1

               Cattle of consolation,

come down, cattle goddesses of five hundred kilos,

sundisk bodies, bellies, digesters of cellulose,

               come down to my anxious field.

               Once before you filed

into the frame of our picture window, ate our windbreak

of Cupressocyparis leylandii, spoke, and broke wind.

               Come to me now, tell me the solution,

why it’s here or there that a cow occurs

in a random field, why you’re moved without cause.

2

               Boethius in his prison

saw no cause for the headfirst destruction he would suffer

or the king’s Gothic cruelties, until Philosophy

               herself came below

               and nudged his writing elbow:

‘Give up your headwork, reasoning and knowledge, Boethius.

It’s divine providence.’  Let her not console us both

               with a gift grown upon misprision.

You thought you were one of the Sun’s sun-gilded cattle,

but he sold you off to death, less good than chattel.

3

               Thomas in his cell,

a monastic cell in Windesheim, who seems to imitate

not Christ but all experience, counsellor and intimate –

               you know how sharply I’m aggrieved

               by the shortcomings of others, how grieved

that my own happiness comes short.  Though I will not seek

dead Christ pinned out like a cattle skin,

               how much, Thomas, your book consoles us.

He endured great trials, says the Chronicle.  He was buried

in the east cloister, by the side of Peter Hebort.

4

               The cattle console me.

We are no manger moocows who bend the knee

at midnight, but hardier.  Like us, be here and now,

               mired in the flesh hocks-

               and-oxters.  Turn ox-

wise at the end of every furrow, pull the oxharrow

of your human nature.  O her hair is oxlip-yellow,

               her body curved like a meadowgrass, a culm

of grassflowers.  Love her, like herself, whatever occurs,

be moved as cattle are moved, love without cause.

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Hosts of golden daffodils,

we host crowds of you, our rooms

are guestrooms for your communal vases.  We are most affable,

we gratify your narcissism

and regale you with tapwater, O yellow affodills.

Your initial d

conferred on a whim by the Tudors, has never been explained

to the satisfaction of the OED,

no more than I could explain

what he does or why, or she or I, or John Doe or John Dee.

Affodowndaffodowndillies, we bear you home like fardels

heavy with knowledge

of your own, something ineffable.

Come share the half-guessed rooms we lodge in,

you who used to be asphodels.

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               The complete cycle of the Psalms

illumined most what was dark in him, Milton would assert

when his reader read to him, or when he’d state, restate

and counterstate a defence of the Commonwealth in arms,

               the state dictating.  Your letter

from Bradford, Ed, unveils a mere velleity,

to inquire along Leeds Road what it is that avails

               in a synagogue, church or mosque,

in a chapel or temple.  O Leeds Road is a masque

in scene after scene, Leeds Road is our earthly vale.

               You live, Ed, in attics

which the urban trees reach for.  Their leaves aspire

to the printed leaves and quires and sheaves of papers

that live with you.  To you I send my letters to Atticus,

               and ask, is there a value

in the spirit of place, does a deus loci avail you?

While I live in Holme in a version of pastoral I imagine

               all Arcadia here,

on a local moor in a little locality; but here

there’ll still be alteration in things, and things to mourn in elegy.

               On the local moor a boardwalk,

built on stilts on a boggy succulent section

of the footpath, carries me over the sogs and suction

as the present over the past.  I walk abroad,

               but the past is frogs and polliwogs

under the boardwalk.  I determine, Ed, as a wag

of determinism, I’m just a mime of my foredoings to now,

               a meme of others’.  Expel

the wretched ineradicable past; my present principle

is uncertainty: am I waveform, locus or merely momentum now?

               I live, Ed, in attics

as high as Milton’s prose style.  High leaves,

which seem the aspiring nature of their trees, are veils

for their failures.  I write to you because in Attica

               something once lived

which might in our time, I thought, be again revealed.

Below me someone is calling aloud and dying.

               Someone else lives,

in a little Arcadia in a masque, for whom something avails.

None of this, of course, is God’s or my own or anyone’s doing.

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27

Hermes himself came in looking for argument.

‘My lady, your ninetyfifth fragment

(as it shall be) ends

with decorous dewy-eyed lotuses – schmotuses, a selfindulgence

that will blight poets

(those sighing generations) like crops of potatoes.

Lady S, you’re slipping

as the sloping house itself is schlepping,

downhill.’  ‘Schlemiel!  Though I’m on this local lotus-bank

or bench of earth, on this very bench

of time, my songs or artefacts,

whose certitude is greater than any statement of the facts,

stand

detached from us, as an urn or vase shall always stand.’

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