Falling Awake Read online

  FALLING AWAKE

  Alice Oswald

  CONTENTS

  A Short Story of Falling

  Swan

  Flies

  Fox

  Severed Head Floating Downriver

  Cold Streak

  Body

  A Rushed Account of the Dew

  Shadow

  Village

  Vertigo

  Looking Down

  Alongside Beans

  A Drink from Cranmere Pool

  Slowed-Down Blackbird

  Dunt

  Two Voices

  Sunday Ballad

  You Must Never Sleep under a Magnolia

  Aside

  Sz

  Evening Poem

  Tithonus

  And so he goes on

  Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode helps to preserve line breaks.

  FALLING AWAKE

  A SHORT STORY OF FALLING

  It is the story of the falling rain

  to turn into a leaf and fall again

  it is the secret of a summer shower

  to steal the light and hide it in a flower

  and every flower a tiny tributary

  that from the ground flows green and momentary

  is one of water’s wishes and this tale

  hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail

  if only I a passerby could pass

  as clear as water through a plume of grass

  to find the sunlight hidden at the tip

  turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip

  then I might know like water how to balance

  the weight of hope against the light of patience

  water which is so raw so earthy-strong

  and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along

  drawn under gravity towards my tongue

  to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song

  which is the story of the falling rain

  that rises to the light and falls again

  SWAN

  A rotted swan

  is hurrying away from the plane-crash mess of her wings

  one here

  one there

  getting panicky up out of her clothes and mid-splash

  looking down again at what a horrible plastic

  mould of herself split-second

  climbing out of her own cockpit

  and lifting away again and bending back for another look thinking

  strange

  strange

  what are those two white clips that connected my strength

  to its floatings

  and lifting away again and bending back for another look

  at the clean china serving-dish of a breast bone

  and how thickly the symmetrical quill-points

  were threaded in backwards through the leather underdress

  of the heart saying

  strange

  strange

  it’s not as if such fastenings could ever contain

  the regular yearning wing-beat of my evenings

  and that surely can’t be my own black feet

  lying poised in their slippers

  what a waste of detail

  what a heaviness inside each feather

  and leaving her life and all its tools

  with their rusty juices trickling back to the river

  she is lifting away she is taking a last look thinking

  quick

  quick

  say something to the

  frozen cloud of the head

  before it thaws

  whose one dead eye

  is a growing cone of twilight

  in the middle of winter

  it is snowing there

  and the bride has just set out

  to walk to her wedding

  but how can she reach

  the little black-lit church

  it is so cold

  the bells like iron angels

  hung from one note

  keep ringing and ringing

  FLIES

  This is the day the flies fall awake mid-sentence

  and lie stunned on the window-sill shaking with speeches

  only it isn’t speech it is trembling sections of puzzlement which

  break off suddenly as if the questioner had been shot

  this is one of those wordy days

  when they drop from their winter quarters in the curtains

  and sizzle as they fall

  feeling like old cigarette butts called back to life

  blown from the surface of some charred world

  and somehow their wings which are little more than flakes

  of dead skin

  have carried them to this blackened disembodied question

  what dirt shall we visit today?

  what dirt shall we re-visit?

  they lift their faces to the past and walk about a bit

  trying out their broken thought-machines

  coming back with their used-up words

  there is such a horrible trapped buzzing wherever we fly

  it’s going to be impossible to think clearly now until next winter

  what should we

  what dirt should we

  FOX

  I heard a cough

  as if a thief was there

  outside my sleep

  a sharp intake of air

  a fox in her fox-fur

  stepping across

  the grass in her black gloves

  barked at my house

  just so abrupt and odd

  the way she went

  hungrily asking

  in the heart’s thick accent

  in such serious sleepless

  trespass she came

  a woman with a man’s voice

  but no name

  as if to say: it’s midnight

  and my life

  is laid beneath my children

  like gold leaf

  SEVERED HEAD FLOATING DOWNRIVER

  It is said that after losing his wife, Orpheus was torn to pieces by Maenads, who threw his head into the River Hebron. The head went on singing and forgetting, filling

  up with water and floating away.

  Eurydicealready forgetting who she is

  with her shoes missing

  and the grass coming up through her feet

  searching the earth

  for the bracelet of tiny weave on her charcoal wrist

  the name of a fly or floweralready forgetting who they are

  they grow they grow

  till their bodies break their necks

  down there in the stone world

  where the grey spirits of stones lie around uncertain of their limits

  matter is eating my mindI am in a river

  I in my fox-cap

  floating between the speechless reeds

  I always wake like this being watched

  already forgetting who I am

  the water wears my maskI callI call

  lying under its lashes like a glance

  if only a child on a bridge would hoik me out

  there comes a tremor and there comes a pause

  down there in the underworld

  where the tired stones have fallen

  and the sand in a trance lifts a little

  it is always midnight in those pools

  iron insects engraved in sleep

  I always wake like this being watched

  I always speak to myself

  no more myself but a colander

  draining the sound from this never-to-be-mentioned wound

  can you hear it

  you with your long shadows and your short shadows

  can you hear the severed head of Orpheus


  no I feel nothing from the neck down

  already forgetting who I am

  the crime goes on without volition singing in its bone

  not I not I

  the water drinks my mind

  as if in a black suit

  as if bent to my books

  only my face exists sliding over a waterfall

  and there where the ferns hang over the dark

  and the midges move between mirrors

  some woman has left her shoes

  two crumpled mouths

  which my voice searches in and out

  my voice being water

  which holds me together and also carries me away

  until the facts forget themselves gradually like a contrail

  and all this week

  a lime-green light troubles the riverbed

  as if the mud was haunted by the wood

  this is how the wind works hard at thinking

  this is what speaks when no one speaks

  COLD STREAK

  I notice a cold streak

  I notice it in the sun

  all that dazzling stubbornness

  of keeping to its clock

  I notice the fatigue of flowers

  weighed down by light

  I notice the lark has a needle

  pulled through its throat

  why don’t they put down their instruments?

