IAIN GALBRAITH
The True Height of the Ear
2018
Published by Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK www.arcpublications.co.uk Copyright © Iain Galbraith, 2018 Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2018 978 1911469 29 2 (pbk) 978 1911469 30 8 (hbk) 978 1911469 31 5 (ebk) Design by Tony Ward Printed in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall Cover painting: ‘La Lune Bleue’ by Francis West © Francis West Acknowledgements The author is grateful to the editors of the following journals and anthologies, where some of the poems in this book first appeared: Akzente, The Allotment: New Lyric Poets, Best Scottish Poems 2005, Edinburgh Review, Irish Pages, Modern Poetry in Translation, New Writing, New Writing Scotland, PN Review, Poetry Review, Qualm, The Times Literary Supplement, The Warwick Review. ‘Translation of the God’ was commissioned by the Cultural Foundation of the Canton of Thurgau, Switzerland, for the tenth Frauenfeld Poetry Festival, September 2009. ‘Passing the Steading’, ‘Stellar State’, ‘Strange Harvest’ and ‘In This Way’ were set to music by Ulrich Leyendecker and first performed on 2 April 2016 at the Orangerie, Wiesbaden, Germany. This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.
Editor for the UK & Ireland John Wedgewood Clarke
For Leonie and Simon
Contents
The void they haunt is living earth The Unclaimed Acre / 13 Voice / 15 The True Height of the Ear / 16 Passing the Steading / 19 The Bonhill Divan / 20 Auspice / 21 Return to a Different Place / 22
All of this and all its opposite Hacking into Forever / 25 Owlets / 26 The Catalogue of Ships / 27 Bronze Helmet from Pompeii / 28 Reversal / 29 Cry / 31 Opposites / 32 Find Me, Eat Me / 34 Siblings / 35 Best Man Dead / 36 Polecat / 37 Elegy for a Hedgehog / 38 Acherontia / 40 Strange Harvest / 41 Rising to Swallows / 42 Saw / 43 Translation of the God / 44 Scripts of Embleton Bay / 46 For a Margin The Dune-Compass
In this way, alight, we follow From the Train / 49 Meanwhile / 50 Arrhythmia / 51 Quail Song / 52 Ceyx and Halcyone / 53 River and Moon / 54 Daqquqa tat-Toppu / 56 Doctor Subtle / 57 Blackbird / 58 Cherry Time / 60 Hortus conclusus / 61 In This Way / 62
Foolish darkness pressing its face to the glass Settlement / 65 Five Raw i Suitcase / 66 ii Rhymes with Flying / 66 iii Earthworks / 67 iv The Skip of Stuff / 67 v The Little Egret / 68 Skew / 69 Stellar State / 70 Homage to Democritus / 71 Signs, Games and Messages / 72 A Mariner of Man / 73 Columba / 74 Graveyard by the Sea / 75 Translator’s Note / 76 Biographical Note / 79
For I have been before now a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird, and a mute fish in the sea. Empedocles
the Here and Now (‌) has not yet even entered time and space. Instead, the contents of this most immediate nearness still ferment entirely in the darkness of the lived moment as the real world-knot, world-riddle. Ernst Bloch
The void they haunt is living earth
THE UNCLAIMED ACRE
Few who come here (and they these days are few) will know this place by the voice of an acre nobody claims, a useless patch, its walls and rusted fences sheering Wade’s old road from alders and tussocks of matted Deschampsia, boulders of Prussian blue. There, you might ask, so what? Or to what end? And where now is the Harmony of the Heath, the dancing Fern? When I was a girl I woke to the rasp of reapers scything the hay, the fighting men of Old Norway crossing the field, and a Polish navvy died in the bothy next door. This is the spot where Samuel Coleridge, disappointed and shoeless, made sure to turn away and walked
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from our abiding rain and savage folk to liberty. Mounds under moss outline the plots of some of the tales I wish to tell. Over the hill by the pier I’ve already assembled the fish, a babe at arms, my first kiss, and ladies in high-laced boots. There will be a something for everysoul: the nightmare, ices, an ancient parrot, and whether. I’ll not forget the girl who drowned in the burn, the storm, the wrecked plane in the wood, or the white stag’s eye: desire paths and doorways to the acre nobody claims.
