John Cassidy Edition

8/6/2019 John Cassidy Edition

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JohnCassidy

Some

Selected

Poems

chosen by Martin Smith


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This modest selection from Johns work encompassesall his main preoccupations, and illustrates as

fittingly as I think possible, his complete mastery as a poet.

Martin Smith December 2009


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CONTENTS

Fishing Langton Pond 5

Quince 7

Frozen Canal 9

Pennines

Late-Night Bus Station 12

Disturbance

Inner Dark 14

Tactic 15

Still Life 17

Stray 18

Hill Mist 19

January Trees 22

Intersection


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The Shock of Distance 24

Defining an Absence 25

Meeting an Old Man in the Hills 26

Prospect

Finale

Willow Herb 29

Tensions 31

Aubade

Endings

Strollers 35

Legacy

The Scholar Speaks, in Her Retirement 37


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5

Fishing Langton Pond

When I got there cattle were standing around.Their colour drained as light slipped over the hillsAnd they showed as white patches, mainly. The

pond Was edged with the deep pits of their walkingBut now they were still as trees, just ears and tailsSpasmodically flicking.

The water was polished like a sheet of zinc And stiff hair reeds pierced it in bunches. I tackled up, knotting by torchlight; my feet sank

In the cattle treads as I threw the spoon And reeled it back, controlling its flutters and lunges Over hidden weed and stone.

I was almost surprised by the splash and scatterOf ripples as the spoon went in, by the reminder of

wet. The surface had been so flat that a clatter, Anuncompromising meeting of metals, a test Of temper, would not have seemed inappropriate Atthat first cast.

The water yielded, though, as water will. Therewas the soft reassurance of bubbles; the line

dripped. The spoon travelled easily to the hiss of my reelWith only the friction of silk, less noise than a

breath. My foothold locked in the ruts and I stoppedSinking, held in the earth.


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Darkness came and sat on the whole scene.Without my noticing, the cattle wandered away.The water went black and was without reflection.Had I let the surface settle, possibly a star Wouldhave swum there, but I was too busy For thatmanoeuvre.

Nothing was any good. The pond grew strange Again. After an hour's empty work I could feel its deliberate change From a cell of sleek and self-renewing life To a black volcanic sterile hole in the rock. Its deadness stilled belief.

The lights of a slow plane came moaning Acouple of miles above me. You always findPeople with somewhere to get to. Leaning Intothe bend of the rod I cast again, Taking apurposeful stance, but the pond Could havestood on stone.

I made no contact with anything in the dark. Nomuscular shape came twisting out of the pond. Noteven a scrap of weed stuck to the hook. And Iknew that every cast would be in vain And that Ishould go on casting till the wind At dawnbrought up the rain.


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7

Quince

This tangled, wiry old bushstartled grey days when they werebarely growing with a wash of scarlet, even before

the leaf buds broke on the samestems, forcing admiration wherenothing else would yet come

boldly into the open

flying colours. For some time the flowers glared, dominant till necessary humdrum leaves smothered their finestatement.

Sap raced and the other plantsrainbowed the coming season;this one gleamed only throughrents in its foliage, frisson

of blood colour proclaiming oddpetals still making it. Hazedmidsummer when the longrainless days wilt and biscuit

the supple green of each shoothides in this spiky prison the firstsmooth nodules of fruit. There are

maybe a dozen


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seen by peering close, otherssecretive at the tree's heart,invisible; in weathers to come,through and past that part

of the year when gold andred fruit load accustomedbaskets, the grey-green matt

just mott led quinces plumpand their skins stretch.

They will cling in Novemberto their thorned branches,stubborn, spiking the hands, asober harvesting. They willhave been

ripening, and in thosethin days their suddenscent will rise sticky,magical, like wine, anunduly rich surprise.

Slowness is essence of quince. That coruscationin March did not whollydeceive; once one adjuststo it, the ache

of waiting becomesits own achievement,a contraction of hope, tending amidmean thorns a smallsatisfaction.


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9

Frozen Canal

After three days of frost a boy on a bikeIs daringly first to prove the black

Top of the iced canal a highway now, Slick between banks off-white with old snow.

Dodging a bottle buried to its snoutAnd an iceberg tyre one-ninth out

He spins with an Indian whoop under a bridgePast his companions fringing the timid edge,

And they follow, all of them, to ride and skitter and glide Along the hissing crown of this new

road.

