Over the Wall

1
When you drive the road that cuts to Carlisle
year-long, from week to week in parallel
to that constrictor’s vertebrae, the Wall;
from its disjointed jaws that try to swallow
all the Tyne like a gazelle, past
old Cuddy’s Crags, the Whin Sill;
glancing north to where in autumn and in evening
the light begins to strip the local greens away
in favour of a brittle ochre hue,
you start to feel the Romans got the border right.

2
True Wall, magnetic Wall,
Wall that never mentions North
but hints obliquely like an only line:
here begins beyond.

Here all thought of borders was born
to the west of empire,
swaddled in vallum and cribbed with stone,
where before they had let their sense of limits
seep through the babble:
horribilesque ultimosque Britannos

Here men began to hold the shrinking world
that had held them
upon her unbound breasts.

3
You start to think it’s like a mirror
that you somehow escaped through with
a book held in your trailing hand
that sticks in the liminal air as though across bars.

You want to plead, ‘O wall,
O sweet and lovely wall,
through whom I see my bliss, let all
my drag of luggage pass,’ until,
spine first, high as hawks, the book begins to appear,
steadying there at the end of your kitestring arm.

The difficult words can’t make it through,
their letters swoop and clatter in the grass like armour;
their questions fall on the other side
of the unguarded Wall, their great marks sprawl
untranslated in the barbaric grass:
armis/reddidit aeratis sonitum
dis manibus

when all scrolls fail
and what survives of script
is chiselled on graves

when stone is stolen
and bones lose names
we’re only, wholly here

our spirits deify
this landscape by
departing into it

our spirits defy
the glutting flow
and hide in glimpses

momentary fanes,
this cult of peripherals, where
gliff must stand for glyph

an alphabet of tracks:
claws and soles
hooves and paws

parochial recoveries:
the dialect of touch
the elegies of water