David Constantine

The horseshoe


This horseshoe, lost by a workhorse in that ploughland
He trudged through in a fog towards Guillemont
The life-shape, the opening into, the putting out from
The footmark such as a spring makes on a hillside
This well-made useful iron thing, its finder, I
His younger daughter’s elder son, have nailed it
Over our going out and our coming in
For luck, in honour of the forgiving earth
And in his memory who was strewn there with the iron
Brass, leather, flesh, blood and bone of many men.


*


Lake


Sole self that day with a working pair of legs
A beating heart, attentive senses, climbed
High enough, far away enough, slowly
Against the river’s hurry, quietly

Against the din of it, keeping close to it
And passing the highest shieling that an ash
Had burst as thinking will a head, I came
At dusk to a lake in its own terrain.

There the hills backed off in a spacious horseshoe
On that flat plane I was the only upright
The banks were low, looped in a contour line
The lake had nothing to mirror but the sky. 

Sole self I bedded down close as I could
To listen: lapping, birdlife homing, settling
I watched the wind shunting the low black clouds
In tatters, fast, under a pale still ceiling.

Woke once or twice feeling a breath of rain
Glimpsed, silver on black, bits of a star-figure
Heard very high a flight of fellow humans
Touching on dawn after the black Atlantic.


*


Eye test


The ophthalmologist asked what could I see.
Dead stuff floating, I replied, the usual wispy debris
And some days a black spot, a tiny black moon
Sidles across the right eye on a trajectory of its own.

I said I liked to lie on hills under big skies
Viewing only the muted red inside my lids.
I can show you better than that, she said. And did:
She showed me the tracery of blood on the globes of the eyes

The paths and streams of it. Her science, her instruments
Gave me a joyous peace of mind. I shall lie
High in the heather under the sun in a still excitement
And shut my eyes and watch the arbor vitae

Putting up, putting out through the rings of bone
Ever more finely on the vast and painless red
Branching, leafing, flowering. Happy the dead
Who out of their life’s deep humus show what they have seen.


*


My friend’s belongings


In his mother tongues, or even in Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian
He would not struggle as he does in mine
After seven years here and far out of harm’s way
To get across to me his lost belongings.
The tongues he is fluent in are the tongues of before.
English is after. He shows me the palms of his hands
As though what he had and held were still apparent there.
He has what we call an open face, he has tears in his eyes, he shrugs
And as though weighed down by what he cannot show me
His lifted hands fall back upon the table top.

On a good day he will search for the words on his phone:
Olive tree, fountain, racing pigeon.
And sometimes pictures. But as to pictures
I am wary since the bad day when without a word
He pushed into my sight and for ever into my head
What they did, laughing, in his country, to a twelve-year-old.
Such things lodge now in the top stratum of his belongings.
He wakes sweating and screaming out of the old nightmares
And feels in the darkness for his phone
Which faithfully supplies him with stuff from home, for the new.

How he struggles to excavate his buried treasures!
In my mother tongue he cannot find the words
But I know, on good days, that he wants to prove to me
Back then his circumstances were very different.
And I do believe that he cultivated his garden
Launched beautiful canny pigeons into the clear skies
Was hospitable to friends and the stranger at the door
And what God put into his hands
Far more than a tithe of it he passed on to the needy.
He calls me brother, he does not begrudge me my belongings.


 

1
11 My recent encounter with the Good Angel
15 Red
16 Lake
17 Puddles on the track…
18 Maps
19 How it saddened me…
20 Eye test

2
22 For the love of it
23 High wind, sunset, high spring tide
24 Full moon and cloud-cover
25 Abandoned bulb fields under Samson Hill
27 Strata
28 Landfall
29 The lucky and the unlucky
31 Black Dog

3
35 At the garden centre
37 The lady on the lid
38 My Tilley hat
40 Both knowing, neither saying…
41 Recall
42 My neighbour
43 He awoke and found it true
44 Dad’s Wastwater
45 As when on a usual Sunday…
47 Open Mic

4
50 Ballad of the barge from hell
51 Ballad of the slave ship in the eye of heaven
52 Song: The way things are is the way things have to be
54 Ballad of the cruise ship

5
59 I will hold you in the light
60 First thing I saw then…
61 Côté coeur
62 The horseshoe
63 Fields
64 The tidebreak
65 On the borderlands
66 Stele

6
69 Leaves
70 Ash
71 Ways of being
72 Sycamore
73 The blackthorn path
74 Plane tree

7
77 My friend’s belongings
78 Young woman with a cello on the metro
79 Old men walking the streets
80 Unborn child of Elizabeth Gaunt
81 Young woman asleep
82 Rescue dog
83 The Marazion man
84 Dancer
85 Mazey
86 English lesson
87 I watched a man…
88 The morning after
89 Carousel

8
91 Six more Hölderlin Fragments

9
98 Chorus from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus
99 Chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone
101 Dolphin

103 Notes