This poem by Frances Horovitz (1938-1983; see also weeks 80 and 502) combines acutely observed physical details – the pale leaves gleaming like stranded fish, the hard slippery yellow moons of crab-apples – with an almost mythic conjuration of nightfall, harking back to older times when the darkness was full of fears both real and imagined – reivers and footpads, wights and bogles – and yet, equally, could possess a strange allure. Thus it is that the last lines see the poet and her companion caught in a liminal moment, drawn to towards the ancient securities of light and fire, yet at the same time reluctant to relinquish the experience of night with its atavistic frisson of the unknown. One of her best, I think. 

Walking in Autumn
(for Diana Lodge)

We have overshot the wood.
The track has led us beyond trees
to the tarmac edge. Too late now
at dusk to return a different way,
hazarding barbed wire or an unknown bull.
We turn back onto the darkening path.
Pale under-leaves of whitebeam, alder
gleam at our feet like stranded fish
or Hansel’s stones.
A wren, unseen, churrs alarm:
each tree drains to blackness.
Halfway now, we know
by the leaning crab-apple;
feet crunching into mud
the hard slippery yellow moons.
We hurry without reason
stumbling over roots and stones.
A night creature lurches, cries out,
crashes through brambles.
Skin shrinks inside our clothes;
almost we run
falling through darkness to the wood’s end,
the gate into the sloping field.
Home is lights and woodsmoke, voices –
and, our breath caught, not trembling now,
a strange reluctance to enter within doors.

Frances Horovitz

Frances Horovitz died young, and left us poems crafted with a painterly precision and full of a bittersweet ache of mortality. This is one of my favourites. Birdoswald is a fort on Hadrian’s Wall.

Rain – Birdoswald

I stand under a leafless tree
more still, in this mouse-pattering
thrum of rain,
than cattle shifting in the field.
It is more dark than light.
A Chinese painter’s brush of deepening grey
moves in a subtle tide.

The beasts are darker islands now.
Wet-stained and silvered by the rain
they suffer night,
marooned as still as stone or tree.
We sense each other’s quiet.

Almost, death could come
inevitable, unstrange
as is this dusk and rain,
and I should be no more
myself, than raindrops
glimmering in last light
on black ash buds

or night beasts in a winter field.

Frances Horovitz