Downland Sonnets

A reading of the sonnets is now available here:

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE3kxlyfzp0

 

Downland Paths

 

Downland paths are arched to contours;

their flexed backs maned with broomrapes

and orchids. I have felt them shudder

when I walked them, as though vexed

by flies. Nostrils flare: sullen holes

where beeches have blown over. There are

vast eyelids lashed with stubble; dewponds

are their glazed corneas. A walker risks

being flipped over by a fetlock, when

the wind hits gale-force. There are tracks

which end in hooves. Approach them

from the wrong angle, and they'll throw you

into a tangle of nettles and whin. You'll

wear them down, but they'll not be broken in.

 

Downland Mists

 

Sometimes on the downs, day is postponed,

and at the end of the barley-field, mist

melts into a sea of glumes. The vale

is an etching in glass, a glimpsed mosaic

of pale illuminations; there is no horizon,

or there are many. Old swathes are green

trails leading nowhere. The whole scene

might be sedimentary: a slow settling

of silts and silica beneath the glaze.

 

Time and space condense, precipitate;

earth, crops and air make a smoked pane

of faded layers - whites, beiges, greys.

Spaces yawn. My soul is formed of chalks,

clays and the failing breath of dawn.

 

Ramparts

 

How many miles of mist-shrouded ramparts

have I walked, soaked to the knees in dew,

with the solitary crow ever sentinel

ahead of me on a bare branch, the vale below

invisible, or emerging in puddles of light

as though the clouds were melting ice -

and I have melted too - melded with chalk,

gone eye-high to grasses, become a thistle,

a path, a thorn, moulded myself to contours

blurred by stubble, learned the slow and

glacial art of undulations, condensed

life, love and sense into an urchin test

as the crow has gazed, surveyed with his

wise black eye, evaporated into flight?

 

The Hind Leg of the White Horse

 

The curve of it is perfect: pure, hammered chalk,

calcium-coloured, cutting out and then conforming

to the line and sweep of the ancient coombe. Sunlight

enlivens it: a whole landscape's equine embodiment.

Put your ear to the turf: hear the urgent thrum

of his warhorse-heart, white lime coursing through

his pale aorta, and the inrush of downland air

through a blanched trachaea, into loamy lungs.

 

The downs become an amphitheatre of respiration:

grass-roots get nutrients out of dead bivalves

thrown to ground out of some antediluvian

sea-bottom. Evening sweats out golden oxygen

until the horse's breath is set to spill, like

powdered dreams, out into space from the holy hill.

 

The Spine of the Downs

 

The escarpment lay down to sleep, weary of flight.

Its closed eye became raised ground, flattened

at the summit; a long muzzle probed the Vale.

The furnace in those lungs burned down to a single,

buried cinder, too deep to warm the sward.

The tail, vaned as a stegosaur's, threshed about

a time or two, then subsided into the Manger.

Great, interlocking vertebrae arched themselves,

making Downs, calcified the whole heaving hill

into solid chalk. The breathing shallowed itself

to a whisper. About the hollow, dewy coombe,

dragon-legends echoed. Twayblades split the turf.

 

Some days, sunlight stimulates the circulation.

The long spine flexes. The creature almost wakens.

 

Downland Light

For Joe Thurston

 

It beams in at a slant, lending nimbus-

fringes to thistles, blades of grass. Land

is prone to tilting; time and distance

turn illusory; perspectives shift, or wilt.

Rooks glint white at a moment's glance,

lapse into silhouettes. Towns obscure

themselves in vapours. Horizons blur;

clouds confuse themselves with hills.

 

The Vale folds into verticals, pleats

itself inwards. We can't be convinced

we're not at the edge of earth. Chalk

flutes and shadows taper into voids.

Here, one could slip between creases, lose

grip on delusion, lean outward and let go.

 

The Moon Above the Downs

 

The moon gave half of herself over

for the chalking-in, surrendering

to the lapwing's deception. The skylark

eclipsed her, sang, then looped down

to the wind-flattened grass. Hares

caught sight of her, turned bulge-eyed

and bolted crazily, negotiating unseen

mazes. Primeval ways revealed themselves:

paths made by sheep and glaciers. Wind

continued her slow and whittling work,

bearing chalk-dust, spiderlings and seeds

into a stratosphere so immaculate that

the lapwings fluted starward psalms,

and moonglow etched out ancient forms.

 

Downland Harvest

 

Whittled down to stubble, the cut straw reveals

the hills' taut musculature, as though the blade

were practised in the art of making-plain.

The thin skin of earth is stretched, tight

as drum-leather, over every flex and distension.

 

A bird in flight might pick out striations,

bunched tendons, and high on the escarpment,

ancient scars, soiled and grassed over: the only

angular things for miles. Hillsides are fusiform:

gigantic lines and curves, laid naked, draped

for life-class, one scored with an arching, bleached

tattoo. Cold water-courses source themselves

in groins; armpits bristle with husks of oats.