Then a heavy drumming in the frosted air Bringsthe butting shoulders of the ice-breaker,

The spoil-sport barge labouring to thump and crack

Leaving brick-sized ice-blocks jumbled in its wake.

Deliberate this. Under unreflecting iceThe sepia water waits for a shocked face

To splinter and blunder in, waits for a mouth Itcan fill with sludge to silence, throttling thebreath.


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It happens - often enough for a barge to be sentWhenever the ice will hold a footstep, blunt

Prow pushing the games away to the thrum Of diesels. The boys stand with their beached bike,

dumb

Till the devastating passage has rumbled through,Then shrilling at the helmsman, hurling futile snow.

But he, indifferent, steers on his ordered track,While they, saved, desolated, swear at his crouchedback.


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Pennines

The spread stone town lies quiet as the light.From some points you can look right down on it,The valley sides being steep; an almostAerial view at the cost of pulled thighs.

Rooftops mark the lines of streets like the splayedSpine of a fish. Early separate smokesFinger the air over the houses, stillWavering and uncertain in the bright

Morning, before their solidarityWeaves a sunproof jacket for today's use.To move out of that valley is to glideAlong the bottom where the railway ran

And over no-man's land to the next oneJust like it. Unless you clamber insteadSideways, driving your legs beyond the streetsTo stumble up among the tussocks here,

Where now in a chilling sweat you can sit

And spit on those rooftops if you want to,Or lie and listen to the moorbirds whenThey shout their mating noises in the wind.

No roads come up this way against the lieOf the land. You have to come cross-country.And there on the opposite hill a wallArches itself like a startled eyebrow.


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Late - Night Bus Station

Overhead lighting clanks in the wind.Torn bits of shadow run up walls

And over the wet ground Within anamber glow that cancels Whatcolours there are.

The gasp and shudder of a bus Readyto lumber away shakes loose Theglue between lovers. They uncoil Intochill singleness, congeal As twotravellers.

On the platform a wavering drunk Hangs to the handrail as if Riding afreighter flung About by the wildAtlantic Under rocking stars.

The deck heaves into a hill thenDizzyingly drops from his feet Asshe pitches, and the rain Spillsfrom the gutter in a greatSobering shower.

He drags his sickness away to whereHome must be. Buses' big tyres sharePuddle water with him as they pass.Heads leaning on the window-glassHold separate stares.


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Disturbance

I woke when a magpie hammered Itsmachine-gun voice from close range Into

my ear as if in the same room. A sharplight marked the first break Of the firstmorning in June, the sky A wholesmooth eggshell.

The magpie was smashing a sparrow's nestAbove the window, pick-axing through Tothe bald, reptilian young. Three dayshatched, they were spiked Out of that lined,close world by a black Bill and an implacableeye.

All their last energy went in a frenzy Of

wheezing. One was lifted fifty yards Away toa bough and banged and broken And gulped.It was there to be seen but I saw In my mindand lay close under blankets Unmoving,thinking of instability

And how it seems to live in another Medium,unseen, unknown, outside, Till the great beak crashes in. Knowing it is no benefit. I hearThe black-white-black flap of that magpieCome chattering back for the next grab.


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Inner Dark

August stifled the streets. Damp housewives leaned on their pram handles And moved as if tranced.

Old men wandered to where they could find A shadow and said Little to one another, panting.

Oiled girls shimmered brown As wet sand and poured themselves slackly Along the pavements.

From a dark doorway among the shops Anamplified female voice Flung a muffledchant. Electric

Bingo the sign said Over an opening like the black Cave mouth where all myths

Begin. Deep inside the votaries Bent under the dull Numbers running from the sibyl's tongue.

The old men outside Who too breathed hope as an obsession Sniffed out for loose air.

The crowds of others sagged in the sun,Relaxed, lounging through what seemedLiberty there in the blinding light.


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Tactic

I am walking the wall ina rough March. From

the far side of it

come volleys of hostilesleet and the snatch of an explosive gust

wrong-footing me every yard. On my side the

cultured green pasture

shines in the wet. Over thewall's blunt blade the drab long-haired moor-grass

is frantic: barbarous territory

ululating and lost.

I turn my stinging face defensively downwind,

prizing the neat

civil fields, the comfort of suave acres, the

tarmac road to town.

The wall sighs but does not shift; its fissures

whistle an unbroken

elegy signalling the humped, final stand

of its gritstone and

desperation. The flung sky, air, ground, all

agitated beyond


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containment, are certain to pour over,

riot and occupy

and transform. Better, then, to box clever, master

a new patois,

stay out in the open, rapid mover,

disguising a despair.


