Poems from the Falconer
Helen MacDonald
Partridges
the parlous cost of lists. It were all a joke
from top to tip, belittle it for mercy. Stamp.
Wicker. All its legs.
The bottle fury.
& all that begging his superior
For all that
tippling and the onduline, grim
carry-on magnificence with all those shining leaves
hood mistaken for plastic in the gloom, those weeks
serving clouds and the inspire glittering.
The traction is no tableaux.
Forgivable, and soaking.
And she wanted to look beneath whatever the carry-on clued
snapped at hearthstones, stippled the paving with the print
of two brute heels. Never mind that the field started at her feet
in inch-thick plate that raised above her head to star the weald's
dark clouds with glass in glass. And it was impossible to walk.
Between ploughlines, two soft backs and lowered heads.
the pair whose little legs tucked and grains adhered to down.
Believing a skyline then particular was a way of moving
believing the blink after chat of whitened stones. Believing
chaff drawn down the line of the road accidental, and the
sileage mown. Believing fondly. Lone, and whispering
her parliamentary hides. Speak body. Welt combe. New
Halt. You can whisper birds for as many times as you like
but they are mute et svelte, et primaries wet as palms
alulas wet as thumbs, lovers of beets and ground.
How many those walked alfalfa. Toadflax and hairy bees
weak foci for the dispossessed. If I could plant plovers
in the sky. Or shake a westerly with landrails down.
And all its invented ghosts. And for all its clouds.
They run along the lines as tiny soldiers
all wintry & humane.
Taxonomy
Wren. Full song. No subsong. Call of alarm, spreketh & ought
damage the eyes with its form, small body, tail pricked up & beak like a hair
trailed through briars & at a distance scored with lime scent in the nose
like scrapings from a goldsmith’s cuttle, rock alum & fair butter well-temped
which script goes is unrecognised by this one, is pulled by the ear in anger the line at fault is under and inwardly drear as a bridge in winter
reared up inotherwise to seal the eyes through darkness, the bridge speaks
it does not speak, the starlings speak that steal the speech of men, uc antea
a spark that meets the idea of itself, apparently fearless.
Ah cruelty. And I had not stopped to think upon it
& I had not extended it into the world for love for naught.
Poem
for Bill Girden
Death, about which we are all thinking, death, I believe
is the only solution to this problem of how to be able to fly
Paul Nash, Aerial Flowers, 1945
To state the discovery of a country
& be in a time without rage, keeping wings
nearyourself, as barred as buried in the day, crossly.
Some present results; a tree, a quail, a rock, a hawk
rousing one's mind from safety and tameable illness
to beautiful comprehension in the form of a hunch
as patience directs
the finishing line is a trail of feathers to brush.
You might resist the pall of earthly wings
wicker thrumming with sand and hysteria
no longer a word, no use, knocking at wind
or poise as it flows up along the face, an edge
clipped with rock and lifting, a movement
as if one were about to launch into speech of faith
at least a hoped conviction, spite of coincidence.
'This is hardly a flaw; it simply is' you say, then drop
like a lark in abeyance of song to mitigate sward.
My pen crumples into a swan, it is singing
inauthenticate myth, and not of future splendour
I am glad. Some evidence of a hymn without light. Fracas.
History. The building of a condominium.
It was true I had never met.
There was a strike on the glass; it was a bird.
I have never been to the desert.
Dale
The storm runs forth on several seas whose manner is
the hard edge of a clamber down gneiss with a split thumb
bald inklings of wonderment, sun and trenchant killing bumped
by wrecked spume and clearing the throat, to try and shout
into the wind. Pulled out like warm glass. Where should flight
Eight choughs and three children, singing to a seal's head
on the lee side of the cliffs, hair fraying, he-lo, he-lo diatomite
and rain, disyllabic chuckle as the corvids glean turf and turn downwind
pealing back a sheet of egyptian cotton new/vraiment class
bled into a strong silence, just equalled by watching
Thirty breakers cowling in diagrammatic vice-lines with shortening frequency
replaced by thirty more/the ferry aspect two miles out dimmed by light
in cloud and rolls of clean water scrolling down. There are fits of waking.
I am waiting, it seems, for the cliff's right edge, but it is turned down
into a fence: slack barbs in hubs and shelves of thrift. Nothing sells
Nothing sells about this edge but fragrance, when the eyes are closed
enough to tip the head away from the ledge and settle it in welsh mud
'this is how the Irish write, as if with their left hand' she said, as soft
as anything, and the frown was half-sustained astonishment, looking
out across the waves as if a clause, then down at the paper in my hand
mothing as matter as fact as dislike occurs either here or for other places
as worn, something to get to. I could hurry by in a parsimonious cinch
frosted umbellifers and wagtails in the flat wastes ankle-deep in water
thinking how it got here and confusing this with national history:
natural history arches its timbre uncomfortably: nine races of Motacilla
flava, four of alba, victorious identification through chalk and paste
sliding eastwards on the vicious gradients come the disorientated:
twelve with a broken neck beneath the light and scores in bushes
on the wrong wind for this bird, a miracle behind glass
discarded on reflection
Jack
where diviners are hauling water is a bump of turf
and a cloud caul low over old heather scurf, sleep.
