Nancy Gaffield

DE PROFUNDIS

What matters is

not the frame but the space

inside. Broken glass. The wind

bellows, curtain billows.

Crows there.

A woman stands in front

of the hearth, drying her hair.

All around her the old world

is crumbling. Swathes of red

dead trees. Must not see, say, so

lost without you. Falling masonry. Fire

glances round the room, licking.

Aspen-glow, tinder-box, wild.

West, we were here.

VOR LANGEN JAHREN

The rings of the tree know
something. Radical
introspection. In here is a world
the tree wishes to speak of,
the shadow of a former
                                    Listen.

Overcome by beauty
of wind in the leaves you are
apt to miss the point.
A year is made of light and dark
rings, principle of Limiting Factors. Spring
wood filled with inner light endarkens
and hardens by summer. They died
of heart sickness.
                                    And so a woman
rich in cognates contemplates
the heavens:
                                                                                                              str,
                                                                                étoile, aster, stella, star

Above me sways the fir tree. You are
here not forever
forever not here.
Are you.

*
Berthed in straw
below deck, hemmed in
and the sea roiling. Farewell
to small land and heather village.
Fading. Ruptures,
transatlantic abrasions.
Crossings and starting over.

Scattering
to cheap and fertile
undesired land. Unfamiliar tongue weeds
wed wedes.
                        Give me your
Pour through numbered,
encumbered
No stopping here.

Stumble into pale light,
Lake of the Woods,
someone else’s,
dwellers amongst the leaves.
Taking it.
The fields too,
the cistern.
Dipping.
Thick as trees and just as good
at keeping secrets.
             Worm in the wood.
Up here on the rim
transubstantiating and wearing
masks, writing the world.

*

Fleeting fall turns to winter sleet.
When they got to the new world
they called each place by the old names.

            Never mastered the broad vowels,
            learned instead to keep quiet,
            tame their speech.

Watching northern geese
baste cloud to earth,
wing dips
pulse in every point,
long and low
herronk of no return.

The heart
repines.

            Suppose I were to find
            words in my pocket,
            loose change. Unlettered.

Blow them over the sea.

What is this spindrift?
asks the cormorant.
            Dance of the Spirits
            answer the Cree.

*

The bark knows.
Putting on a brave face, it scrutinises
the sky. Day after day, cloud
hangs there. Leaves come and go,
then snow. So much time
spent waiting.

Wave after wave
of lapwings fly
over late-winter fields. Lilacs
in the dooryard
bloom and everything shooting
upwards. A blue orb fractures,
unfamiliar tongue
cleaving, wanting
to sing a song
in a strange land.

Oaks turn
inward.
                                                        Click-clack
                                               Click-clack

Shiny refrain of train on the tracks.
Dashing of little ones against stones.
Heart, my heart,
bury my heart.

DUST

it begins in the house
of bad moods
it begins again
as a mote
as memory

it begins as
a stable structure in the rain
rainbows          of oil
            certain themes
are incurable

who are you     in your prospect
of puddles

nothing stays in its proper place
unsettled landscape       nuclear
sublime
            if you don’t
want to know
look away        now

Nancy Gaffield’s first book, Tokaido Road, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, nominated for the Forward First Collection Prize and won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2011. Her second, Owhere, was a winner in the Templar Pamphlet competition 2012. She is currently working with composer Nicola LeFanu and the Okeanos Ensemble on a music theatre/opera based on the Tokaido Road poems, which will première at the Cheltenham Festival in July of 2014. Nancy is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Her next full-length collection, Continental Drift, will be published by Shearsman in 2014.