14
VOICE in memory of Francis West
The man was half a mile long, tipping the dunes into the fluted fields. Behind him the sun, the agile one, discreet, stalking the jagged rocks. Lazy-beds stretched pink beneath the skirts of the ingoing squall, and a flock of plover, starved for a week, gorged on the thawing land. Turned-to for an instant, lost, a hailing voice far out to sea.
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THE TRUE HEIGHT OF THE EAR
I drew aside the branches of a tree and peered into the light. I saw the faces, fair enough to me and odd how tall some were – or how, a rising tide of perished flesh my family was coy: the men behind white beards while sullen women stared askance, biding by the safer walls as if their god of rectitude could smell in me some dance or pool of sin, clasping to my breast a boy. And how the older maids were framed in holes, perhaps the squares of doors, while mounted round the teeming room a style in hand-me-downs was labelled Pindi, Kars, H.M.S. Thule, or just A weekend stalking on the bens, Sir Ivor shaving through a Brownie lens. Above us hung a throng of dazzling blades: kukri and skean-dhu, assegai, finger-nail, hyuck and guandao, each as sharp as a fish-knife. Was the curse of sabres tempered by our homely quilts and appliqués? Had the clash of cutlass chilled that air with truth? – all this for setting in some Adirondack rail inspector’s hut, but how the heck the shack all packed with keg and horn got to that place I could not guess. My uncles fought at brag around this board. A dirk-brawl stained its ear-height edge –
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a blood I swear I heard. Then Auntie Bella read a yellowed letter, asking if my Dad had thought he’d kick the can or what had come of you or yet your mother if he had, you who know so many taken in your time and no foretelling who must go. Now, she warned me, was the pressing season, respite none for all eternity – and was I not to Death as liable as the next? On such a ledge I’d never cared to dangle, grabbed our younger tight above the elbow making out I’d oh, forget my head, my thoughts all in a fankle. Backing off the stoop I watched their faces fall: left something in the van –must go, have to – sorry, be back soon… And still in view of pendent steel am dragging him across the pitching stage, yelling to the bigger boy who’s now in tears to get the hell in the car, and spindles skidding soon am churning down the dirt-front sideways. It’s time to shoot my parabellum through this ceiling, Son – and moving on we’ll chew on olden days, your mother slaving in the kitchen, gutting haddock on the day the boiler blew, and in the winter of this tale her liver failing. I’ve always wished you well –
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I write to you in hope you will recall my loyal letters when you lay my grey head in the grave. If only we could throw our arms around each other what a comfort we would have in this place then.
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PASSING THE STEADING
If tups and fank are all but ghosts the void they haunt is living earth: the way damp worsted rubbed on stone or shapes we work dissolve in rain.
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THE BONHILL DIVAN i. m. Isabella MacAllister & James Galbraith, married 5.11.1819, Bonhill
A vista wrought for a royal jaunt would likely sleek our Lord Blantyre who henceforth saw his pleasure’s commerce entered to the darkening glist of Delft and Venice – sequestrated promise downset in Claudian willows, an umbrous Bowling canal. Dumbarton Rock’s the smirr of ages fast in erd and stane, a warrandice to steamboats coursing for the grand emporium’s heart. On my lap’s a westward view from Milton or Dalnottar, clouds ablaze like fiery garments over the Clyde. The mind’s eye flees, reaches, squints, hurries back with dyers, printers, mills, the blackened grass: a weavers’ road that hurtles through the mutable estates where wick and virtue flare to fife and drums, the torchlit scintill of three hundred shattered panes. The late train to Tarbet gently halts and hums – a voice regrets the hindrance left across the rails (two boys, one me, later reported scaling this embankment with an iron bed). I return to my page of po-faced sheep – Arcadia complete with penny wedding, tittling billie, the guidwife in her mutch.
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AUSPICE First, raise your eyes. Look up into the sky. Euripides
Through the window I watch the buzzard mobbed from a branch by a pair of jays. I am here to remember my mother, who no longer knows where she lives or her name, but wake to find my own son’s head wrapped in a sheet in my arms. There has been some error surely? Cries the raptor, fainter, gone is the house you founded once in brick but not even you after so many lifetimes know who you are or why, when summer slips and the light grows silver and thin, a gossamer chorus flies.
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