Matthew Hollis

That if the linen flapped too loud
The washing line was taken down
And if a shopdoor bell was rung
Its tongue was held with cotton thumbs
And if a milkfloat tattled by
It was flagged down and held aside
And should the rivers drown us out
We had them dammed at every mouth
And coughed our engines gently off
And wrapped our tyres in woollen socks
And sat awhile on silent roads
Or dawdled home in slippered shoes
And did not sound but held our tongues
And watched our watches stop, and startle on.

‘I’m just stepping out to get the cat in.’
She didn’t infact return for a week
spent on the back of someone else’s motorbike.
Suspicious, I admit, if only for the reason
that I don’t have a cat - and strange how
I can always tell when she’s going;
her lights fade like a battery lamp or a dynamo
slowing at a junction. I realise now
I blunder her borders, the space I know
to be hers; and eventually she comes back to find me
in a cold bath, or in front of the telly
by the flowers that drooped a week ago.
And just in case you’re any in doubt,
I have a cat now. It comes in, it goes out.

Finally, he showed her how to weight the arm
on a fulcrum so true the needle
had only to ghost on the vinyl,
with each revolution threading into itself
for a sound so honest it defied comprehension;
the 78s of trainsong and birdcall
like a passing tremor, or a flight of sunlight,
spoken recordings so faithful she’d vow
that was company beyond the wall
but for the sound of the needle’s own
entrance and exit -- for all the world
the open and close of a back door.

if
like your body
the sea were a body
then what is this I feel
as yard by yard
you descend into its arms
a slip of water
between your thighs
around your waist
the hands of the ocean
drawing you out
losing your step
in the dance

Beyond the gravel and the clay-stone stile,
where the small town narrows to a model,
I step into the vines and the last night-air
and wait for the dawn to come about.
In a loosening outhouse, in a flunk of linen,
you are still to the morning, not yet of this day,
and nothing should hurry you around;
not the sound of the milk-van or the baker’s kiln,
not the cockerel, and not my own hand;
though the sky is beginning to bruise,
and citrus lights the far field vines,
and, humbly, there’s a coming into colour:
the thin church, the reed of trees,
the green air whittling the river-grass,
stirring the first insects to gauze.
Watching this
is to realize how little comes of urgency,
how little worth-its-weight is, in the end, waitless:
the vineyards speckled with half-remembered homes,
their ghost of families, their trellis grounds, so carefully sown and stitched and torn, so
precisely brought to handle; where the must of pulp
is honeyed into ferment; where the skin is sensitive
and contact is measured to the minute -
that teasing brush with the body, unlocking
the tannins, opening the window of the wine.
Like the ullage - the breathing space I could never judge -
the balance of touch has undone us: that striking of patience
between presence and space, heat and the necessary calm.
No bottle worth its glass came from any less devotion.
And because you would not wait as I would wait
I settle instead for the gentlest reminders:
your flint of eyes, your pallor skin, your nettling
touched, but left untrampled, and barely stung.

for Kim
The day is late, later than the sun.
He tastes the dusk of things and eases down,
and feels the shade set in across the yard.
He never thought there’d be so much undone,
so much in need of planing: the haugh unmown
with its fist of bracken, the splinting of the cattle bar,
the half-attended paddock wall
scribbled with blackthorn and broke-wool.
Perhaps he could have turned the plough for one last till,
be sure, or surer, of where the seeding fell.
But then it’s not the ply that counts, but the depth of furrow,
knowing the take was deep and real, knowing the change was made.
And field by field the brown hills harvest yellow.
And few of us will touch the landscape in that way.

If I close my eyes I can picture him
flitting the hedgerow for splints
or a rib of wood to kindle the fire,
or reading the snow for whatever
it was that came out of the trees
and circled the house in the night;
if I listen I can hear him out
in the kitchen, scudding potatoes,
calling the cat in; if I breathe
I can smell the ghost of a fire,
a burning of leaves that would fizz
in the mizzle before snow.
There is in this house now
a stillness of cat fur and boxes,
of photographs, paperbacks, wastepaper
baskets; a lifetime
of things that I’ve come here
to winter or to burn.
There is in this world one snow fall.
Everything else is just weather.