Tom Brangwen Senior's Trembling Stand

“He went on stubbornly for a time. Then the strain became too great for him. A hot, accumulated consciousness was always awake in his chest, his wrists felt swelled and quivering, his mind became full of lustful images, his eyes seemed blood-flushed. He fought with himself furiously, to remain normal.”

- The Rainbow, page 26

I

How could Tilly, that sorrow, calm you, rub ideas into
your skull, your brain, your mind of the new, dear farmer?

When the marsh is dry and the long-winged birds
are so far gone their flights are no longer described--

When you lust for something so blurred, unknown
to you and there is no acknowledgeable soul around to tell--

When the hardest drinks have taken on a single life of
their own merely and simply honest in its painful image,

a reflection of the dead, damp fields and the lives before
you that lived at that blank, boring farmhouse, yet well-off--

what becomes the positive boundary to calm such dead-ends?
What keeps you feeling like cattle fenced into a rotting inclosure--

To feel like a ghost walking apart from the strange others,
the present dead members of your family, who manage to

appear moving in smooth, blank wisps, hair as nothing,
while you get up and bow down again and again, according

to the shadows and the light, and the flagellating balance
of both oblong fragments that butcher everyone's perception--

II

When you saw that magnetic woman crawl up for butter,
asking that simple, foreign question, the heat thick in the house--

when you decided to track down a handful of flowers and
stamp your presence into the Baron's home, as some dark persiflage--

when you forced yourself to fall sleep next to her, her body close
to you, and all was awkward, filth, a new marsh spreading unaware--

when your life became a fence of reinforced chained links
all strung into one another, rust closing the few remaining bonds--

there was still all that plain, regulated work—the work of a farmer
is what kept the shades and the dawns rebounding out and away--

the dreams made of dirt and the hordes of the lowest class,
with guttural intolerance chomping away, so admirable--

there really was no claustrophobia about it, was there, being confined
as community rather than restriction—working with what we have--

rather than what we do not—if only your author was so easy--
if only your author could swell tides and let up the storm so often--