The Postman

Satchel on hip
the postman goes
from doorstep to doorstep
and stooping sows

each letterbox
with seed. His right
hand all the morning makes,
the same half circle. White

seed he scatters,
a fistful of
featureless letters
pregnant with ruin or love.

I watch him zig-
zag down the street
dipping his hand in that big
bag, sowing the cool, neat

envelopes which
make twenty-one
unaccountably rich,
twenty-two an orphan.

I cannot see
them but I know
others are watching. We
stoop in a row

(as, he turns away),
straighten and stand
weighing and delaying
the future in one hand.

Not long after recording the future arriving through other people's letter-boxes to become the present, I found myself at work on a poem in which the future arrived for me: the camera now turned on the photographer and, for the first time, it's a movie camera. The poem's written in sections, each with a different stanza-form, in an attempt to convey the different stages of the experience.

The Almond Tree

I

All the way to the hospital
The lights were green as peppermints.
Trees of black iron broke into leaf
ahead of me, as if
I were the lucky prince
in an enchanted wood
summoning summer with my whistle,
banishing winter with a nod.

Swung by the road from bend to bend,
I was aware that blood was running
down through the delta of my wrist
and under arches
of bright bone. Centuries,
continents it had crossed;
from an undisclosed beginning
spiralling to an unmapped end.

II

Crossing (at sixty) Magdalen Bridge
Let it be a son, a son, said
the man in the driving mirror,
Let it be a son. The tower
held up its hand: the college
bells shook their blessings on his head.

III

I parked in an almond's
shadow blossom, for the tree
was waving, waving at me
upstairs with a child's hands.

IV

Up
the spinal stair
and at the top
along
a bone-white corridor
the blood tide swung
me swung me to a room
whose walls shuddered
with the shuddering womb.
Under the sheet
wave after wave, wave
after wave beat
on the bone coast,
bringing ashore - whom?
New-
minted, my bright farthing!
Coined by our love, stamped
With our images, how you
Enrich us! Both
you make one. Welcome
to your white sheet,
my best poem.

V

At seven-thirty
the visitors' bell
scissored the calm
of the corridors.
The doctor walked with
to the slicing doors.
His hand is upon my arm,
his voice - I have to tell
you - set another bell
beating in my head:
your son is a mongol
the doctor said.

VI

How easily the word went in -
clean as a bullet
leaving no mark on the skin,
stopping the heart within it.

This was my first death.
The 'I ' ascending on a slow
Last thermal breath
studied the man below

as a pilot treading air might
the buckled shell of his plane -
boot, glove and helmet
feeling no pain

from the snapped wires' radiant ends.
Looking down from a thousand feet
I held four walls in the lens
of an eye; wall, window, the street

a torrent of windscreens, my own
car under its almond tree,
and the almond waving me down.
I wrestled against gravity,

but light was melting and the gulf
cracked open. Unfamiliar
the body of my late self
I carried to the car.

VII

The hospital - its heavy freight
lashed down ship-shape ward over ward -
steamed into night with some on board
soon to be lost if the desperate

charts were known. Others would come
altered to land or find the land
altered. At their voyage's end
some would be added to, some

diminished. In a numbered cot
my son sailed from me; never to come
ashore into my kingdom
speaking my language. Better not

look that way. The almond tree
was beautiful in labour. Blood-
dark, quickening, bud after bud
split, flower after flower shook free.

On the darkening wind a pale
face floated. Out of reach. Only when
the buds, all the buds were broken
would the tree be in full sail.

In labour the tree was becoming
itself. I, too, rooted in earth
and ringed by darkness, from the death
of myself saw myself blossoming,

wrenched from the caul of my thirty
years' growing, fathered by my son,
unkindly in a kind season
by love shattered and set free.

