Snow Falling on Chestnut
Hill
Here you will find, sequence after sequence, a book-length poem in progress. It will be
published by Carcanet in October of 2012, as "Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill": New and
Selected Poems. There will be one poem per month, on this page.
ONE

Overture
    Freude, Tochter aus Elysium


The Joseph lilies sway, in choir, like a silent chorus
of snow-coifed nuns; you stand, distant from them,
child of God, suffering God. On sodden fields

a flock of chittering starlings shifts; the eye
is never worn with seeing, nor the ear filled
with hearing. Freude, the poet wrote, trinken alle Wesen

an den Brüsten der Natur; all things
nourish themselves on joy at the breasts
of Nature. Here: the field, its wet-daub acres

ragged as a famine-smitten family, only the rushes
flourishing, their knot-rooted stubborn uselessness,
the matted shivering of scutch grasses, persistent

betrayal by the rains. Bitter
as the ribs of hounds: and yet
we hold in our hearts rich meadows

of the mercy of God, all of us,
forgiving and forgiven, riveted
by the outstretched arms of the Christ-man;

made light by sorrows, and by astonishment.
By the gold-flush blossoming of furze-bushes
round the edges of the field. Swallows

were flying low over the wild meadow and already
summer symphonies were giving way
to organ-fugues of the fall; child of God,

suffering God, I have moved so many years
across uncertainties, listening for that slow
basso profundo, source and sustenance of our grief, our joy. . .

Freude!


*


I was remembering that old cantankerous composer, deaf
as his podium, how he waved his hands about and heard
his Ninth Symphony’s shout of joy; and marvelling how he stood
gazing out across the blurred and many

faces of death’s company (full
orchestra, full chorus) who sang : Brüder, überm Sternenzelt
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen! Brothers, above
the canopy of stars, a loving Father lives!


*


Father walked the kitchen floor
evenings, hands clenched behind his back;
mother held her head down, there had been disputes

and the air was dense
from withholding presences; she prayed
Legion of Mary prayers, whispered militancy, the sibilances

irritating. There sank within me,
down to irretrievable depths, habits
of pleading and the rusted anchor of guilt.

When mother had whispered her way into her heaven,
father sank into his depths, telling sins
on the ambit of his rosary,

bead after bead, a slow circuit.

Now, I, child of the times,
have been down to the shore again;  
I hold his old brown chaplet,

crucifix dangling; each fine-wrought bead
fingered to a dull smoothness,
chain tarnished from handling

but holding firm; I tell my own
blithe and sorry histories, bead after bead,
walk the length of the pier, hands clenched behind my back.

Brüder, überm Sternenzelt
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen  :

© John F. Deane
two

Traveller
    “One day when we were young
    One beautiful morning in May. . .”

A pair of mallard
circled down out of a dark sky
and skidded-splashed onto the surface of the lake;
peat-brown feathers of the she, her oboe-call,
the iridescent emerald of the he, his self-importance;

in the top corner of the wild meadow
suddenly foxes: sun on the red-gold pelts,
vixen-play wary with the fox-cubs’ swift
tumble and paw-sweep on the grass, small
piccolo-skreeks and high-barks;

from the house the sound of mother’s old Dansette,
a wobbling record, (His Master’s Voice),
and Tauber’s off-white tenor, the reedy
nasal crooning: “Roses are blooming in Picardy”;
I was watching father, the beloved –

turned suddenly hunter –
lift down the sleek and hard-shod rifle,
select a blunt-head gold-red cartridge and slick it
into the breach; I knew the bullet-crack would shatter
fur and flesh and bone and end the music.

*

    When I first saw the travellers
    they were halted in the shadow of a hill, there
    as if birthed out of night;

    a caravan, green-drab, with a tarped
    dirt-black tent drawn in
    under the lifted shafts of a cart;

    mute and rangey dogs
    scavenged the borders of the camp,
    a horse and mule –

    crestfallen and watching towards unfathomable places –
    stood braced against the day; children
    in off-brown smocks were finger-in-mouth and big-eyed watchful;

    there were stones
    set to the wheels of the caravan, for keeping,
    lest it off suddenly, and bolt.

*

When I passed home from school, a thick
unsatisfactory smoke was rising;
the children rooted with the dogs

in the measling chaos of pots and scattered blankets.
At home the adults
prated of violence; they told of stolen

hens and eggs, clothing missing off the lines, told
of night-time forays, bodies slipping through the dark
and making the darkness bleed; once

the big man, dark-clothed, dark-fleshed, came
obsequious, cajoling, to our back door;
Tauber was singing, from the drawing-room

When they begin the beguine,
it brings back a night of tropical splendour. . .

the big man
eyed me, and I knew a small,
inexpressible, guilt.

*

I had my own immaculate days
of lake and sky
and far-scented bog-sprung hillsides; I had
a crafted tub, rake for mast and sack for sail;
to bump its prow against the black turf bank

in the sweetest influence of breeze
was all of adventure I then required;
I learned
the fox-bark, how it told
a story of fugitive survival, I had found –

where the shore was dangerous
in reed-isle and moss-lawn – a trodden place,
an atrium before a dark lair
and a story-book of hen-feathers, gristle-spit, and bone-claw.
Though once

*

I saw him, big man, traveller, there
along my landing-place against the lake,
he was stooped over, and doing something;
I was scared of his gruff consonants, his black eyes;
I watched, as fox might watch from the archway of his lair,

and when he left I found
shore-stones darkened from a fire, burned-black sticks
and up against the bank a midden
of eel-heads, eyes open in slime-black skin,
teeth bared and pin-sharp; the water,

amber-beautiful by the shore, became
a slaughter-place where long black eels emerged
from the peat bottom like filaments of mud, whiplash-fast
and slitherful and I heard, in dreams, the laughter
of the travelling man, and his camp’s hubbub.

*

Muted trumpets, harp, the quivering strings:
Lonely on a desert breeze, I may wander where I please,
yet I keep on longing, just to rest a while;

they left, as if a mist-filled daylight swallowed them;
there were small and ash-grey patches
clumped across the hill, with rags and timbers

and fox-red flitches of things along the thorns;
there were ash-smells and cooked-flesh fat-spills,
grease-puddles, a fungus-stink of oozed mud;

and I found it difficult to hold my place again
in the uneasy light they had left behind
that kept on glimmering along once-familiar lanes :