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Still Life

Consider the solidity of apear,

tear-drop inbulbous amber gravity-downdrawn stretchedfrom its stalk weighthanging

down out of clusters of leaves flower-endstar measuring the dive to ground.

Take note of the taut skin-stretch theabout-to-break-out white

pushing behind it the sweet wait for time or wind to bringthe severance

the drop.

It is all a vast expectancy,promise, hope,

fear.


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Stray

I see you mostly through glass sinuous along the tops of fences

or coiled compact on that tarpaulin roof-slope eyes undauntedly on mine.

You slide like black oil out of sunlight over the edge of dark, to move within your own strange commonwealth of stealth and brawls and deaths and frenzied couplings.

I hear you from my sleep and disowneverything. You are not mine. Only yourprints in the damp soil acknowledge youon my territory,

wilful hedonist, entrapped in nocontrolling net of circumstance. You ink across the new white morning yawningpinkly with little teeth.

I sit on the wall which divides us. Youprowl rub-rumblingly around my legs, asif innocent, and I, as if innocent, look softly on you and absorb the dark.


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Hill Mist

The sheep cries were echoless,unclear. That was the first thing.Peaks stark a minute before weregone now, and the colour in thegrass had been switched off, half-noticed; but the sudden deadsound of the bleating spelt openthreat. The rest followed.

Hardly had I resented the

clasp of cold on my neck thanthe mist stood solidlyeverywhere, almost nudgingmy shoulder to stagger meinto peat pools, feet baffled,unsure of anything, the veryground untrustworthy.

Getting down out of it wasnot the easiest of skills. Therewas a full beck running loudenough to be found if, Iwanted to try. Never follow ariver, follow a wall. Riverscan become cataracts and ropedown cliffs.

You see them streaking the sidesof hills, often the only glitter in agrey day, loud, silver and suicidal.


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They have a logic that Ihesitate at, a straight-downget-there determination. It isthe way of water.

But men build walls; they lumber

boulders in incredibly precarious places, they manage a balance you can only gasp at, but where men have lodged and perched stones there is a sureness, a sense of place, and other men find foothold.

Dare as they did and you can trustthem, moving with caution, palmsrunning over rough grain, lichen, tuftsof wool where sheep have jumped,reassuring loaf-shapes settled with soprecise an art, such knowledgeablehands, that they live as comrades.

Grope for a wall then, wander strideafter slow stride towards a loom of stone, past sheep skeined in condensedmist, still, stopping their chewing towatch you pass. They turn theirhorned, alien heads and stare. This istheir world. Bracken tangles yourankles.


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It was as it always is. The wall was there, in the end, pushing itself in my path. I caught hold of it, followed its side as it led downward,

and came to the valley like an awakening. Bright fields were thick with hay being worked.

In the warm smells I walked throughthere was friendliness; farmers askedhow it had been on top. Damp, Isaid, looking back up where theslope edged into cloud and the wallsvanished. It was a word for thedifference, a word. I shook myself dry.

Not far away the rattle of waterflourished again the river's dashfrom the crag and its jovialbounce through the valley'sacres. That free drop sparkledand surged in my head all day.The wall's art, too, wassomething I was glad of.


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January Trees

At the low point of the year withtrees little more than logs up-

ended and embedded in a soil likeconcrete, moss

of a strident green smothers eachbole in horizontal afternoonsunlight. There are days whensnow plasters one half

white, upwind, and the otherglows in its pelisse of moss. And Iconsider whether trees are notableonly

for what they carry, even in winter, or whether they stand, themselves in themselves, stark, being sufficiently trees.

It could be that display is here afunction of living, bodying outthe virtue of holding the whiteand green

apart and together, as, in two months, splutters of leaves will admit complicity, will hide and hatch out birdsong.


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Intersection

Morning traffic heading north panted and grumbled past

over the bridge, thickening quickly, blocking entries; houses were letting people out, and dogs sniffed through gates and stretched into a new day.

The labouring wag of grey wings, wide and curving, delivered a solitary heron over traffic and chimneys, bill jutting like a fighter's radar, legs neatly together out behind the tail.

The wingbeat's steady flail

at two to a second carried the tucked neck like a passenger without tension or hesitations, crossing the traffic flow to where miles away standing water waited.