  I notice they never pause

  I notice the dark sediment of their singing

  covers the moors like soot blown under a doorway

  almost everything here has cold hands

  I notice the wind wears surgical gloves

  I notice the keen pale colours of the rain

  like a surgeon’s assistant

  why don’t they lift their weight

  and see what’s flattened underneath it?

  I notice the thin meticulous grass,

  thrives in this place

  BODY

  This is what happened

  the dead were settling in under their mud roof

  and something was shuffling overhead

  it was a badger treading on the thin partition

  bewildered were the dead

  going about their days and nights in the dark

  putting their feet down carefully and finding themselves floating

  but that badger

  still with the simple heavy box of his body needing to be lifted

  was shuffling away alive

  hard at work

  with the living shovel of himself

  into the lane he dropped

  not once looking up

  and missed the sight of his own corpse falling like a suitcase

  towards him

  with the grin like an opened zip

  (as I found it this morning)

  and went on running with that bindweed will of his

  went on running along the hedge and into the earth again

  trembling

  as if in a broken jug for one backwards moment

  water might keep its shape

  A RUSHED ACCOUNT OF THE DEW

  I who can blink

  to break the spell of daylight

  and what a sliding screen between worlds

  is a blink

  I who can hear the last three seconds in my head

  but the present is beyond me

  listen

  in this tiny moment of reflexion

  I want to work out what it’s like to descend

  out of the dawn’s mind

  and find a leaf and fasten the known to the unknown

  with a liquid cufflink

  and then unfasten

  to be brief

  to be almost actual

  oh pristine example

  of claiming a place on the earth

  only to cancel

  SHADOW

  I’m going to flicker for a moment

  and tell you the tale of a shadow

  that falls at dusk

  out of the blue to the earth

  and turns left along the path to here

  groggily under its black-out

  being dragged along crippled over things as if broken-winged

  not yet continuous

  no more than a shiver of something

  with the flesh parachute of a human opening above it

  but lengthening a little as it descends through the rings

  of one hour into the next

  with the rooks flying upwards snipping at the clouds

  until at last out of that opening here it lies

  my own impersonal pronoun

  crumpled under me like a dead body

  it is faint

  it has been falling for a long time

  look when I walk

  it’s like a pair of scissors thrown at me by the sun

  so that now as if my skin were not quite tucked in

  I am cold cold

  trying to slide myself out of my own shade

  but hour by hour more shade leaks out

  or if I stand

  if I move one hand

  I hear the hiss of flowers closing their eyelids

  and the trees

  as if dust was being beaten from a rug

  shake out their birds and in again

  it’s as if I’ve interrupted something

  that was falling in a straight line from the eye of God

  and if I do nothing

  the ground gives up

  the almost minty clarity of its grass begins to fade

  the white moths under the leaves

  are amazed

  VILLAGE

  Somebody out late again say what you like

  sinister walk throwing one foot forward

  black jumble-sale clothes with a bit of string around the knees

  going over the mud with a tread like that throwing one foot forward

  somebody out not back being out again

  walking every evening as regular as the rooks

  throwing one foot forward so many names in this place are you listening

  taking his bucket to the tap

  John Strong

  that’s him bursting full of himself hook-nosed sinister walk

  scars on each side of the wrist no teeth

  not known for his beauty having been shot in the mouth

  black jumble-sale clothes

  [...]

  somebody out thankfully not me out lost in the mud

  somebody lost out late again say what you like

  a boot by the granite trough not many of us left

  living in the slippery maybe the last green places are you listening

  not many of us left not much movement

  in the blackening lanes among a few low trees

  little flocks of orchids in the ditches nobody cares

  it’s as dark as a pond down here we could do with a hedge-flail

  with a scythe somebody with a scythe

  you can hear him smashing through six-foot nettles

  black jumble-sale clothes with a bit of string around the knees

  so as the rats won’t run up his legs are you listening

  Thomas Lytch

  that’s him in the rain now

  somebody with a tread like that

  very chilblain slow with a lump on his toe

  just saw him on the way back home again mud in his mouth

  [...]

  I said the dirt gets right into your fingers

  living under the trees like this the toads don’t mind it

  this is god’s honest truth there’s one about as big as a bucket

  hops out of the nettles every night you can say what you like

  that’s him slugging about the village bent-headed

  heavily laden with the cold you can tell it’s him

  spillikin legs always wet for some reason

  always poking the verges looking for a tasty bit of nothing

  a
lways wet for some reason always standing like a bale in the rain

  remembering better times whereas naming no names

  some of us would rather not remember something

  some of us have got enough bloody nightmares already

  somebody a bundle of nerves ever since the wall came down

  won’t barely go out of the church now

  ever since a bat swooped in like a pair of leather gloves feeling her face

  had to dive under the pews for cover this is god’s honest truth

  Joyce Jones

  just heard her voice again say what you like

  cold nights without streetlights

  walking to the sea perhaps

  on the soft of her feet with a stout stick why

  [...]

  somebody out peering out not me

  red face at the window regular every evening

  not noted for his warmth this is god’s honest truth

  not noted for his warmth no wife