The British Countryside in Pictures

            The frontispiece fixes as
British
a man whose
livelihood is the grass. As he had

before the take and
since,

he plies away in the sun.

"Market Day."
Storefront awnings slope into the square.
Among the occupied,
only the vendors are without hats.
Well-fatted,

sweet and full of pickle are the hooked gibbets of
beef above the pens.
The plate after

"Tractors on Parade" is untitled.
Where the village high street's

walls converge at the far end,
a motor-car has entered and parked.
Pictured empty in another,
the new Great West Road has working

fields to either side. In the one format,

affordable and bound print by print,
grass advances as a factor
never to be run out of by a

people at home.
The farmer is to be seen as having at last put
dearth right.
Nature was on its
own side always. Necessary

against nature sometimes to forbear from making
more mouths to feed.
With the poorest twelfth begetting
half the nation,

the interests of soil and
race were served
by the politics of the straight furrow.

In the countryside
alone it was that one was spared meeting

the less right sort of girl.
Need.
It had become at last what only
others knew,
even if they were in one's midst.

Outside in

Kenya,
Madras,
Shaanxi,

Quixeramobim,
nature had put in place
disastrous shortfalls,
need and epidemic,
nature had played out

Ireland again.
Of those invisible millions who were gone,

nothing was missing.

Nothing was missing
for them. There without need,
they were the revenant in England's garden,
they were the ones whose absence is their sign.

Of the unperceived who keep
safehold where they hide,

vision is a forgetting.
The British were those whom nature let bring home
as grave clothes to the ones it starved

arboreal and floral plantings.
England was green.
There belonged
ill-matched to many their likely

allotments of soil.
Across the range of them from
kitchen-gardens to pleasance,
these were not brandished. They were kept up.
While there were throwback native

cottagers who grew potatoes,

a weekly show on
gardening was aired.
All crystal sets picked up the BBC.

Because those grounds least frequented
were grounds where need was least,

of most
avail was a garden if
no one was there.
The walled reserve was model.
Its expert and only

viewers were staff.

What showed above the fine clean tilth was
surplus.
From its abounding
beds each day,

staff saw to it
for one:
by the garden's having made an
excess of nature,
nature was trumped.

Need had been made less natural.
Replaced was the old
productive ideal that the useful

good was desired.

The desired good was
useful in the new ideal.

Things become useless in the hoarding of them.
Needed for a nation's
surfeit of goods were buyers
primed by their wanting. Desire's

deputy
was the person in love.
An appetite need not slacken if what one

craves is the scarce,
and there is but the one beloved

only.
No hunger
feeds so on itself
as being able
never to have one's fill of someone prized.

They had become friends.

It would not have
occurred to him that she did not
love him. Of

course she did.
Friends love one another.
It began to explain his finding now that
along with love she also

gives him desire. Under something the
sway of which is undue,
in love with her,
he learns that he has had cleared
inside him

a constructed

garden-like place.
He practices his absence

as the stilled reflecting surface of its pool.
With features of her person in his
stead there,
to what is not its

own anymore in wanting

the self is sent
back by the other.
Far enough beyond
reason already is any
one such transport. Improbable

twice over
that with the same conclusive keenness

she should want him.
He looks for cues that
he too had given

her desire.
They are not there.
There is the coming
war to think of as well.
With conscription on its way,

better to be no more than
genial with her for now.
That is why it is her
suitcases he reaches for when he

meets her at the St Pancras train.
Right from the start he is off ahead of her
efficiently down the platform.

Against him from behind,
her fingers have it in them

that she will have to break away

too soon again for her return north.
Out of her greeting hand on his
back he walks.
For no longer than withdrawal

itself takes,
her touch had been there.

Wondering at its light
circumspect grace,
he does not mistake its bidding. What
she wants
he can from this time on want

for her. There can be no

help for them now since what
she wants is him.
Made nearly

bearable by desire is one's not being able to
withstand the desired.
The hurried meetings follow.
Their wanting one another comes to take on
greed as its base.

