood now o
One-ery, Two-ery, Ziccary, Zeven,
Hollow-bone, Crack-a-bone, Ten-or-Eleven,
Spin, Spun, It-must-be-done
And what is motherhood now o
as the ash smoulders in the backs of our throats
of the ewes, the wethers, the half-grown lambs
And the moors all empty but for the wind
that moans as it licks at the dry stone walls
And that’s your motherhood now o
Spin, Spun, It-must-be-done,
Twiddledum, Twaddledum, Twenty-one.
*
Walls
We used to live here, the woman says,
taking the boy's hand.
I don't remember, says the boy.
Were there sheep here then too?
Oh yes, says his mother.
They used to bump our bedroom wall
at night. We thought they were visitors
at first, but when we looked out
into the dark, there were only sheep.
Were we living in a house?
asks the boy. Of course, says
his mother. And she picks up
a thick ceramic arrowhead.
And we ate off these.
When they were plates,
she adds. And we used to sit
on our front steps, and drink tea.
See those bumpy lines of rock
across the beck? Those are
bronze-age fields, and once
we slid down them on a tray.
That was the morning
the snow turned the moor
so white it was blue. They
have walked across steep slopes
to get here. The boy is tired,
spreads his arms wide.
His mother picks him up,
cradles his head against
her shoulder, and soon
he's limp. She considers
the rubble at her feet,
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now she's alone, but it's
speechless as the heap of
stones above, that's
Bombey's barn on the map.
Who was Bombey? She
doesn't know. And who was
she, baby on hip, trudging
happily along this path,
muddy no matter what the weather?
Who was she when her hair smelt
of kerosene? She looks across
the beck, senses, as if it were
her own pulse against her palm,
the curled damp of her boy's hair--
and slowly the long days return
when what mattered was stones,
rough, pitted, the biggest
she could find, and she leans
backwards, lugs them up-slope
to the half-made wall,
and drops them one by one
like heavy mice, at the feet of
the squat man she loves. And
the boy murmurs in his sleep,
when you had feathers, Mom,
when we lived on the cliff,
before there were walls,
when we used to be a bird.
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*
Moor
1
And what survives? Only the voracious: gorse with its dark green prickles,
its seeds that pop like a greedy baby's lips,
bracken whose spores in fall cause cancer,
heather, tough, clumping in gangs
that turn bruised in August, tiny purple blossoms that blend
with distance as if a thumb had smudged the page.
And each of these tries to choke the rest.
I am the only one, says the heather, the gorse.
I will kill you if I can, says the bracken.
Or, nothing grows but the barest grass, stretched to near transparency,
like the features of a dancer over bone,
full of the desperate beauty of young men in concentration camps.
There are no cattle here, with their soft eyes.
Only the primitive-headed, the slope-muzzled, their blatting
the sound of words before there was language:
Herdwicks and Jacobs and Lonks
bred to heaf to their home grounds if they stray too far.
Summer winds blow hard over the moor.
In winter the snow frenzies, swirls until all track's lost
like a crofter so angry he cannot think, but
clenches a fist at his door, as something he does
not understand pours from his mouth.
When the snow stops, the farmers go prospecting,
prod at the drifts with sticks. Once, Moon dug out eight ewes
and a wether. The storm had lasted ten days.
One had died, but the rest had eaten each other's wool.
What can dig, does. You can walk for hours and see only evidence :
the dark clustered droppings like full-stops gone wild. But then,
suddenly, the ground will crawl as tens of brown scuts zigzag
into the heather or between rocks. But, more often, you
stumble over them first, scribbles of fur and bone-- blinded, starved.
2
Fresh from Australia, Megan went hiking,
the ordinance survey for Yorkshire, West (her uncle's) in its transparent case
on a cord around her neck,
the way little girls have their names pinned to their first-day-of school dresses, thought Megan,
who'd done the outback, the Rockies, and, last year, Nepal,
but said only: I'll call you when I get to Grassington
before she set out,
cigarette dangling from one red-nailed hand, along paths never more
than ten miles, she knew, from a pub.
But the moor can change,
like a woman with a knife in her handbag, who makes eyes across the room.
And no map, no piece of paper at all, no page from the psalms, no verse from the
Quran, not even James Joyce,
can hold back the mist.
And the moor turned suddenly white, and four times Megan stopped.
And four times she'd have stepped off a cliff.
3
A moor's a wrong turn a blank wall
days spent staring
when I've been nowhere
for months
But I come back again and again
I can't stay gone
Because once
the mist lifted and I realized
why I was out of breath
I was at the top
and from this top I could see other tops
purple, dark green, dark brown
and the far profiles of old women --
mountains in the distance --
and in that moment I understood
what three hundred sixty degrees meant
to my soul
and I believed I could climb
the other peaks as well
though there were valleys between
with their cities glittering like grass
and their smug Wednesday church bells,
though there were A-roads between
with their worms of smoke,
though there were walled pastures between
where brown-and-whites grazed, false maps on their sides
And in that moment this was my religion:
if only
I could keep courage in my knees
the days of walking with nothing to show but miles
the long afternoons of up
the slash-eyed wind
the rocks to navigate by rain
the mud
even the redux mist
even the unstarred night
would not matter
And when breath came hard,
as breath does, I would know
I was not dying
but ascending another scale,
like the curlew for whom flight is not
enough, but she must sing too.
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