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I scratch earth around timpsila on this hill, while below me, hanging in still air, a hawk searches the creekbed for my brothers. Squat leaves, I’ll braid your roots into such long ropes, they’ll cover the rump of my stallion. Withered flower, feed us now buffalo rot in the waist-high grass. Hear my sisters laugh? They dream of feasts, of warriors to owl dance with them when this war is over. They don’t see our children eating treebark, cornstalks, these roots. Their eyes gleam in shallow cheeks. The wagon people do not think relationship is wealth. Sisters, last night the wind returned my prayer, allowing me to hear Dog Soldiers singing at Ash Hollow. I threw away my blanket stained with lies. Above the wings of my tipi, I heard the old woman in Maka Sica sigh for us. Then I knew the distance of High Back Bone’s death- fire from another world away. Even they may never stop its motion. Yesterday at noon, I heard my Cheyenne sister moan as she waded through deep snow before soldiers cut up her corpse to sell as souvenirs. Are my brothers here? Ghosts bring all my joy. I walk this good road between rock and sky. They dare not threaten with death one already dead.

(A true incident) ‘Only a local anaesthetic was given because of the blood pressure problem. The patient, thus, was fully awake throughout the operation. But in those days—in 1938, in Cardiff, when I was Lambert Rogers’ dresser—they could not locate a brain tumour with precision. Too much normal brain tissue was destroyed as the surgeon searched for it, before he felt the resistance of it … all somewhat hit and miss. One operation I shall never forget … ’ (Dr Wilfred Abse) Sister saying—‘Soon you’ll be back in the ward,’ sister thinking—‘Only two more on the list,’ the patient saying—‘Thank you, I feel fine’; small voices, small lies, nothing untoward, though, soon, he would blink again and again because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers, rash as a blind man’s, inside his soft brain. If items of horror can make a man laugh then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time; more brain mashed because of the probe’s braille path; Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still; his dresser thinking, ‘Christ! Two more on the list, a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.’ Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain, a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod, leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’— the patient’s dummy lips moving to that refrain, the patient’s eyes too wide. And, shocked, Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe with nurses, students, sister, petrified. ‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’ that voice so arctic and that cry so odd had nowhere else to go—till the antique gramophone wound down and the words began to blur and slow, ‘ … leave … my … soul … alone … ’ to cease at last when something other died. And silence matched the silence under snow.

And now the green household is dark. The half-moon completely is shining On the earth-lighted tops of the trees. To be dead, a house must be still. The floor and the walls wave me slowly; I am deep in them over my head. The needles and pine cones about me Are full of small birds at their roundest, Their fists without mercy gripping Hard down through the tree to the roots To sing back at light when they feel it. We lie here like angels in bodies, My brothers and I, one dead, The other asleep from much living, In mid-air huddled beside me. Dark climbed to us here as we climbed Up the nails I have hammered all day Through the sprained, comic rungs of the ladder Of broom handles, crate slats, and laths Foot by foot up the trunk to the branches Where we came out at last over lakes Of leaves, of fields disencumbered of earth That move with the moves of the spirit. Each nail that sustains us I set here; Each nail in the house is now steadied By my dead brother’s huge, freckled hand. Through the years, he has pointed his hammer Up into these limbs, and told us That we must ascend, and all lie here. Step after step he has brought me, Embracing the trunk as his body, Shaking its limbs with my heartbeat, Till the pine cones danced without wind And fell from the branches like apples. In the arm-slender forks of our dwelling I breathe my live brother’s light hair. The blanket around us becomes As solid as stone, and it sways. With all my heart, I close The blue, timeless eye of my mind. Wind springs, as my dead brother smiles And touches the tree at the root; A shudder of joy runs up The trunk; the needles tingle; One bird uncontrollably cries. The wind changes round, and I stir Within another’s life. Whose life? Who is dead? Whose presence is living? When may I fall strangely to earth, Who am nailed to this branch by a spirit? Can two bodies make up a third? To sing, must I feel the world’s light? My green, graceful bones fill the air With sleeping birds. Alone, alone And with them I move gently. I move at the heart of the world.

All along the valley, stream that flashest white, Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night, All along the valley, where thy waters flow, I walk'd with one I loved two and thirty years ago. All along the valley, while I walk'd to-day, The two and thirty years were a mist that rolls away; For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed, Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead, And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree, The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.

