Sonnets for Five Seasons

(i.m. Charles Leslie Stevenson, 1909-79)

This House

Which represents you, as my bones do, waits,

all pores open, for the stun of snow. Which will come,

as it always does, between breaths, between nights

of no wind and days of the nulled sun.

And has to be welcome. All instinct wants to anticipate

faceless fields, a white road drawn

through dependent firs, the soldered glare of lakes.

Is it wanting you here to want the winter in?

I breathe you back into your square house and begin

to live here roundly. This year will be between,

not in, four seasons. Do you hear already the wet

rumble of thaw? Stones. Sky. Streams. Sun.

Those might be swallows at the edge of sight

returning to last year's nest in the crook of the porchlight.

Complaint

'Dear God,' they write, 'that was a selfish winter

to lean so long, unfairly on the spring!'

And now — this too much greed of seedy summer.

Mouths of the flowers unstick themselves and sting

the bees with irresistible dust. Iris

allow undignified inspection. Plain waste

weeds dress up in Queen Anne's lace. Our mist-

blue sky clouds heavily with clematis.

'Too much,' they cry, 'too much. Begin again.'

The Lord, himself a casualty of weather

falls to earth in large hot drops of rain.

The dry loam rouses in his scent, and under

him — moist, sweet, discriminate — the spring.

Thunder. Lightning. He can do anything.

Between

The wet and weight of this half-born English winter

is not the weather of those fragmentary half-true willows

that break in the glass of the canal behind our rudder

as water arrives in our wake — a travelling arrow

of now, of now, of now. Leaves of the water

furl back from our prow, and as the pinnate narrow

seam of where we are drives through the mirror

of where we have to be, alder and willow

double crookedly, reverse, assume a power

to bud out tentatively in gold and yellow,

so it looks as if what should be end of summer —

seeds, dead nettles, berries, naked boughs —

is really the anxious clouding of first spring.

...'Real' is what water is imagining.

Stasis

Before the leaves change, light transforms these lucid

speaking trees. The heavy drench of August

alters, things; its rich and sappy blood

relaxes where a thirst ago, no rest

released the roots' wet greed or stemmed their mad

need to be more. September is the wisest

time — neither the unbearable burning word

nor the form of it, cooped in its cold ghost.

How are they sombre — that unpicked apple, red,

undisturbed by its fall; calm of those wasp-bored amethyst

plums on the polished table? Body and head

easy in amity, a beam between that must,

unbalanced, quicken or kill, make new or dead

whatever these voices are that hate the dust.

The Circle

It is imagination's white face remembers

snow, its shape, a fluted shell on shoot

or flower, its weight, the permanence of winter

pitched against the sun's absolute root.

All March is shambles, shards. Yet no amber

chestnut, Indian, burnished by its tent

cuts to a cleaner centre or keeps summer

safer in its sleep. Ghost be content.

You died in March when white air hurt the maples.

Birches knelt under ice. Roads forgot

their ways in aisles of frost. There were no petals.

Face, white face, you are snow in the green hills.

High stones complete your circle where trees start.

Granite and ice are colours of the heart.

Source: Poems 1955-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2005)