 

Have patience - wait - and feel the respiration.

 

Downland Thorns

 

They cling to places that can't be tilled -

ramparts, edges of escarpments, sullen slopes -

and thrust out thorns with a wise misanthropy,

as if to say, "Axe me, and I'll spill blood."

Only the wind is obeyed: it sculpts them,

wakes them, withers them in the sere,

and when they die, uproots them, rolls

their gorgeous torsoes down the coombes.

 

Others have a gnarled agreement with gales,

thrust deeper roots, fleck the frozen air

with withered haws, their sagging arms

laden with the sodden wool of lambs.

They earn the permanence of stones,

stark as menhirs guarding ancient tombs.

 

Swallows at West Kennet Long Barrow

 

There were dull susurrations in the clouds,

and a stirring in the ripened wheat,

the burial mound sagging under its burden

of wildflowers. Those great sarsens

were dark sentinels, lichen-mottled

and looming at the threshold of the tomb.

 

As I probed, the swallows flecked out

like smuts stirred from a dormant furnace,

whirling into the atmosphere, the quick,

dissonant chit-chits of their distress

borne thinly on the wind, rising and

plunging whole fathoms, out of fear.

I withdrew. Rain fell. I turned to dust.

Like struck sparks, they swept into their nests.

 

A Thistle at Avebury

 

Rampart, ditch and stone have been here

four or five thousand years; the butterflies,

bees and hoverflies were pupal soup

just days ago, resolving themselves into

miracles of wings and compound eyes.

Tourists are more ephemeral, clouding

like midges, dallying at the Cove, humming

around the Barber Stone, fleeing for pubs

and buses - but it's the thistle I've come for,

with its chalk-riddled roots, stem fibrous

as a hempen rope, and that serried armoury

of spines. I crouch, admire, shudder.

 

It's already higher than the smaller stones,

spiked for survival, determined not to die.

 

 

Scabious

 

Let your eyes slip out of focus, and the blooms

are lilac interpunctions in a meadow almost gold.

In a wind, they turn to blurs, and bumblebees

must cling with all six claws, their eyes knocked

by pastel-coloured stamens. The unopened flowers

are a stippled green. Petals break out at their edges,

turn spatulate. At the centres, half-formed corollas

are crosshatched with stamens. Fat spiders crouch,

expecting hoverflies, and haired stems are astir

amongst the longer grasses. Walk through them: a spider

drops insensate; butterflies flit to more distant

flowers. The heat-haze wafts and sways.

 

Come closer. Stand beside me, with that quietness

of yours, in the gilded meadow all splashed with sky.

 

Downland Poppies

 

The sepals fall. Petals flare, crumpled

as tissue-paper torn from a gift, and a thin

fringe of anthers scatters pollen on the wings

of hoverflies. Landscapes recede: chalk

fresh dug for drainage, a blurring slope

of blue-stemmed wheat, a hedgerow marking

a road, recumbent breasts of downland hills

and wind-sculpted beech hangers, all slipping

out of focus. The petals flake away like

filo-pastry, scatter their wilting crimson

on the heated earth, and the haired stems

lengthen, catch themselves in wind, knock

against the sky. Seeds pour out like smoke,

or black ashes from an urn half-unsealed.

 

 

The Meadow

 

The drier blades are brittle as grasshoppers' legs,

the swathe hissing in the heat. Yellowhammers' voices

punctuate the lazy hums of bumblebees, tweezering

the air with needled crescendos. Purpled knops,

yellow rattles, bright orchis-smudges, sky-echoing

scabious and cranesbills, bow under the weights

of insects: marbled whites, ringlets rich as chocolates,

tortoiseshells flashing open, and pairs of little

skippers, dropping their hindwings as they drink.

Lizards still themselves, heartbeats visible

beneath their skins. Snakes bask on tussocks.

A burnet-moth slips out of a chrysalis, half-way

up a grass-stem, as my soul begins to flit across

the meadow, lit up with memories, ephemeral as a skipper.

 

Downland Sunset

 

It all smashes into silhouette.

 

You'd think the beech branches had turned

to cracks in the enamel - fortuitous breakages -

and gradually the sun scorches its course

down the glass, obliterating smaller twigs

in a network of explosions. Sometimes

it is eclipsed behind some impossible knot,

thicker than a trunk, where the hanger-trees

have coalesced - or perhaps a whole channel

has been bashed out into blackness - great

ruptures in the pane, snaking like rivers

with inky oxbows, whirlpools and ominous blots

of beechwood. If you could walk through soil,

you'd see: questing roots do much the same to chalk.

 

All poems Copyright Giles Watson, 2013.

 

 

Done