Three Poems by W.S. Graham

Poetry Nation 3, 1974

THE SECRET NAME

1
Whatever you've come here to get
You've come to the wrong place. It
(I mean your name) hurries away
Before you in the trees to escape.

I am against you looking in
At what you think is me speaking.
Yet we know I am not against
You looking at me and hearing.

If I had met you earlier walking
With the poetry light better
We might we could have spoken and said
Our names to each other. Under

Neath the boughs of the last black
Bird fluttered frightened in the shade
I think you might be listening. I
Listen in this listening wood.

To tell you the truth I hear almost
Only the sounds I have made myself.
Up over the wood's roof I imagine
The long sigh of Outside goes.


2
I leave them there for a moment knowing
I make them act you and me.
Under the poem's branches two people
Walk and even the words are shy.

It is only an ordinary wood.
It is the wood out of my window.
Look, the words are going away
Into it now like a black hole.

Five fields away Madron Wood
Is holding words and putting them.
I can hear them there. They move
As a darkness of my family.


3
The terrible, lightest wind in the world
Blows from word to word, from ear
To ear, from name to name, from secret
Name to secret name. You maybe
Did not know you had another
Sound and sign signifying you.

SGURR NA GILLEAN MACLEOD

(For the Makar & Childer)

Dear Makar Norman, here's a letter
Riming nearly to the Scots bone.
I rime it for it helps the thought
To sail across and makes the thought
    Into your Leod heid fly.
I thought I saw your words going
    Over the sea to Skye.

Here I speak from the first of light
On Loch Coruisk's crying shore.
Each bare foot prints the oystercatching
Sand and the ebb is cold streaming
    Itself and creatures by
Between my whole ten toes singing
    Over the sea to Skye.

Norman, you could probably make
This poem better than I can.
Except you are not here. Roll up
Your trews and let the old loch lap
    Your shanks of Poetry.
The bladder-wrack is smelling us
    Over the sea to Skye.

Maybe it doesn't matter what
The poem is doing on its own.
But yet I am the man who rows
This light skiff of words across
    Silence's far cry.
Don't be misled by rime. I row you
    Over the sea to Skye.

Norman, Skye, Norman I shout
Across the early morning loch.
Can you hear me from where I am?
Out on the shining Gaelic calm
    I hear your three names fly.
Look. It is the birds of Macleod
    Over the sea to Skye.

I row. I dip my waterbright blades
Into the loch and into silence
And pull and feather my oars and bright
Beads of the used water of light
    Drip off astern to die
And mix with the little whirling pools
    Over the sea to Skye.

And I am rowing the three of you
Far out now. Norman and Skye
And Norman keep the good skiff trim.
Don't look back where we are going from.
    Sailing these words we fly
Out into the ghost-waved open sea
    Over the sea to Skye.

IMAGINE A FOREST

      Imagine a forest
      A real forest.

You are walking in it and it sighs
Round you where you go in a deep
Ballad on the border of a time
You have seemed to walk in before.
It is nightfall and you go through
Trying to find between the twittering
Shades the early starlight edge
Of the open moor land you know.
I have set you here and it is not a dream
I put you through. Go on between
The elephant bark of those beeches
Into that lightening, almost glade.

      And he has taken
      My word and gone

Through his own Ettrick darkening
Upon himself and he's come across
A glinted knight lying dying
On needles under a high tree.
Ease his visor open gently
To reveal whatever white, encased
Face will ask out at you who
It is you are or if you will
Finish him off. His eyes are open.
Imagine he does not speak. Only
His beard moving against the metal
Signs that he would like to speak.

      Imagine a room
      Where you are home

Taking your boots off from the wood
In that deep ballad very not
A dream and the fire noisily
Kindling up and breaking its sticks.
Do not imagine I put you there
For nothing. I put you through it
There in that holt of words between
The bearded liveoaks and the beeches
For you to meet a man alone

Slipping out of whatever cause
He thought he lay there dying for.

      Hang up the ballad
      Behind the door.

You are come home but you are about
To not fight hard enough and die
In a no less desolate dark wood
Where a stranger shall never enter.

      Imagine a forest
      A real forest.

---

W.S. Graham (1918 – 1986) was a Scottish poet who was mostly overlooked during his lifetime, but his reputation as a major modernist romantic has been acknowledged since his death, championed by poets such as Harold Pinter and Michael Schmidt.

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