'The Almond Tree' is probably the most straightforwardly autobiographical of my poems. Its opening lines came - unbidden - into my head as I was driving to the hospital. Later lines, at the end of section IV, 'Welcome to your white sheet/my best poem' echo the lines of a much better poem, Ben Jonson's elegy, 'On my First Son': 'Here doth lie/Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.' I was stunned when a friend pointed this out: I would have been prepared to swear in a court of law that I'd never read or heard that poem, but obviously I had. If my theft - or, as I now prefer to think of it, my transformation - had been pointed out to me, while I was still writing 'The Almond Tree', I'm sure I'd have cursed and cancelled those lines, not perceiving the best thing about them: the fact that, while Jonson's lines about a dead son are echoed in a happy context, they anticipate my speaker's subsequent unhappy discovery that this Jon's son is a Mongol or Downs Syndrome child.

The poem originally ended with an eighth section with which I came to feel uncomfortable: it seemed to make too explicit something that should have been implicit, and so I dropped it - only for it to resurface as a separate poem, called 'Firstborn', in my Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems.

After that birth, a death

At Half Past Three
in the Afternoon

On one side of the world
I was watching the waterfall
shake itself out, a scroll unfurled
against a grey slate wall,
when on the other side
it would be half past nine, and you
in bed - when on the other side
the night was falling further than I knew.

And watching the water
fall from that hole in the sky
to be combed into foam, I caught
a glimpse in the pool's dark eye
of us, eating our bread
and cheese, watching the falling light
crash into darkness. "Look," you said,
"a rainbow like a dragonfly in flight."

On one side of the world
at half past five in the afternoon
a telephone rang, and the darkness welled
from a hole in the sky,
darkness and silence. Soon,
in search of a voice - how to recall
"a rainbow like a dragonfly
in flight" - I walked back to the waterfall.

The trees had lost their tongues -
as I did, coming face to face
with the glacial skeleton hung
beside our picnic place.
The spine was broken, cracked
the ribcage of the waterfall.
The pond under its cataract
knew nothing of us, knew nothing at all.

And what did I know, except
that you, the better part of me,
did not exist? But I have kept
your anniversary
today - or, there, tonight -
returning to the creek, and trying
to understand. I saw the light
falling, falling, and the rainbow flying.

We have been taught to consider experience as flux, a stream of random sense impressions most faithfully recorded by the stream-of-consciousness method. Contrariwise (and some will think more contrary than wise), I am continually aware of patterns or recurrence and, since it is these perceptions - rather than perceptions of flux - that seem to generate my poems, patterns of recurrence are a natural feature of my writing. Perhaps I should explain what I mean by natural.

When I learned that my mother had died, in England, at a moment when I, in Amercia, had been watching a waterfall beside which we had picnicked two years before, I found the coincident strange and comforting. It suggested a connection at a moment when one was painfully aware of disconnection.

In due course, the first phrases of what was to be the first stanza of a poem came into my head: "at half past three, on one side of the world…at half past nine, on the other side." The sentences that grew from these phrases determined their own line breaks, their own pattern of rhymed and rhythmic recurrence. I did not plan a stanza of two halves, two quatrains representing this side and that side, light and darkness, voice and silence, falling and flying. Rather, I allowed the poem to find its own pattern of recurrence, and instinctively it found one that would reflect these emerging polarities. It was born with its voiceprint as a child with its fingerprint, and once that pattern of lines was established (trimeter, two tetrameters, two trimeters, two tetrameters, pentameter; rhyming a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d) it would have seemed unnatural to alter it in subsequent stanzas. On the other hand, such a pattern of recurrence seemed to produce, naturally, the necessary repetitions, the echoes (line seventeen of line one, for example, or line twenty of line ten) of the stanzas that follow. Such echoes can have ironic vibrations, as in the return of line thirty-two to both the place and rhyme of line twenty-four. Conversely, an established pattern sets up expectations in attentive readers that need not be fulfilled if the poem's intention is to surprise them: hence, after an unbroken series of masculine rhymes, the final feminine one that tries to lift the poem into the air.

But will it fly? Only time will tell.

About Jon Stallworthy

Perhaps because I began writing poems (at the age of seven) in wartime, I associated poets with war-correspondents, their cameras at the ready to record other people's moments of crisis. Twenty-something years later, that view of the poet - vigilant, detached - prompted me to write: