Northumberland Raga

(Roughside, near Tarset, Hexham)

                        1 (after Lorca)

I last saw Roughside at sunset

on top of its hill    its chimneys smokeless    asserting domain

over pressing congregations of fir trees

manufactured trees    plantation growths

like cancer choking life from the throat of the hill

I rapped on the padlocked door

heard not even the rustle or scratch of a mouse

not even an echo    just absence    

not even a ghost nestling in that old stuffed chair

There was only an owl    a short eared owl     

regarding me silently from the gable

I once had a cottage where I lived with a girl

who passed away so completely

she's gone forever

over the hill and faraway from the might have been

Roughside stands empty except for the owl

and was it was her owl?  

the one she reared with raw meat from a chick

that flew from fence post to barn roof    

rust dusted its talons

And I said:  No we can't keep it

We must let it go

And when we were walking

down the hill in those days when the fir trees were just planted

in the time when breezes blew freely and Roughside had plums on its plum tree and adders basked in the sunlight

songbirds were mobbing an owlet and it was her owl and I thought it was dead

I thought I had killed it by letting it go

But it was her owl and now it is mine

and no one else's    because it was her owl

my owl!  

                        2

Basil Bunting died

when we were in France that spring

long ago he gave me good advice

refusing his help as a referee

warning of abuse of that word "the"

Roughside to Corbridge was but twenty miles

if I had gone   Was I too shy?   Too proud?

Briggflats    Scarlatti    talking about Pound

who in Northumberland tilled such ground?

now yearning for quiet country life

making poems at Roughside

yet money harries me back

                           *

Thwarted by traffic a magpie loiters at roadside

then hops towards a metallic gleam

like me hoping to get back one day

to that ore bearing seam

                           *

I'll find an idea in a loose leaf book

an idea I can peck some substance out

about a cuckoo    we heard one calling

near Romilly's Brard in Loubressac

that we    like cuckoos    pushed our way in

to her song bird's nest    while in Aynac

some friends bought the old mill for a song

                            (cuckoo)

as water wastes through the mill-race

images of what would be clothe the bone

she pointed...

               a poem-bone at my face

                           *

Roughside  where I lived  was a rough male place

hospitable to short eared owls and sheep

Brard more feminine with bees and a goat

children picking orchids     I had heather

she    apple trees    songbirds and a dovecote

I'd no running water and it was hard

she'd piped water    and wine    from a spring

maybe Heaven is a little like Brard

high on the moors    far from usury

even bereft of Barclaycard    and broke

Roughside was good till a man from the bank

climbed up from the road to save a stamp

may a crow perch on that bank manager's nose

peck out his eyes for coins to close

                           *

And B. B. might have said

your poetry fears being naked with us

shrouding its meaning with unnecessary rime

trapped in my mind's hall of mirrors

where embarrassments flash often

I think of Heather breaking the stillness

when she stripped and dived naked

swam in a rock pool    iridescent

left me standing  awkwardly  present

I try to recapture that magic light

a magpie hopping away  my dream fades

the world intrudes

                           *

Some images claw light from dark

climb hand over hand from a cave

in an aerie  eaglets shudder

wing beats shatter cold air

others glean darkness from sunshine

sunlight through lacework  willows

weeping    shading field and

horses standing in water  Anglo Arabians

with a colt watching a stallion

and some mares standing deepest

above the moorland buzzards soar

where troubadours once lamented

solitary men    that many might have helped

had they had less pride.

                           *

poetry wants to be naked for you...

bold words if spoken boldly

else pathetic, whispered by that sensitive

young man we grow tired of

brush strokes gold in black hollows

                  watching each moment

poised on this one rock  watching

each moment stream Tyne water down

there are ways of working  turning

words on a wheel towards meaning

there are ways of laying down tools

signifying  completion

                              *

  

then owlet flew with slow wing beats

from fence post to barn roof

rust dusted her talons

moon rose over Stonehaugh

yellow bloom in purple leaves

above black edge

 © Dick Russell, 2013