Dan Eltringham: Summer Scrapbook (pt. 1)
Go. Eager to quit the city, hardly gambolled at risk, unforclosed
free-of-debt
yet not forsworn nor saken, leaving all this they strike for
pelagic waters,
where the sea lets in a little light of surface glimmer but
depths tug,
air is easier, the rim visible in green hills seen in instants
between steep streets
keeping invested trust beyond the chosen enclosure called
the city,
today. Lungfull to peak air time, using my loaf to fill the bread
basket again
leaves milk on the step as metaphor again, butter spoils our chances,
no-one wants to be
just a gateway drug to something harder, further down the line.
Bilberries.
At the end of the line is the station, of course, that’s all. If
the head is bread,
the stomach its basket, woven tight like the jumpers of drowned
Island sailors,
Mull or Islay or Lewis legible in the weft, a grammar of belonging,
not trite but true,
crosshatches remembered fishing nets, trellises copied the run of
drystone walling,
the three point blackberry carded the trinity, double zigzags
matrimonial
undulations, then now is it to unshackle the hierarchy binding
head to hand,
stomach to mouth. To prefer repair to replacement, maintenance
to replacement,
a patch-up job to replacement, the nation with the best maintenance
will recover first,
staving off decay by daily care, what I love is continuity of usefulness
in buildings
or failing that just the stone reused, the outline of a Saxon axe head
latched on its haft,
traced on a sandstone ledge. What is left of earth, once flipped about,
taken out,
but a monumental chimney ringed by rare dragonflies, orchids,
a good spot
for lunch? Land once black as its subsurface, now the gothic
pit head
reflects in the pit pool, pit wheels grace town greens, pit towns ring
the grene wode,
concentric, depressed post-industrial communities, whence Red Robyn
flings cash back,
centrifugal. Seasonal shift, heather purpled, blackberry soon. Fell
down a fell
this afternoon, slipped off a rill down a hole in the ground Wordsworth
never saw,
in the leisure box, feeling green around the ghyll, where once-open slate
rakes frame
picturesque mountains, our picnic? Rebarbative wire no reply but
a snag on
trousers, in the fabric of progress, torn like technique, narrow squeezing
through style,
out the other side, to the plain top field where cows are kept.
