Seven Parts for a Stone Cutter

Dawn is slow milk
A recipe if you will
For easy butter

Clouds of July horse flies
Over its waking surface

The Scar held yet
Wide palm soft purse
Heavy with possibility

* * *

I’ve been here since sun up, waiting bowed
So usurped by work
A thorny spine binds my arse to my head

I stretch and grunt to the wind
But pollen in my lungs hard to shift
Treats my voice to honeyed resin

I make a gummy yawn, hum
My singsong name and effort
Take my tool-bag to the lee

* * *

My hands are sure ridiculous
For they are twice as old as me
Pinky skin stretched thin across the backs
Ache with details they have mapped
Each brooding curve, each liminal track
Each constant silhouette of stone

* * *

I move to the hollow
Where the land subsided years ago
The Scars’ limpid scar
Up against the dark hawthorn line –
If you have walked it you’ll know where

Pick my start place
Begin to hem pasture
From next years’ fallow
Caution myself against haste

The dry wall’s growth
Divides the matter round it
Shard lain upon shard, tympanic
Songs from the basin
Toward completion

* * *

Shift my weight; erase the farmhouse
And swelter woodland from my sight

Beneath the ridge a hidden lamb
Bleats –
Wild clatter of slate, a sticky mouth

The prime goshawk circling
To the long beat of his heart since dawn
Descends, embeds talons in the gullet

A welter of potent blood
Splashes over granite

Beautiful, terrible marks spot
Through bitter gorse and heather
Throw up a juvenile groan

* * *

See myself as I once was
Running down the slopes
Suffocated by space
Hands empty, tools blunt

From within the hill I heard feet beat time
The loose value of soil made itself known
My peace broke
Collapsed, ridiculed
I fought the sound

Through the spring day, apprentice pilots
In their practice runs
Targeted the Scar
And I became a hillside comedy

I could not compete
I leapt from footholds of tradition
Tried to counter my substance
Fell heavy through granite
Flaunting my sorrow where no-one else could see

I wondered if I knew myself better than stone
Than each defined particle
Than this mineral certainty
But did not

What I believed hard beneath
Was soft, supple
Within the core the bleeding novice
Would have to choose different tools
To cut his new organ

* * *

The lamb holds out ‘til evening
Velvet ears aware the hollow drumming
Of its own evisceration

And the ring of steel head hammers
Beat out the so be it rhythm
In my grip

On this milky stone map
Horse flies collect
Around blackening eyes

And the goshawk I name Byron
After Kendal black drop
Rises belly full

Lands, preens north
On my slate wall
Watches; waits again


Cumbria, Spring 2004