Dodder wrapt and a mimic fit to klepe greenshank
cotton blowing eastward, a match-mime set in as ore
shoulders sunk, heavy as rain and thistlewool merlin
blinking at the roll of weather. New roles settle, ticking
gently at the yaw singing out an arc overland
a whisper of suspicious music like the stars are dead
and the real fact of succession is dripped over rock in a sincere bid
to stay. But there is no stay. There is ice at the steady damage
patterned ground and small burrows where air laps and falls
an emergency environment at the instant where the jack comes
parabellum of delicacy and mores
violent spoils as manuscript through drier air
manifest as movement
the video slips & marshalled antics fade
Noar Hill
Coruscating over maize where the buff and silk and scimitar tipped contour
feather buoyed on a strong easterly passed in a second and buried deep in leaves
the memory of skin behind, skin and barbs walking up to the crest of the hill:
all he ever wished to invent was there, and that was the end of modesty
amateur light flapping on grey felt that tug to the eye like a wing bar
raw chalk and ice underfoot creased to imagine age where it soaked
gunpowder demeanour, the scent of flint and government prised
apart by frost, dropping from the sheer three foot slope as white mud
a pallor derived from deception at the window stood
bitten by river air, the roiling heart, a moment of love only
chief among these then and you are calling it in
inspiration like dry skin in its diminution silence
and the sky is as motionless as the heart
its hook to tie it from
Lammergeier
Today is what either history truth maybe the civilisation of work
grandeur and its all allies spread upon the long steppe
blood on their faces from the setted sun & the formes of music
chased with woodsmoke the apparell the magenta turf
single beads and microhistories & the tracts all equally torn
above the lozenged tail of the pseudo-phoenix the lambslayer's
water and golden eye, his breast feathers rusted from long contact
with oxides and bone & his long remiges conformable with pure air
his eyes abstracting rising heat from slim pillars of polarised shear
& both feet clenched as loosely as that former hand therewith nothing
but the slap of something which may once have been a standard
against the prow of white which might have been none
for there are no small pieces and the whole too large for an idea
cruising the work's reconstruction with a series of stones, markers
of the referentiality of small clearings in the merry chaturanga manoeuvre
the nervous head crested with stone and tags of water of mail
& its tiny dogtag oxides leaching into the deepening ground fragments
of a projectile recovered & loaded to be taken back home
where the long graze up to azimuth supplanted the beating heart
with the delicacy of an entirely assumed protection. What sirens.
The sparkling discomfiture of the statistician's assurance
squeaked behind the teeth & the expression of sweet brisability
is offered in the ripple of air from the epicentre of the broken runway
& the small roses, the white cloths, and strings which disappear intire
About the article
Poems from the Falconer
Poems from the Falconer is a seires of seven poems drawing on Helen McDonald's experience of falconry. The poems are Partridges, Taxonomy, Poem, Dale, Jack, Noar Hill, and Lammergeier.
About the author
Helen MacDonald
Helen Macdonald is a poet, a historian of literature and science, and a falconer. Her book, Falcon, appeared in 2006 in the Reaktion series , Animals, and draws on her experiences at home and farther afield with the ancient art of falconry and with the birds themselves, several of whom she has trained.
Her poems have been published in Shaler’s Fish (2001), and several magazines and website; her Radio 4 Afternoon Play, The Falcon and the Hawk, adapted J.A Baker’s book The Peregrine, combining it with her own experiences as a falconer. She is now writing H Is For Hawk, to be published by Jonathan Cape. She says of her book, ‘It is partly a diary of training a large and powerful bird of prey, and partly the record of a spiritual journey - an unflinchingly honest account of my own struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming, and my own untaming. It is the story of a journey into wildness with a creature that almost brought disaster, but was also my salvation. The book is also a meditation on the place that hawks have had in the human imagination for millennia, the place of nature in the modern world, and the strange story of another falconer, goshawk-keeper and writer, the novelist T.H. White, best known for his series of Arthurian books The Once and Future King.’
Helen is currently an affiliate research scholar at the Department of History of Philosophy and Science at Cambridge, where she is continuing her exploration of the connections between the history of ecology and conservation, natural history writing, and field-sports and hunting cultures in the 20th century. Through different ways of writing, she is continually inquiring into the entanglements of humans with birds, as these selected poems, and this extract from her earlier book Falcon show, the ways war and nature have been yoked, and is extending that interest into the history of biological warfare.