High Windows Read Free Page A

judging has started: dogs
    (Set their legs back, hold out their tails) and ponies (manes
    Repeatedly smoothed, to calm heads); over there, sheep
    (Cheviot and Blackface); by the hedge, squealing logs
    (Chain Saw Competition). Each has its own keen crowd.
    In the main arena, more judges meet by a jeep:
    The jumping’s on next. Announcements, splutteringly loud,
     
    Clash with the quack of a man with pound notes round his hat
    And a lit-up board. There’s more than just animals:
    Bead-stalls, balloon-men, a Bank; a beer-marquee that
    Half-screens a canvas Gents; a tent selling tweed,
    And another, jackets. Folks sit about on bales
    Like great straw dice. For each scene is linked by spaces
    Not given to anything much, where kids scrap, freed,
    While their owners stare different ways with incurious faces.
     
    The wrestling starts, late; a wide ring of people; then cars;
    Then trees; then pale sky. Two young men in acrobats’ tights
    And embroidered trunks hug each other; rock over the grass,
    Stiff-legged, in a two-man scrum. One falls: they shake hands.
    Two more start, one grey-haired: he wins, though. They’re not so much fights
    As long immobile strainings that end in unbalance
    With one on his back, unharmed, while the other stands
    Smoothing his hair. But there are other talents—
     
    The long high tent of growing and making, wired-off
    Wood tables past which crowds shuffle, eyeing the scrubbed spaced
    Extrusions of earth: blanch leeks like church candles, six pods of

    Broad beans (one split open), dark shining-leafed cabbages—rows
    Of single supreme versions, followed (on laced
    Paper mats) by dairy and kitchen; four brown eggs, four white eggs,
    Four plain scones, four dropped scones, pure excellences that enclose
    A recession of skills. And, after them, lambing-sticks, rugs,
     
    Needlework, knitted caps, baskets, all worthy, all well done,
    But less than the honeycombs. Outside, the jumping’s over.
    The young ones thunder their ponies in competition
    Twice round the ring; then trick races, Musical Stalls,
    Sliding off, riding bareback, the ponies dragged to and fro for
    Bewildering requirements, not minding. But now, in the background,
    Like shifting scenery, horse-boxes move; each crawls
    Towards the stock entrance, tilting and swaying, bound
     
    For far-off farms. The pound-note man decamps.
    The car park has thinned. They’re loading jumps on a truck.
    Back now to private addresses, gates and lamps
    In high stone one-street villages, empty at dusk,
    And side roads of small towns (sports finals stuck
    In front doors, allotments reaching down to the railway);
    Back now to autumn, leaving the ended husk
    Of summer that brought them here for Show Saturday—
     
    The men with hunters, dog-breeding wool-defined women,
    Children all saddle-swank, mugfaced middleaged wives
    Glaring at jellies, husbands on leave from the garden
    Watchful as weasels, car-tuning curt-haired sons—
    Back now, all of them, to their local lives:
    To names on vans, and business calendars
    Hung up in kitchens; back to loud occasions
    In the Corn Exchange, to market days in bars,
     

    To winter coming, as the dismantled Show
    Itself dies back into the area of work.
    Let it stay hidden there like strength, below
    Sale-bills and swindling; something people do,
    Not noticing how time’s rolling smithy-smoke
    Shadows much greater gestures; something they share
    That breaks ancestrally each year into
    Regenerate union. Let it always be there.
     

Money
     
     
    Q uarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
        ‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
    I am all you never had of goods and sex.
        You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’
     
    So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
        They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.
    By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:
        Clearly money has something to do with life
     
    —In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:
        You can’t put