I remember a house where all were good To me, God knows, deserving no such thing: Comforting smell breathed at very entering, Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood. That cordial air made those kind people a hood All over, as a bevy of eggs the mothering wing Will, or mild nights the new morsels of Spring: Why, it seemed of course; seemed of right it should. Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales, All the air things wear that build this world of Wales; Only the inmate does not correspond: God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales, Complete thy creature dear O where it fails, Being mighty a master, being a father and fond.

In the very night of movement where I sought a sequential self – The sea as blood, thought as Earth that changes the sea Changes the fishes in it for the fortunes of landscapes are in the fantasies of architecture H —        taught to sing siren scales by ear by rote or immersion abroad In the discrepancy of double exposure Casts of light crack time’s microscope

Mangled, uncared for, suffering thro’ the night With heavenly patience the poor boy had lain; Under the dreary shadows, left and right, Groaned on the wounded, stiffened out the slain. What faith sustained his lone, Brave heart to make no moan, To send no cry from that blood-sprinkled sod, Is a close mystery with him and God. But when the light came, and the morning dew Glittered around him, like a golden lake, And every dripping flower with deepened hue Looked through its tears for very pity’s sake, He moved his aching head Upon his rugged bed, And smiled as a blue violet, virgin-meek, Laid her pure kiss upon his withered cheek. At once there circled in his waking heart A thousand memories of distant home; Of how those same blue violets would start Along his native fields, and some would roam Down his dear humming brooks, To hide in secret nooks, And, shyly met, in nodding circles swing, Like gossips murmuring at belated Spring. And then he thought of the beloved hands That with his own had plucked the modest flower. The blue-eyed maiden, crowned with golden bands, Who ruled as sovereign of that sunny hour. She at whose soft command He joined the mustering band, She for whose sake he lay so firm and still, Despite his pangs, not questioned then her will. So, lost in thought, scarce conscious of the deed, Culling the violets, here and there he crept Slowly—ah! slowly,—for his wound would bleed; And the sweet flowers themselves half smiled, half wept, To be thus gathered in By hands so pale and thin, By fingers trembling as they neatly laid Stem upon stem, and bound them in a braid. The strangest posy ever fashioned yet Was clasped against the bosom of the lad, As we, the seekers for the wounded, set His form upon our shoulders bowed and sad; Though he but seemed to think How violets nod and wink; And as we cheered him, for the path was wild, He only looked upon his flowers and smiled.

It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young Though I have long wondered what it would be like To be me now No older at all it seems from here As far from myself as ever Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing I imagine all the clocks have died in the night Now no one is looking I could choose my age It would be younger I suppose so I am older It is there at hand I could take it Except for the things I think I would do differently They keep coming between they are what I am They have taught me little I did not know when I was young There is nothing wrong with my age now probably It is how I have come to it Like a thing I kept putting off as I did my youth There is nothing the matter with speech Just because it lent itself To my uses Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning

The baby sleeps. Sunlight plays upon my lap, through doily leaves a black lab comes, a scotty goes, the day wears on, the baby wakes. The good birds sing, invisible or seldom seen, in hidden kingdoms, grateful for the in- between. The baby sleeps. Elsewhere the Queen rolls by on gusts of cheer — ladies wave and bless her reign. The baby frets. The baby feeds. The end of lunch, a daytime moon. The leaves are lightly tinkered with. It’s spring? No, autumn? Afternoon? We’ve sat so long, we’ve walked so far. The woods in shade, the woods in sun, the singing birds, the noble trees. The child is grown. The child is gone. The black lab comes, his circuit done. His mistress coils his scarlet lead.

I would drive the pre-dawn dark to stake my spot to fish for dinner, to numb my hands in the ice bucket, to pluck, from the neat stack, a herring, to fit the skullcap and pierce the eye with a toothpick, the body double-hooked, my fingertips glimmering with the scales of the dead while the line whined free from the reel, and the bait arced out over the tidal current on a point in view of   the town where I lived, where I had become a man with no money, suddenly concerned only with money, for there were mouths and I had helped to make them — The eddy swirled, kept my line taut, my whole body taut though a man a few down the row laughed, sitting back on his bucket while he pulled in more fish than he could take. I hated the other men, hated the ones who caught nothing, who crossed lines or hooked gulls, who plucked even birds from the sky and slowly drew them in while they struggled and looked away, even, finally, in the hands of the man who only wanted them free. I climbed the breakwater and fished and spoke to no one. I baited my line and thought of a woman who would carry my body over the threshold of our small white house simply with her eyes because I had brought something home, for her, for us, our boys at my side while one fish was divided and indeed did feed many — (Now to sift the facts for truth): I reeked of   the sea and had nothing to show for it. Darkling saltwater for a dream and no other place to be.