His buoyant passing-by restated theantique conflict. Over all themoaning pantechnicons clinging totheir curving routes his free eyeglittered, catching a distant shinebeyond the reeds.

That lone flight left seeds of seductive images: the old survivor, hauling himself about his different business, invading even the centre, an unplanned presence. The growing day ground them between its teeth.


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The Shock of Distance

The street rushes inward

Wall to wall, narrows

By the minute as the day's

Traffic clots, swills and clots

Again in a jostle of halts.

Air thickens almost to a solid.

Eyes swivel only to cope

With immediates, with where

To put a footstep, how to clear

A coming shoulder, when to hazard

A dodging run in a blizzard

Of brake creaks and wheelslip.

If suddenly a head tilts

Back, pulled by the clinksOf scaffolders niggling a bank's

Huge facade, the shock Of distance comes in a quick

Look in a gap into the vaults

Of low sky and the agile

Line of hills, chalked with sleet,Lifting above the end of the blocked street:

Opening now on a different

Destination, trackless and hesitant,

The wind floundering across every mile.

That is not where people are.

It does not invite

Ambition's bitter spurt or the sweat

Of a long holding on; only troubles

With a wilderness of possibles

The cramped, determined roadway roaring here.


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Defining an Absence

This is to walk squinting into a sun which edges everything wintrily

with incredible hardness, even grass-stalks frosted into still sabresbristling at the bottoms of walls,

the walls themselves givensuch uncompromising presence

their weight is known as never before.

And never before have footsteps been like the tapping of a door someone

has gone out through and left loose in a cool wind, defining an absence no

sun will ever do anything to but sharpen like the sabres of the grass, or

plant as firmly in the early light as these blank formidable walls.


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Meeting an Old Man in the Hills

Up here the wind blows cooler than it sighed an hour ago. The town

below clicks on at dusk its orange-amber glow. The onlytrack is downward now,

hesitant, careful, slow, beforethe restless calendar

turns autumn into snow.


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Prospect

June grey as a rat's back scuttles between the feetbefore noticed and there it isdodged behind, gone. Theplanting spade still hangs inthe damp porch, useless.

The leafshrivel months arecoming, coming. Clouds willnot part over full woods;

only the bits worn throughto blue will let any gleamout, cynically.

By the time light breaks freeit will be hard, low-sunned.The trees will be wires bentagainst it, wet rooftopsmaking solitary and hopelessglitterings.


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Finale

Rain has bubbled through my sleepan hour outside my windowwashing the daybreak cleaner andcleaner only I find

it is not rain after all but swallowswired together in rows with theirthroat noises going on and on asthey

flicker to hold balance and I letmy eyes lie on their rust facesand scimitar navy wingssuspecting this

is the last look at swallows inthe collapse of summer sothere is a chance that next timeI wake the water sounds

will really be rain running

softening the crisp dropped leaveswith only the wind to settwitching the wires, emptily.


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Willow Herb

A stain along hedge-bottomsCreeping out of ditchesCrowding the rootsThat hawthorns twist up from.A foxglove colour, brashAmong sober grasses,Visible for most of a mile.This is a premonition,Earlier, it seems, each year.

Within weeks, everywhere. Pushing up banks, hectoring Cinder tracks, anything derelict. Sociable plants, putting their Vulgar heads together all over the place.

Odd solitaries live up walls, On millimetre ledges of rock, On the tops of bus shelters. Drop-outs

Or pioneers, these have a tough Time of it and, as often as not, Succumb.

Yet the tribe seeps on, thrivingAgainst disastrous oppositions,Tramplings, thin root-holds, tainted air.No place is impregnable.City spaces, roadsides, fields,Castles of rubbish, simmer

Empurpled through July.

Success is imperial. Whole districts lieDaubed with the colour, every crannyCarries a reproduction of the insignia.

Time has laws. In the endWind lifts seedheads in sporadicFlurries, fitfully thickening the wide airWith a blizzard of filaments.Late mist clenches roundTheir crisp autumn stems, left


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Like old men with bedraggled hair,Standing in empty fields.

Brown skeletal bunches

Loom still in pockets on shelteredSites, repositories of old hopes,Monuments after a withdrawal.


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Tensions

During a long winter Blasts of wind across the flat lands Tackled a few big trees, and clipped Innumerable chimney-pots. Cascades of slates battered the pavements And windows splashed into bedrooms Letting the sleet in an hour before dawn.

