Crossley-Holland: "Comfort"

COMFORT

Who said anything about comfort?
Those syllables do not rhyme
with zinc slakes or ice-bright sky.
The sea is grinding her spears.
Up creeks and gullies, over groynes
the black tide surges
and the hag wind rides her.
In the bleak forest on the staithe
rigging clacks and chitters.

Little but memory for company,
wild geese, swans whooping,
but no urbanity no
gossip prejudice bitterness sham.
In London I dream of these harsh folds,
the sea's slam, the light's eagle eye,
and here again I draw
this place -- hair-shirt, dear cloak --
around such infirmities.

--Kevin Crossley-Holland

Crossley-Holland: "The Language of Yes"

THE LANGUAGE OF YES

The world's wreckers are at their games
and everywhere it is late.

Words words words a fury of words
hype and shred and prate,
sanitise, speculate;
they please themselves.

How can I be content
with hollow professions
or the arm's length of the skeptic?
Even with the sensory,
the pig heart's slop-and-mess?

I still want.

Let me make and remake the word
which reveals itself,
unexpected, always various,

and be so curious
(affirmation's mainspring)
I sing the language of yes.

--Kevin Crossley-Holland

Crossley-Holland's "Idling"

IDLING

The way waves fold into themselves, sigh, then
play themselves out high on the foreshore,

a man draws and redraws the crescent contours
of the salt-woman he loves to draw to love.

--Kevin Crossley-Holland


P.S.  There are riddles here that I am working to work out; the images and unfolding of the lines draw me in here.

Crossley-Holland is a renowned translator of Anglo-Saxon riddles, a popular genre in the medieval period, among others.  His own poetry, as above, often shows such trickster influence.

Crossley-Holland: Do You Ken?

SALT- COMPOUNDS

salt-scythe
sweeps onshore, corrosive and hissing; pins back
ears; rifles each stay, shroud and halyard.

creek-wood
the old ones, clinker-built and always thirsty;
noses blunt and bottoms glaucous; still quivering.

sea-garment
roseate spinnaker, light-breasted; no less
stiff canvas, often split and mended, grey with salt.

herring-haunt
see-through escarpments toppling and barking
as they dive through themselves into ghosts of flint.

mauve-mist
delicate as breath suspended over marsh grass;
summer carpet, wiry and tide-beaten, knotted in mud.

wave-arms
without joints, creaking and groaning; like wings
their strange spade hands salute and dip and rise.

mud-runes
ribbon-casts, blow-holes, keel-scrapes, anchor-spikes,
darts of the stitchers and strutters and mincers.

--Kevin Crossley-Holland

from his Selected Poems,
London: Enitharmon Press, 2001

Crossley-Holland: "Faithful As A Wordfisher"

BEACHCOMBER

Faithful as a wordfisher,
there he goes, old magpie of the foreshore!
Face chafed and chapped like driftwood.

Parcelled shapeless against
winds straight off the icecap
but look! agile even so, jumpy as a tick,
quick in his pickings.

Scoofs along the tideline scurf,
his oily sack full of consonants:
hunks of wax,
and seacoal, rubber ballast, cork,
sodden gleamings.

And swinging in that shoe-bag hitched
to his broad belt?
Ah! In there, sunlight and amber moonlight,
emerald and zinc and shell-pink,
Aegir's vowels.

--Kevin Crossley-Holland

from the sequence "Waterslain"
from his Selected Poems,
London: Enitharmon Press, 2001


Note: I can't say that I follow all the lines above, but the general situation and the definite fun with language and scene I follow quite well.

And, "Faithful as a wordfisher": that's a description I like, using "as" both as a comparison and as a signifier of action/behavior. Starting Monday I wordfish with whole crowds of new students.

Crossley-Holland's 'Leaf-Girl'

LEAF-GIRL

'Round and round the trampled 
ground between the flaming
maple and the black walnut,
and out across the nickel rink 
to the winter warming-hut,
round, round with bounds and 
yells, skips and little rushes 
you chased October leaves.

Curtsy, shout, leap and spin, 
your pale face thin and hair 
haywire, the best red-gold:
so you became the leaves 
you caught. And watching you 
I think I thought there's 
some movement, some pursuit 
best expressing each of us.'

--Kevin Crossley-Holland