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| Charles Tomlinson [PennSound] |
from Charles Tomlinson's Selected Poems:
Canal
Swans.
I watch them
come
unsteadying
the
dusty, green
and
curving arm
of
water. Sinuously
both
the live
bird
and the bird
the
water bends
into
a white and wandering
reflection
of itself,
go by
in grace
a
world of objects.
Symmetrically
punched
now
empty rivet-
holes
betray
a
sleeper fence:
below
its raggedness
the
waters darken
and
above it rear
the
saw-toothed houses
which
the swinging
of
the water makes
scarcely
less regular
in
repetition. Swans
are
backed by these, as
these
are by
a sky
of silhouettes,
all
black and almost
all,
indefinite.
A
whitish smoke
in
drifting diagonals
accents,
divides
the
predominance of street
and
chimney lines,
where
all is either
mathematically
supine
or
vertical, except
the
pyramids of slag.
And,
there, unseen
among
such angularities —
a
church, a black
freestanding
witness
that
a space of graves
invisibly
is also
there.
Only
its
clock identifies
the
tower between
the
accompaniment of stacks
where
everything
repeats
itself —
the
slag, the streets
and
water that repeats
them
all again
and
spreads them rippling
out
beneath
the
eye of the discriminating
swans
that seek
for
something else
and
the blank brink
concludes
them without conclusion.
The Fox Gallery
A long house —
the fox gallery you called
its upper storey, because
you could look down to see
(and did) the way a fox would
cross the field beyond
and you could follow out, window
to window, the fox's way
the whole length of the meadow
parallel with the restraining line
of wall and pane, or as far
as that could follow the sense of all
those windings. Do you remember
the morning I woke you with the cry
Fox fox and the animal
came on — not from side
to side, but straight
at the house and we craned
to see more and more, the most
we could of it and then
watched it sheer off deterred
by habitation, and saw
how utterly the two worlds were
disparate, as that perfect
ideogram for agility
and liquefaction flowed
away from us rhythmical
and flickering and
that flare was final.
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