None of this could be shrugged off. The bass roaring in the woods, The high whining filling the wires Sang wickedly together. Hunched into collars we pushed outdoors At the edge of light, sensing A focused malevolence, ourselves

Picked out as targets for all this.Something was after us; it wasUp there at roof level, throwingLoose bits down, it was behindThe protesting tree, tearing its roots

Out ready, it was anglingThe world into hostility: it would

Get us before the sun made lightOf it all and the pressure changedAnd the winds died and we walkedBelittled in a world not at allConcentrating on us any more and the skyCleared for the wheeling of careless birdsAnd the routine slack circles of the clock.


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The mad whinnying of a starter-motor Shook the morning awake, and it must have been A bad morning for engines, from the sound of it. It looked no better. Light was just touching A few twigs, furred with rime. Mist hung about.

The night could be remembered. An owl on a lamp-post swivelled Its big disc face, one way and then the other, Querying the grass. A bus rumbled And hissed under its perch, but ruffled no feather.

The passengers' glazed faces moved In anotherlife. If there came in that lamplight A colourlessnoiseless pounce, no one knew. There would be nomore than a squeak as a life went

out. The morning had no tell-tale blood onview.

The engine struggled, coughed a couple of times,And sidled growling from the kerb, Slitheringover ice-patches and swinging Away to town.Nothing now to di sturb The mist. No sound but

the heart beating. Rhythms resettled themselves. The car would be throbbing at the pulse of beacons Somewhere approaching town. Clocks irritatingly

ticked Or pompously, publicly boomed outanother

summons. The day was moving; its metresmeshed and locked.


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Endings

Ash lies cold and unsmoking Just the colour of the damp daybreak Undistinguished from the dull grass Pieces of wood stones debris Of a dead fire.

Not a nugget Of heat no minutest jewel Delaysand offers a glow Holds a remoteheartbeat Energising a hope ascorch Clear enough to tingle theskin Of a plunged fingertip.

The moist Amorphous chill cushion of ashFails to respond with more thanSifting resistance as the daylightRises and compels acceptanceAdmission of the ruin Thenothing the finality.


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Strollers

The two of them walk under the frayed flowersOf park almond-trees while their child and dogTrot and wander along the verges.

He watches a point six yards ahead on the groundWith a deliberate fixity as if his eyes Wereheadlamps. He does not speak.

Her neck stretches and twists and neverRests. She is questioning, jabbing at him,Moving like a vigilant long-billed snipe.

Her voice flings splinters of ice across a smoothEvening. The sun hurries to get down Behindlong shadows. The air stirs, cooler.


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Legacy

The tractor ruts are granite, yesterday's bootprints fossils in silvered mud. The brief blaze of daylight will melt nothing.

Miles up a plane draws from hill-ridge tohill-ridge a perfectly straight-edged record of some roaring minutes.

The sky's blue eyeball is scratchedfrom lid to lid. It looks a flaw fit for

the world to split on.

The diamond bead is over another county, orthe sea. Its dim thunder drops onto thewood.

The indifferent past litters everything.Scars last. A magpie's mad laughterdetonates over the frost.


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I once had tea with Otto Jespersen.

We had been in correspondence.Things In the manuscript of Beowulf (Cotton Vitellius) I saw as pointersTo readings in the Middle EnglishPearl. I was a graduate student then,a girl.

I called, naturally it was at hisSuggestion, one late summerafternoon At his country home inWestern Denmark, Walking fromthe station. He was mostWelcoming. He cut a dark browncake. Later he took me rowing onthe lake.

His arms were sinewy, curiously brown, I thought, for a scholar's, I don't knowwhy; eyes Of distinct blue. We travelled smoothly In hot light. I felt I should have had A parasol. The sun, starting to die, Recklessly oranged almost half the sky.

He paid delicate compliments to my Scholarship. The oars were entering in And lifting, entering in again, Dripping crystals of light. The water Rolled back like silk sheets. Still, It was all so still, round our boat's smallturmoil.

I left him late, almost at nightfall.My head Was turning with thestimulus of talk. Any philologistwould have envied me; To bereceived by Jespersen, and shownSuch courtesy. He walked me to the

train, And shook hands. We did notmeet again.

The Scholar Speaks, in Her Retirement


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Across the half a century of my own Modest achievement, I have held thosehours And those colours, the blues, the browns,the clean Unfolding waters. All my researches were A rediscovering at whatever cost Of what I found there; or of what I lost.

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