O SWALLOW, SWALLOW

rest perturbéd spirit.     

                                           I

A year, or thereabouts, after my father died,
My mother moving house – too many a room
In and out of which her heart still hoped
She would meet him coming and going
In his cheerful, noisy progress about their home
(He liked shut doors, and thought no door shut
Till frame met stop and the latch clicked loudly)
I had the task of clearing out his workshop,
Discarding or storing hundreds of wall-hung tools,
Shelves of tins, boxes, pots and jars,
In which he kept a myriad things, because some day
They might come in handy – few ever did
But most of them I keep too – his son in this –
Believing that a house is hardly a house
Without a workshop.
                                    Hours on end
He spent here. And in the earliest years
A retreat, I think now, a father myself,
From three young and ebullient children
Where undisturbed he worked at what he would
Dismantling the mower for its winter service
Rebuilding a battered grandfather clock
Bought for ten and six, gladly repairing
Whatever worn or broken household gadget
It would have saved much time to replace
Had his pride or pocket then allowed.

Unwillingly I worked all morning, disbelieving
That his life was done, fearing that my desecration
Might prevent his coming back – after all
How can we admit a parent’s death
And not admit something lost within ourselves
If only hope? At lunchtime, glad to stop
I went indoors, and there, in part of the house
Not much used after his death, I saw something
That spoke of all the sadness of my task – trapped
Between the sliding panes of an open window
A house-martin, dead, one of those
My father loved to see returning every year
Either a fledgling fallen from the nest above
Or a parent whose delicate being, alighting
On the top rail after flying back with food,
Set the sash, heavy with years of paint
Sliding into a fearful prison of light.


                                        II

And I suppose that so sad a sight
Spoke to me of my father
Because had he been around the house
He might have set this martin free
And so been given a moment’s unusual happiness –
For these were not just birds to him,
But permitted to invade the unstopped eaves
Heaped droppings on the sills below,
And woke the household early on summer mornings
Chattering and scrabbling in the roofspace overhead,
Disrupting the habitual neatness and order
My father always liked all about him.
Not just birds then, but an aspect of himself,
An undiscovered freedom perhaps, dangerous,
Something he could not talk or even think of
And would countenance only in a being
Not himself.
                        And so in truth this poor martin
Spoke not of my father’s death, but his life
Caught between light and light
This world lost as we all must lose
And a sense of freedom he could not grasp
Having no talent disciplined to discern.


                                    III

And thinking that of him, how can I not think also
That bound as we are to this life now, still we look
Towards another, which far too often we misconceive
As the freedom to attend upon our selves, seeking
A private way, turning aside from those about us.
That road down, out of the light of the obedient sun,
Was not one my father took. Struck by the spell
Of a lonely childhood, his deep need not cast off,
Bound to my mother by all his being, he was indeed
A man of immediate faith, standing firm by those
Who made up his life. But that spell unbroken
For years I think he found no freedom in his love,
Did not see it as a power that might reveal
An order in which our consciousness can live,
Free of the fear of time.
                                          His hope of freedom
Therefore unfulfilled in any way he recognized,
But also loving those who often seemed to thwart
Disturb or make difficult demands upon his being,
Going out to the workshop became a family phrase,
Marking his retreat from what he could not cope with.
Yet afterwards, even when reason had come upon us,
And later still, long after we had all left home,
He would often be out there, winter and summer,
All day long.
                        By then I think the workshop had become
Not just a place of private peace, out of the welter
Of family life, but a place where what he was could be,
A retreat where the gifts and marks upon his being –
The solitude cast into his soul in childhood, his love
Of those he was only lately learning how to talk to,
The freedom he had not found – all worked together
Becoming a power expressed in the things he made –
Made with a love unspoken, saying, I often thought,
That things were better now: the Christmas centre-piece,
An annual allegory of the doings of the family,
An urn to mark our wedding, with a golden guinea
Hidden in its heart, a box for wooden bricks,
Inlaid with the initial of our eldest daughter,
A trolley to help our children walk – a few
Of the things he made for us and others, left now
Here and there about our house, almost forgotten;
But when noticed or remembered, unmistakeably bearing
That love he worked out in his workshop,

A troubled love
Whose hardest task was to make in tears
The wooden urn for my sister’s ashes,
Laid beneath the granite stone
Where my mother now has placed his name.