From the next moment between them
least likely to be surpassed
they carry
away from one another into their days away

more wanting.
It will be weeks.
To be with her

through them instead. If they could be already
beyond the war and

years on,

they might have lives.
Whole patches of days would have to be
discordant, humdrum.
Rote would help them through.

Given ordinary times to

lift her from,
have her lift him,
he would have come to

preside with her over their chances. Around them
everywhere was the petition that

dailiness might hold its gracious own.
Toward it came
sandbags on the corner pavements.
Post office pillar-boxes were rigged with
gas-detecting paint.

The mask itself smelled of rubber. What one saw

first through its eyeshield was one's own
canister snout.
Leaflets from the Lord Privy
Seal's Office were

"Evacuation: Why and How"
and "If the Invader Comes."
So the enemy might

lose themselves in their confusion, the stations'
signposts came down. There were now
barrage balloons overhead
and searchlights.
The Anderson shelter was

corrugated steel.
It needed a garden to be sunk in.

Two million more acres were to come under the plough.
Collected for their great trek
out of the city,
the children walked

"crocodile" to the trains,
a loudspeaker telling them,
"Don't play with the doors and
windows, if you don't mind, thank you."
Villages and towns were to accept a number

equal to their populations.
Each child had a pinned label.

Each was allowed one toy.
They were met at the other end
by strangers who had come to

see who they were.

A lady with a clipboard sought billets for them.
Some of them were in tatters.
The more doleful were often the last picked.
This was to be where they would
live now for a time,

out here in the country.
Files of them traipsed the lanes behind their teachers.
They were shown how to strip
hopbines,

how to make rush baskets out of reeds.
Boys served as beaters for the pheasant-shoots.
Harvest of course meant that

sheaves had to be carted. The sturdier of

both sexes
were put to work in the fields.

No bombs fell into the warm, beautiful autumn.
Most of the children went back home.
When it was time to
leave again for the country,

few of them did.

Above the blackouts,
the Germans were led at first by
moonlight up the Thames estuary.
Then it was by the fires.
Sounding like

stones being thrown at the front wall,
the incendiaries melted steel.

Bombs that screamed their way into the city
thudded down.
A smell of cordite followed.

Looked to be needed each month
were twenty million feet of seasoned
coffin-timber. There were
no more blue waterproof bags.
With the raids coming every night but one,

the dead might have to be dumped in the channel.

It is in bodies given to be seen that
ghosts meet their term.
Their transparency is no less restive.

Escapes that would fail are
patent already

in the pre-war countryside exposed.
Phantom in a picture are gaps that might have been
filled by a child.
One plate is called

"A Quiet Corner."

A trading-wherry is about to tie up.
Full sunlight has
to itself again for the afternoon
the bench
an East End child had jumped from for her

sprint to the canal. She had seen that
ropes needed securing. Having
called to her up the slope,
the bargeman was mindful that at

that same lock last spring
a man had asked to take his picture.

There are pollarded
willows in the picture. In another,
a hedge-crowned wall.

Stills of the countryside are composures.
They apply to keeping
outcome at bay.
Nameable,

all finite things are
present to one another for as
long as they show.
The bedding planes first. Ready
never to be seen as country,

they are exposed sometimes as its side.
On show in their single plots,
slate, shale and

weald clay,

marl,
the Tertiaries,

chalk and upper greensand.
A former seafloor laid down
shell by shell,

limestone dislikes interruption.
As stuffs from its lighter understories wear away,
streams take their sources back
farther with them into the scarp.
The cap-rock

outliers they leave are often wooded.
Sight is of the senses

the one that most
lends itself to remove.
Each prospect for the looker-on is
his without trespass.

Across the tiers of houserows up from the river,

each profile shows what its volume
stretches to from its
mid-point out.
The ridges to their backs are in cloud
where the sheep pass

down from high summer grazing.
Their drove-road takes the turn of the hill.
Inviting the indicative,
the tie-bulwarked lawn above it has its

copy in the millpond's glaze.
Another figure appears who speaks English.
Upfield from the crude railing over a footbridge,

his alternately-forward

knees are caught
mid-stride.

James McMichael
Capacity
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2006 by James McMichael.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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