Silence erects thick walls of inertia
About the ground of dilemma,
To bound and contain, to drain
Resolution from willing ponds –
But talk can too easily overwhelm
And divert attention, capture
Desire too eagerly in gestures
Of consequence and action –
Sweeps of generous hand,
Buckets of excavation, and land
Turned over upon itself
Before the well-framed question –
We stand and mourn good earth
Sacrificed to gratification,
And, in our rush to raise a hand,
To rouse the hue and cry
Why not peer down, down the valley,
To see the river braiding by,
To ask where, how, underground,
Its waters rise and trickle down?
Contours and grasses, tales told
In hedgerow seepage, and tracks
Of squeamish badger, homeward
Bound by Dawn’s guitar, skirting
Brightest blades of lushest rye
Where water shines to hasten
An osmotic dance too early
In the van of reluctant Spring –
Ah, Dearly talkative Comrade,
Who shuffles heaps of paper
And overlooks the mowhay
Of Little Regarded Farm,
And the contentment of geese,
The security and peace
Of little regarded dragonflies
Beneath the dry-cheeked willow –
What do they say, what yarn entwine
From season’s slowly spinning wheel,
That we might bind an argument
To preserve the brittle wax and wane
Of brave Kenwyn’s riverly zeal?
It could not do that water dries
To starve the delta sluice below,
Yet gladiators and champions
Cry and rant for craven arena,
For thumbs up, thumbs down,
‘Let innocence die, and mercy
Shrivel!’ As starving eels go
Between the Bull Head’s stones
And minnow shadows, doubtful
Weedy sanctuaries of good trout
Pulled by ticklish boys to plate,
Let all this, and simple pleasures
Of naked feet in birthday rites
Of expedition and assurance,
Probes of city children to test
The faith and sense of prayer,
To know, as curving spines prevent
The eye and ear from going there,
That source and tribute, delight,
In water for the curing hides,
In currents turning oaken wheels,
And pools reflecting uncertainty’s
Afternoon as lonely confides
And whispers to the waters
And its images of captured cloud,
How time and motion of tides
Tells twilight how it feels –
O! How it feels beside the ford,
Between the parish bridges,
To know the dawn and dusk decide
The silhouette’s bladed ridges –
Everything runs down to rivers,
Water and mis-ploughed soils,
Minerals and broken branches
And blanching cadaver oils,
And the seedsman casts his arm
Where shoots extend and green
And wave in passing seasons
To tell where droughts and gluts
Have blown and drenched and been –
And the music of the water
Eases the passage of those passing
Under solemn joists from Coosebean,
Whose rafts will drift to Lyonesse
On currents of pyre and grail:
Would we, with all our engineering,
Deny the myth its resurrection?
Or we, with theatres of gasping balls
And mobs with petulant thumbs,
Propel slight martyrs, and compel
The neutering of timeless springs,
And conversion to sporting dreams
Of contours’ killas streams, which bear
The floods and inundations there,
From moor and thorn to tidal care,
Where cormorant and kingfisher
Debate the estuarial question,
While weather carves a judicial stair
To bear the stones from mountain lair
To lie in broken pieces, shattered there,
Brought down and cast by profit
Under gavel of a magistrate Mayor?
What’s not seen but simply known,
Which feeds and teases a timely flow,
May be halted, diverted, left for dead
To bleach below, and between the walls,
Arterial walls of hapless town,
The sluicing flow of channel’s dredge,
The snake of navigation’s skin
Drawn to quays and wheeling leats
To keep the drummer’s fragile beats,
To stoke the stevedore’s excited cry:
‘Sail! Sail! A cargo from Tolverne!’
And opes amok with harbour’s pride,
And beacons set to Solstice burn!
O! Trench and pour grey’s clotted slab,
Raise the mortgage-makers’ treaty,
Pass the pipe, prepare fine words
And consume a native’s living prairie –
No different, the buffalo’s echo
To farming’s picture-book oohs and aahs:
Will we halt this advance of engines?
Or, starve the Kenwyn to wash the cars?
